Irvin Mayfield Jr. was born December 23, 1977, in New Orleans, the youngest of nine children of schoolteacher Joyce Alsanders and Irvin Mayfield Sr., a former Army drill sergeant and boxer. His father bought him his first trumpet, and Mayfield came up playing with the Algiers Brass Band, a local street act, before his talent carried him quickly into the city's professional jazz scene.
In 1998, Mayfield co-founded and co-led Los Hombres Calientes, an Afro-Cuban jazz group whose 1999 debut album won Billboard's Contemporary Latin Jazz Album of the Year. In 2002, he founded the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra (NOJO), serving as its Artistic Director, and the following year was named Cultural Ambassador of both the City of New Orleans and the State of Louisiana — a position he has held since. He went on to serve as Artistic Director of Jazz at Orchestra Hall for the Minnesota Orchestra beginning in 2008, taught "New Orleans as Discourse" at the University of New Orleans, and founded the New Orleans Jazz Institute there.
Mayfield's father died in the flooding that followed Hurricane Katrina in 2005; his body was found near Elysian Fields Avenue the day after Mayfield performed "Just a Closer Walk with Thee" at the Higher Ground Hurricane Relief Benefit Concert, telling the audience his father was still among the missing. Mayfield went on to open Irvin Mayfield's Jazz Playhouse on Bourbon Street and Irvin Mayfield's I Club, positioning himself as a driving force in the city's post-Katrina musical recovery, and was appointed to the National Endowment for the Arts' National Council on the Arts.
In November 2021, Mayfield was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison after pleading guilty to defrauding the New Orleans Public Library Foundation of more than $1 million in donated funds, money that had been intended for the city's library system. He has continued to perform and record since his release, remaining Artistic Director of the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra.
