An album hot with passion

In the liner notes for Hot House Flowers, Stanley Crouch writes: "Hot House Flowers, then, is an especially good title. Good because this album seems fashioned, on one level at least, to celebrate the sweet riddles and modulated heats of romantic love. Also, intent on nurturing melodic blooms in apparently barren places. Plus: is the result of the golden-brown history of American trumpet, a history made in the audacious hothouses of rhythm and dead-eyed passions, where the enemy was never depth of emotion but the sentimentality and hysteria that made all forms of romance seem repulsive instead of inspiring and uplifting."