SOUND PROJECTIONS
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
FALL, 2019
VOLUME SEVEN NUMBER THREE
MAX ROACH
Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:
GENE AMMONS
(September 14-20)
TADD DAMERON
(September 21-27)
ROY ELDRIDGE
(September 28-October 4)
MILT JACKSON
(October 5-11)
CHARLIE CHRISTIAN
(October 12-18)
GRANT GREEN
(October 19-25)
ROY HARGROVE
(October 26-November 1)
LITTLE JIMMY SCOTT
(November 2-8)
BLUE MITCHELL
(November 9-15)
BOOKER ERVIN
(November 16-22)
LUCKY THOMPSON
(November 23-29)
Roy Hargrove
(1969-2018)
Artist Biography by Scott Yanow
Roy Hargrove
was a hard bop-oriented musician (and acclaimed "Young Lion") who
became one of America's premier trumpeters during the late '80s and
beyond. A fine, straight-ahead player who spent his childhood years in
Texas, Hargrove met trumpet virtuoso Wynton Marsalis in 1987, when the latter musician visited Hargrove's high school in Dallas. Impressed with the student's sound, Marsalis allowed Hargrove to sit in with his band and helped him secure additional work with major players, including Bobby Watson, Ricky Ford, Carl Allen, and the group Superblue. Hargrove attended Berklee for one (1988-1989) before decamping to New York City, where his studio career took flight.
In 1990, the young Hargrove
(he was only 20 at the time) released his first of five recordings for
Novus. He often toured with his own group, which for several years
including Antonio Hart. In addition to Novus, Hargrove also recorded for Verve and served as a sideman with quite a few notable figures, including Sonny Rollins, James Clay, Frank Morgan, and Jackie McLean, and the ensemble Jazz Futures. His Verve album roster includes 1995's Family and Parker's Mood. Habana (a Grammy-winning album of Afro-Cuban music) and Moment to Moment followed at the end of the decade. Hargrove also went on to contribute to well-received R&B albums by Erykah Badu and D'Angelo, but he also remained indebted to hard bop with such albums as 2008's Earfood. A year later, Hargrove returned with his 19-member big band on Emergence. Sadly, Hargrove
died in November 2018 at the young age of 49; he had been on dialysis
for well over a decade and died from cardiac arrest associated with his
kidney disease.
https://tedpanken.wordpress.com/tag/roy-hargrove/
* * * *
For Roy Hargrove’s 48th Birthday, a 2009 Conversation for Jazz.Com and a 2016 Downbeat Blindfold Test
This contains the intro from a May 2011 post, which contained a long Q&A that I conducted with Roy for the http://www.jazz.com website. After that, I’ve posted the full proceedings of a Downbeat Blindfold Test that Roy did with me in January 2016.
*******
This evening, trumpeter Roy Hargrove brings his working quintet (Justin Robinson-alto sax; Sullivan Fortner-piano; Ameen Saleem-bass; Montez Coleman-drums) into the Village Vanguard to launch a two-week run. He’s morphed gracefully from young lion to esteemed veteran, is one of most singular trumpet stylists out there, and has incubated no small number of next generation movers and shakers in his bands over the last 15 years, and yet gets less dap from the jazz media than his abilities, conceptual daring, and body of work would merit.
I’ve been following Roy since he hit NYC twenty-plus years ago, and finally had an opportunity to do a piece on him in 2009, when I was doing a lot of work for the jazz.com website. This Q&A was conducted on August 11th of that year, in the offices of the Jazz Gallery.
* * * *
By his own account, Roy Hargrove spends about two-thirds of his time on the road, as was the case over a seven-week summer 2009 sojourn during which he toured all three of his bands—his quintet and big band, both devoted to hardcore jazz, and his crossover unit, the R.H. Factor. Back home in New York for a week, Hargrove was decompressing, relaxing in the daytime and spending his nights jamming at various New York venues—Small’s, Fat Cat, and the Zinc Bar in Manhattan; Frank’s Place in Brooklyn. Still, on this hot Tuesday afternoon, the 39-year-old trumpeter, resplendent in a pink-check jacket, shorts, and a narrow brim, strolled into the Jazz Gallery exactly on time for a discussion framed around his new recording, Emergence [EmArcy], his first with the big band, following strong quintet releases from 2008 and 2006 entitled Ear Food [EmArcy] and Nothing Serious [Verve], respectively, and Distractions [Verve], also from 2006, and his third recording of R.H. Factor.
In point of fact, Hargrove may be singular among mainstem-oriented hardcore jazzfolk of his age group in his projection of an old-school attitude regarding road warriorship, song interpretation, blues feeling, and swing, while simultaneously tuning in to the popular music of his time on its own terms. Which of Hargrove’s peers of comparable visibility would embrace the requirements of playing third trumpet in the Dizzy Gillespie All-Star Big Band with as much enthusiasm as Hargrove devotes to the various ensembles that he leads? Which other highly-trained post-Boomer would deliver a lyric like “September In The Rain,” a staple of Hargrove’s sets for at least a decade, with as much brio as Hargrove projects when uncorking cogent, thrilling solos on structures ranging from bebop to post-Woody Shaw harmonic structures? Indeed, in his ability to blend the high arts of improvisation and entertainment with equal conviction, Hargrove is a true descendent of such iconic elders as Louis Armstrong, Roy Eldridge, and Dizzy Gillespie, all musical highbrows who wore their learning lightly.
How does the big band sound now vis-a-vis when you did the record, after playing quite a number of gigs over the last year?
It’s really tight. I’m trying to get them to the point where they have the music memorized, and don’t have to use the written music any more—being able to play by ear is so important. When I played with Slide Hampton and the Dizzy Gillespie All-Star Big Band, I tried to memorize the parts so that I could pay attention to everything that’s going on with the conducting, with the dynamics, and try to make it very musical. It’s getting close.
How big is the book? There are 11 tunes on the recording.
There’s probably 30 songs or so.
In the program notes, you stated. “I always wanted to work in a big band format. The sound is so full and rich, and it provides opportunity for congregation, which is much needed among today’s younger musicians, most of whom have come of age in small group settings.” I’m also thankful for the opportunity to exercise my compositional and arranging skills. Music is such a vast world, and I intend to explore every avenue possible. The cast of players on this project are all guys I met in school and on various gigs and jam sessions over the last twenty-odd years. I think we all share a strong passion for music that comes from the heart.”
Two themes arise which are a common thread in your career. One is this notion of congregation, communication through music, speaking across generations and styles. Then also curiosity, hunger for information. I can recall watching you as a young guy getting your butt kicked by the elders at Bradley’s, and not being daunted or fazed, but taking it in a constructive way and coming back for more.
True.
Now, in the liner notes, Dale Fitzgerald writes that the first day he met you, you told him that to have a big band was an aspiration. You were always interested in that notion?
Yes. I always watched Dizzy’s big band on video, and it was very inspirational to me. When I started to embrace playing jazz as a teenager, the big band format was my training ground, in learning how to read, and learning how to play in a section in a group. For me, it’s kind of going backward. Earlier, there were big bands and then they went to the small groups; now it’s small groups, and I’m trying to bring back the big band thing.
I believe it’s really important that we all have to know each other when we play together. Most big bands, if it’s a great ensemble, the soloists are ok—they have one or two. But this group is a band full of soloists, so it’s challenging for me to try to bring them all together and have them play where the entire ensemble is thinking in the same direction, with tight cutoffs and everybody breathing at the same time—the things that normal big bands do. A few guys work in the Broadway shows, so they have a lot of experience…everything’s by the numbers. So there’s a balance between discipline and at the same time keeping it very loose and spontaneous.
You just mentioned that watching videos of Dizzy Gillespie’s big band was an early influence.
Yes. The way Dizzy conducted the band, and the way he seemed to have so much fun—and they were having fun. This was inspirational to me, and I wanted to have a group like that.
Playing with the Dizzy Gillespie All Star Big Band over the last number of years has probably been a great training ground in putting together your own group.
Oh, it’s been great. Especially playing in the trumpet section there, playing the third trumpet part on Slide’s arrangements. The third trumpet part is a kind of focal point within the band, because you get to hear all the different ensemble parts written around the voicings. A lot of times, the third trumpet part, or even the third trombone part, has special notes that make the chord grow. I’m a sponge, listening to everything and taking it all in. It just gives me more information to transfer along to the group.
The program of Emergence contains many flavors—Latin, straight ballads, you sing a bit, exploratory pieces arranged by Gerald Clayton and Frank Lacy. But somehow, the template seems rooted in the mid-‘50s Dizzy Gillespie Big Band; the Ernie Wilkins-Quincy Jones synthesis of Dizzy and the Basie New Testament band, seems to be a jumping off point for the feeling you have in mind.
Exactly.
It’s a nice blend of art and entertainment.
I think that musicians should always have fun when they play. Sometimes it gets too serious. That’s just my opinion. When we play, it has to be tight, but at the same time I like to have the freedom to go outside of the box a little bit.
Talk about the process of recruiting this band.
Now, that’s difficult. With a big band, there’s hardly ever any money to pay guys, so it’s hard to get cats to be available.
It started off as a sort of Monday workshop thing, as often happens around New York…
Actually, the first hit was about 15 years ago, in Washington Square Park, where I was able to pull together a kind of all-star thing, with Jesse Davis and Frank Lacy, and even Jerry Gonzalez in the band—Jerry was playing fourth trumpet and percussion! I was able to do that first hit because the Panasonic Jazz Festival, which was running the event, paid us enough that I could give each one of those guys a grand or something. They were excited. “Ok! You got some more gigs?” But at the same time, throughout the process, the music grabbed them, too, and here it is, fifteen years later, we’ve brought it back, and everybody seemed to want to be part of it.
The other thing is that there aren’t really any gigs out there, and there’s a lot of musicians. People want to play. So it wasn’t that difficult to find musicians to be in the group. But it’s always a different gauge to try to find people who are available. For example, we did a few things here at the Jazz Gallery, and I was trying to find trumpet players. We shifted around a few different people, but we finally got what seemed to be a lineup of ringers—Tania Darby, Frank Green, Greg Gisbert are all very good lead players, too, and Darren Barrett, who I went to Berklee with, is a great soloist—Clifford Brown-Donald Byrd stuff. I guess finding the trumpet section was the hardest part; for a while, we had some mishaps. But we managed to pull it together.
I’m always at jam sessions, like I was last night, so I’m always running into musicians. I just go into my mental rolodex and pull out the people I know.
It takes time to accumulate a book. How did you accumulate repertoire?
I arranged a few of my songs for it, just to begin, then I told the cats, “If you want to write something, bring it in.” For this album, I asked Saul Rubin to write the arrangement on “Every Time We Say Goodbye,” and I had written “Tchipiso” and asked Gerald Clayton to do the arrangement. Then, of course, there’s our theme song, “Requiem,” by Frank Lacy, which we’ve been playing. That’s the chop-buster for the whole band; they like to play it, but it’s kind of difficult. It’s very powerfully arranged.
I try to include the music that I learned when I came to New York, from cats like John Hicks, Walter Booker, Larry Willis… Right now, a friend of mine is working on an arrangement for Hicks’ “After the Morning,” which we used to play at Bradley’s all the time. My premise is to try to pass down the information I picked up from cats like John Hicks, Walter Booker, Clifford Jordan and Idris Muhammad when I started cutting my teeth in jazz.
Apart from the Dizzy Gillespie All Star Big Band, what other big bands have you been part of after high school?
I think that’s the only group I’ve actually played in. I’ve sat in with a few, played with some large ensembles here and there, but not anything that happened more than once.
Playing in big bands was a rite of passage for many of the older musicians who were your heroes, who came up before 1955-1960.
That’s why I think the music needs this. It creates some kind of humility. It’s very needed. Excuse me, but a lot of times, especially now, when I got to the jam sessions, people are so ego! I’ll give you an example. We’ll play an F-blues, and everybody with an instrument will get up and play, and it goes on for three hours. Each musician will play 100 choruses. There’s no humility there. Big bands, large ensembles create an environment where you don’t have to play for two hours and stretch out. Everybody can’t be John Coltrane! Sometimes you can just play half a chorus. Charlie Parker will play a half chorus and blow your mind! There’s something to be said about being able to trim it down—say less but have it have more meaning.
Is that something you learned early on, playing in your high school big band?
No, I didn’t learn that early on. I’m still trying to learn that!
It’s a quality that you aspire to.
Yes, I aspire to it. Sometimes, you have to make the amount of music that is just enough. You don’t have to over-crowd it.
How do you see this band vis-a-vis other contemporary big bands? It isn’t as though the scene is totally devoid of big bands, though there aren’t so many that work steadily.
Yes, there aren’t that many.
Maria Schneider, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, the Vanguard Orchestra, the Mingus Orchestra, Carla Bley…
My group is not quite that streamlined. I’m still trying to get it to that point. My group is filled with hooligans.
No hooligans in those other bands?
No hooligans over there. There’s plenty in my group, though. My vision of that just seems like there’s those groups, and they’re all very clean-cut and organized, and then there’s my group, which is complete chaos. A lot of characters. It’s never a dull moment around those guys. When we’re hanging or traveling on the train, all I have to do is go around them, and it’s entertainment all day.
Does the composition of the band somehow reflect your personality?
Maybe so. I’ve never really thought about it like that, but yeah, probably.
So you’re talking about camaraderie and the jazz culture. This band evolved through this location, the Jazz Gallery, which has served over its decade-plus…
As a breeding ground.
…as a breeding ground and also a kind of communal space for a lot of young musicians from many different communities.
That’s right.
Talk a bit about the interface between the Jazz Gallery and the evolution of this project. Your quintet identity was already long-developed, but the big band identity not so much.
I have to give it up to Dale Fitzgerald, because it was his idea to bring this back into the picture. The first gig we did here at Jazz Gallery, people got really excited. That got the ball rolling. Then I got excited about it. I figured, well, it’s been over ten years; we might as well record the thing now, try to take it out on the road. I guess that’s an uphill battle, considering the economy and everything else going on right now. But still, I think it’s very needed. The kind of conversation you’ll get with it is worth more than money. To me. Because it would help if we can feed jazz with something fresh. It’s difficult right now. People don’t want to swing any more. That dance element is getting buried, more and more and more. It’s got this esoteric sound. People want to be so hip. They want to create the new thing. But the new thing, to me, is the dance. They’ve buried that. I like hearing drummers when they play the ride cymbal. You can’t get drummers to play the ride cymbal any more. They’re always playing like a drum solo throughout the whole song. The ride cymbal, that is your beat. That’s your identity. The way the bass and the drums sound together is a big deal. People just forget about that. Everybody’s on their own program. That’s why I’m doing this whole big band thing. That’s why I’m doing all three bands. Instead of music just being in the background, music should be like therapy for people. When you go to hear music, you should feel better when you leave. Like you’ve been to the doctor and he heals you.
Another flavor of this band which also hearkens to Dizzy Gillespie is your embrace of Afro-Cuban rhythms on several pieces. Two things come to mind. One is that the Jazz Gallery has been an incubator for some of the most creative Cuban jazz musicians of this period…including some of the more esoteric ones.
Excuse me!
But then also, it’s the place where Chucho Valdes entered the New York picture during the ‘90s, and the venue where you first touched base with him and gestated Crisol. Let’s talk about Afro-Cuban rhythms and how they fit into your notions about swing.
It goes back to the dance thing. When I went to Cuba the first time in ‘96, they was partying in there! Here’s people who don’t have anything, they can’t even go to the store and buy orange juice. You’ve got to go to somebody’s house to buy beer, or something to drink. They don’t even have their own bathrooms. It’s crazy. But when they party, when the music starts, it’s like a festival. They REALLY know how to get down. This inspired me…the possibilities exploded in my head. I owe so much to Chucho for turning me on to that world. Before that, I had no idea. Not really. Not like that, before I went down there and saw it for myself. The level of virtuosity with the musicians in Cuba is out of this world! One guy would have five different facets in his realm. For instance, you might have a trumpet player who plays congas and is also a visual artist who can dance.
When I hung out with Anga and Changuito, playing with these guys, even though they didn’t speak English, I was still able to communicate with them through the music, and they showed me so many things. They showed me how to play the different rhythms based on the clave, things that inspired me… But I didn’t really get to dive into it on this album the way I wanted to. We had one percussionist. I wanted to do a bunch of overdubs, but we didn’t have time to get into it the way I really wanted on the big band thing. There’s still some music floating around from the Crisol era that hasn’t been released.
Did the Cuban experience have an impact on your improvising style, on the way you phrase? Is it something you can dip into, go out of? How does it play out for you?
Just being around those guys, I soaked in some of that. I’ve always been into rhythm and movement. When I play, I’m trying to be a part of the dance. I want the music to go into your body, the way you feel where you have to tap your foot and snap your finger, or move your head, or something. Hanging out with those guys strengthened that feeling, made it more prevalent. When I play, I’m thinking about the drums the whole time, and trying to sit in to the rhythm of whatever the drummer is doing. I pay attention to the drummer always. If the drummer isn’t really happening, then I can’t really play. Sometimes I can, but most of the time it’s a struggle if at least the time is not steady.
So it isn’t so much the style or whether they’re playing swing or straight eighth that’s important, but the quality of the beats. Or is that not the case?
It’s a combination of things. It’s the steadiness of the beat and also the way it feels, like if it has an oomph behind it as opposed to it being very quiet, subdued. I prefer to play with a lot of energy. That’s why I liked having all those drums when we were doing the Latin project, because it inspires me to play with energy and force. Drums and brass just go together.
Let’s segue to the R.H. Factor project, which is a much more explicit manifestation of your dance orientation.
In the beginning, I started off trying to do a tribute… My father was a record collector. He had foresight. People used to come to our house to see what we had, so they could go and buy it. They wanted to know what the new thing was going to be, because my father would have it.
So whatever Roy Allen Hargrove was getting, that’s what…
Yeah, they used to come to our house to see what he had in his collection. Every weekend, my dad would buy two or three records, and come back home, and then two weeks later it would be a hit. He just bought what he liked, but apparently that would be what everybody else liked, too—but later. I lost him in ‘95. So I wanted to do a tribute to him in a way that… He always said to me, “I like the jazz, but when are you going to do something a little bit more contemporary, something funky?” I’d say, “I’m getting to it.” He got out of here before I could do it. So I began to collect all of these recordings from my memory, out of what I knew he had. I would go out and get Herbie Hancock with Headhunters, and Earth, Wind & Fire, and George Clinton—just reeducating myself. I’d always been doing little home recordings of my own original music, and I decided to take a few of them out of the archives and transfer it into a live setting, which was the beginning of R.H. Factor. We went into Electric Lady Studio for two weeks. Once the word got out that I was doing something different, all the musicians in New York started coming through!
A lot of musicians.
A lot! I’m saying every day it was somebody new. It’s funny how the world is small. When the word gets out, it gets out. You know how that is, here in New York. We were at Electric Lady, and the first day I couldn’t find anybody. Nobody was around. I didn’t have a bass player, no drummer, no nothing. It was just me and Marc Cary, trying to get it started. We had Jason Olaine calling around, trying to find us a bass player. Finally, Meshell Ndegeocello popped up and brought her drummer, Gene Lake, and that’s how we got started—and the whirlwind of creativity began at that point. For two weeks, cats were just coming… Even Steve Coleman came by one day. There were some people who I actually called to come through, more mainstream entertainers like Q-Tip and D’Angelo and Common, Erykah Badu. These are my friends. It was a little bit difficult to get them, but they still came through. The only problem was that the budget spiraled out of control, because there were so many musicians, and they had to pay all of them. But that first one, once it got off the ground, was a lot of fun to do. I had Bernard Wright there, and my homeboys from Texas —Keith Anderson, Bobby Sparks, and Jason Thomas. That’s the nucleus of what was going on.
Just let me interrupt momentarily. Erykah Badu, Q-Tip, D’Angelo, Common, were all people you’d come to know during the ‘90s. Now, you’re best known as the leader of a hardcore jazz quintet playing swing, in a milieu where the jazz police are serious.
Mmm-hmm. But I never paid attention to that.
Well, you mentioned your father’s question, “when are you going to play something more contemporary?” That made me wonder whether there was a tipping point where you decided…
No-no. I never was satisfied with just staying in one place with music. I get bored. I always try to keep it rounded. When I was in school at Berklee, people thought I was strange because I would hang out with the jazz guys and the R&B cats, and then just sit there and listen to the gospel choir, saying, “they don’t understand.” Because there especially I met people who got into their locked-in things. You’ve got the guys that just play like Bird, then ones that just play like Coltrane. You got the guys who are strictly R&B, and they think the jazz guys are stuck up. You got the jazz guys who think the R&B guys are ignorant and can’t play changes. I never really sank my teeth into being in one of those groups. When I started recording professionally, I chose to do straight-ahead jazz, because that’s where my development was at the time, and I was trying to learn how to do it. I thought there was enough people trying to rap and do all that other stuff. There was enough of that at the time! I’m fascinated by Clifford, Fats Navarro, and these guys who were like institutions.
It was high art.
Yeah. I’m fascinated by that. Once I got locked on to that, I couldn’t stop. For me, it’s a blessing to be able to record jazz in THIS day and age. So I just went with that. But then, when it came time… Actually, it was really difficult for me to try to branch out and do something that wasn’t jazz. When I make a jazz recording, no one says anything. They’re just like, “Ok, take 3. Thank you.” Or “maybe we need another one, just for safety.” But then, when I started branching out into something else, everybody had an opinion. Everybody wanted to try to tell me how to write the songs, how to arrange the songs, do this, do that, “you’ve gotta get this singer, you’ve gotta get that one.” Everybody became an authority. People in the jazz world, they all think, “He’s a bebopper, he doesn’t know what he’s doing; he can’t play that.” But I’m from the generation that hip-hop came from, so it’s going to come out of me, too. I mean, my favorite group was Run-DMC when I was like 13 and 14. I actually bought Kurtis Blow’s first album.
Did your father like hip-hop?
He had one song he liked, “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash. “Don’t push me, ‘cause I’m close…”
In his very warm liner notes, Dale Fitzgerald writes that you started playing in an elementary school jazz ensemble in Dallas. Then people started hearing about you when you were 14-15, when you attended Booker T. Washington High School, which had a distinguished lineage stretching back to the ‘40s and ‘50s. During that time, were you working outside school? Blues bands, R&B bands, church situations?
Yeah. Once I got hit by the music bug, I couldn’t stop. I wanted to do it all the time. They had to pull me out of the band room. I was the first one there, and always the last to leave. I’d stay there until 5 or 6 o’clock in the evening, because I loved it so much. It was also a kind of deterrent from being in the streets. People talk about South Central L.A., but South Dallas is no joke! Erykah is from South Dallas. We went to high school together. Yeah, people don’t talk about South Dallas. If you picture the ghetto in South Central L.A., or Compton, which they glamorize on TV and have the gangs… Just imagine ten times that. It’s so bad, they can’t even show it on TV. You go to Texas, and the ghetto is crazy. People are just crazy for no reason! I grew up around that in the 1980s, the late ‘80s, when a lot of gangs were beginning, and there was a lot of crack. One time my father told me I couldn’t go outside after 6 o’clock. So being around all that…having music really helped. Having something to do to keep me out of the streets. Otherwise, it might have been trouble. I’m thankful for that.
Did the idea of having a distinguishing voice on the trumpet come to you pretty early? Were you modeling yourself after the cats you were listening to? Did it just naturally come forth somehow?
Being in Texas, you hear blues all the time. Blues all the time. People love to listen to the blues. Every Sunday, my father and his friends would get together and play dominos, and put on Z.Z. Hill and B.B. King and Bobby Blue Bland, and listen to the blues. My grandmother and my aunts and all of them had 8-track tapes of Tyrone Davis. A lot of blues. So the blues gets in there. So when I first started learning how to improvise and took my first solo, it was based on playing the blues. My band director showed me a couple of licks… I guess coming up in church, you learn how to project yourself emotionally through your instrument, if you play an instrument, or if you sing—whatever you do. Texas is the Bible Belt. People know what that is when you go to church, and somebody sings a solo. That becomes a part of you. My grandmother put that in me when I was little. My spirituality has always been what keeps me going. That’s what is coming through.
It wasn’t until I was a teenager that I started to hear people like Clifford Brown and Freddie Hubbard. Now, hearing Freddie Hubbard pretty much turned my whole life around. Clifford Brown at first, because I had never really heard jazz trumpet like THAT. Clifford’s technique was so good that it sounded like he wasn’t even playing trumpet any more. It went into like a woodwind sound almost, as though he had practiced so much and got so good that his sound went past being just a trumpet—it was just music. But then, Freddie Hubbard really got me, because he had a contemporary thing in his sound—it reached back to cats like Clifford and Fats Navarro and Dizzy, but it also had a thing from my father’s generation, from the ‘70s. I could definitely latch onto that, especially the way he played ballads. I always liked his ballad playing. Just ballads in general. I like to play the slow songs.
So I started from blues, and then I started learning bebop when I came to New York.
That was right after high school?
Well, I was in Boston for a couple of years.
Didn’t you come to New York before you went to Boston…
Well, yes, I actually did, once. But it was for a competition. I was still in high school. I didn’t really leave the hotel.
But before you came to Boston and New York, there were a couple of national figures who entered the picture for you a little bit, right?
Yes. Clark Terry and Wynton. When I sat in with Wynton that first time, I was really nervous. But I thought, “Ok, you’ve got to step up to the plate now; you’ve got to deliver.” I wasn’t afraid, but at the same time I was really nervous.
Is stepping up to the plate something innate in you?
I’ve always enjoyed when people enjoy. When I’m playing and someone is feeling good from that, I’ve liked it, ever since I was little, when I first started. When I play a few notes and somebody goes, “Yeah!” I’m like, “ok, yeah, I want to do that every time.” so yeah, step up to the plate, make it happen.
Back to R.H. Factor and the first record that came out with Common, Q-Tip, and artists like this, what was their sense of you as an instrumentalist? Were they thinking of you as a jazz player? As a common spirit? Apart from the friendship and the collegiality, what was the artistic relationship like?
Like Herbie always says, “I’m a human being first, and a musician second.” I guess there’s something to be said for a doctor with a bedside manner. You have to know how to deal with people. So when I go to the more mainstream artists, I switch the way I work with them as opposed to when I work with the jazz players. In some cases, they’re used to special treatment, and you can’t be so technical.
Give me a concrete example.
For instance, with Q-Tip, I put him in the booth and let him write to the track, and just have the first 8 bars, or something like that, keep looping over and over, For about an hour I left him in there by himself. He wrote to the track, then we went back in and cut it, and he did it first take. But there’s no formula. It’s different with each person. It depends on their personality. With Common it was a little different. He and Erykah were dating at the time, so I had to pull him out of the studio. Finally, I got him out of there at 5 a.m. or something, and he came down. He didn’t even write anything. He just improvised his thing, which was one take. I couldn’t believe he did it in one, so I was like, “Can you do that again?”—and he did it again! It was great. But then I went through all of this crap with his manager, because he didn’t like the improvised thing. He wanted him to write something. I’m like, “You don’t understand what’s going on. I wanted it to be improvised.”
Does this emphasis on bedside manner represent your attitude as a bandleader in all the different situations?
Definitely. It takes patience and forward thinking. You always have to be thinking for the other guy, thinking what he’s going to do. Is he going to miss that note? Ok, is he going to come in? I’ve got to count him in. It’s like a juggling act sometimes, trying to… Well, not really like a juggling act—I’ll take that back. What I mean is, you have to think forward, think ahead. With the big band especially—conducting and bringing in all the different sections and whatnot—you have to always be at least 2 bars ahead.
I guess you have to be like when you’re leading the small band, too, keeping the crowd in mind, what to play at what time—gauging all those dynamics.
I mean, it’s not that much different from the small group to the big groups. I think that, in a way, the approach should be kind of the same. With the small group, sometimes we play the big band arrangements, pared down, which is exciting for them.
A different flavor. Changes things up.
Changes things up, yes.
So you hit New York in 1990 after two years at Berklee. Was being there helpful to you?
Yeah, definitely. Billy Pierce was there. I did my first couple of gigs with James Williams while I was there. Greg Hopkins, too. At Berklee, I was in the Dizzy Gillespie Ensemble, which is how I learned a lot of that book. Greg had some of the same arrangements, so when I got in the band with Slide, I had played a lot of the arrangements before. That helped me professionally. I already had some training, and I got a lot there, too, though I wasn’t there very long. Not just from being in the school, but from being on the streets. Going to Wally’s every night. I heard a lot of great music there, and I got to know some great musicians as well, like Antonio Hart, Mark Gross, Delfeayo Marsalis… Being away from Texas was a culture shock for me, but also very enriching as far as my education in jazz.
Then you get to New York…
Then it got really deep! While I was at Berklee, I was starting to learn a little bit of some bebop, but I was really just trying to learn how to read chord changes. I’ve always played by ear, from when I first started. The first trumpet player got mad at me, because I would play his part, but I’d be down at the third trumpet! I think the ear training is such a big deal, though, especially now. We’re in the information age, and you can get everything at the push of a button. So musicians have to be very complete. You have to be not only good readers and be up on the technical side of playing music, but also be able to play what you hear. That’s sometimes lacking. I know a lot of musicians who can read flyshit, but if you whistle something to them, they can’t play it. Ear training is a big deal.
Anyway, it got deep when I got to New York. I started sitting in with people like John Hicks. I followed John Hicks around New York for a while.
Let’s paint a picture. You were around 19-20, and spending a lot of time at Bradley’s, both playing bookings and sitting in. You were playing with Hicks, and you were playing with Larry Willis, and the musicians who play on the record, Family… I personally remember an occasion when you were sitting in with George Coleman and Walter Davis, Jr. on the second set, they kicked your ass, and then you came back on the last set and hung right in there. I saw similar situations transpire several times. It’s kind of an old-school way of learning, but I think it says something fundamental about you.
I’m very thankful, because people like George Coleman and Walter Davis taught us how to be men on the bandstand—how to be grownups. I never will forget that same night you mention, when I was playing with George and we went through the keys on “Cherokee,” which was like a lesson on harmony and then another lesson on rhythm. Then we played “Body and Soul,” and he started changing up the meters—he played in 3 and then in 5, and then BLAM, really fast. [LAUGHS] Then he turns around to me and goes, “You got it.” I go, “ok. What am I going to do after all of that?” But I stuck to my guns and tried to ride it out. Man, they were so helpful to me. That’s why I think we just need something now. Musicians need role models, something so that they can see how it’s done. I’d glad I got a chance to see it in person. Bradley’s was an institution, to me. It was like going to school. It was like your Masters. You go in there, and you’re playing, and then there’s Freddie Hubbard at the bar! What do you do? This is very humbling. Everything I’m playing right now I owe to that whole scene.
Before I interrupted, you mentioned following John Hicks around the city, and you remarked earlier you’ve commissioned an arrangement of his piece “After the Morning” for the big band. Hicks was a musician who is underappreciated in the broader scheme of things in jazz…
Yeah, but he was a true musicians’ musician. My manager, Larry Clothier, told me about John in the beginning. He said, “You’ve got to hear him; he elevates off the piano. Really. He starts levitating.” When I saw him the first time, it happened! I was like, “whoa!” So I latched on to John, and he was like my uncle. He was like family to me. His music was an influence. I was influenced by a lot of pianists as far as how I write and my approach to harmony. there’s John Hicks, then also Larry Willis, then also Ronnie Matthews, Kenny Barron, too—and James Williams, of course. My writing was influenced mostly by James Williams and John Hicks, the use of the major VII-sharp XI chord. That was my favorite chord when I was in college, and I used to use it on a lot of songs. They showed me how to use that chord, and make it very melodic. Sometimes the guys in my band would get tired, because I would write them like inj parallel… “Man, you got some more major VII-sharp XI chords?” A lot of my tunes had inflections from John or James or even Larry Willis, and they still do today.
One thing that I think shone through at Bradley’s was your ability to play a ballad. At 19 you could have been called an “old soul,” but we can’t really say that now, since you’re turning 40 this year.
I think that’s just my upbringing. I’ve always gravitated towards the slower songs. Ballads have an emotional quality to me. You slow it down, and you hear everything, all the nuances… Maybe I’m a romantic as well. I guess I believe in love! I like the slow songs. I like when it’s broken down. Sometimes that’s where the beauty is, when you bring it in the slow tempo. And I always listened to singers. Nat King Cole and Shirley Horn. Sarah Vaughan is my favorite. Of course, I owe a lot to Carmen McRae. I got to hear her live a lot, and she used to let me sit in with her all the time. Her delivery… I heard Freddy Cole at Bradley’s as well.
There’s a vocal element in my music. I try to play like a singer. I try to sing through my instrument like a vocalist would sing. I’m always thinking about the lyrics. I was told by Clifford Jordan that you have to know the words of the song, because then you really understand what it’s about, and when you play the melody you really understand the mood you’re projecting. Also, it helps your phrasing.
It sounds like there was never any generation gap for you.
Man, I have extreme respect for my elders. I believe in that. Somebody who’s been on this planet longer than me, I have to respect them. Even if they’re dead wrong, I’ve still got to respect them! There’s something to be said about the fact that they’ve been here longer than me, and they’ve survived. When it comes to musicians, it even gets deeper.
Another thing that’s interesting about how Bradley’s played out for you is that, because your business arrangements turned you into a leader quite quickly, it became the primary venue for your apprenticeship. You never did the sideman thing too much, if I recall correctly.
No, you’re wrong about that. I did a lot of sideman things, but it wasn’t anything steady. I started off playing with Frank Morgan and the Ronnie Matthews Trio, and it went from there to Clifford Jordan, Barry Harris, and Vernell Fournier, and then Charles McPherson.
Were these one-offs or were you touring with them?
I was touring with them. I would do a week here, two weeks there with different groups. Most of them were veterans, with me, the young kid, as the special guest. They were so encouraging. Whenever I showed up on the scene with my trumpet, the older guys, like Clifford Jordan, would be like, “Man, come on and play.” Nowadays, people get very protective over the bandstand. You want to go sit in with them, it’s like 2 o’clock in the morning, and they say, “We’re going to play a few songs, and then we’ll invite you up.” You can’t do that at 2 o’clock in the morning, man! It’s too late for all of that. Let’s have some fun! But people get very protective. I think the reason is because there’s no gigs. That creates a thing where when somebody gets a gig, even if it’s 2 o’clock in the morning, they want to play all their original shit and they want to speak their piece.
But the older cats were very welcoming, even though I couldn’t really even play changes that well. “Hey, come on and play.” Sometimes, when I didn’t want to play, they’d be like, “Get on up here.” Like, Kenny Washington one night, we were at Bradley’s, and he was playing some fast, crazy tempo. Kenny was known for playing 220! I went to go sit down, and he was like, “Unh-uh, come back up here.” [LAUGHS] He wouldn’t let me go. “Yeah, you’re getting some of this, too.”
But even if my premise is wrong that you didn’t do so much sidemanning, pretty much you were leading groups from…
I didn’t have my own quintet until ‘93-‘94, with Greg Hutchinson, Marc Cary, Rodney Whitaker, and Antonio Hart. I tried to create a couple of bands before that, but nothing really stuck. I had different projects. I had one group with Walter Blanding, Chris McBride and Eric McPherson early on.
I’d like to talk about your development as a trumpet player over the years. What your weaknesses were, how you worked on them.
Trumpet is a beast! When I was in high school, Wynton referred me to a guy named Kerry Kent Hughes, who was a trumpet professor at Texas Christian University. He was my very first private instructor on that level. I’d been studying at school, and pretty much teaching myself, for the most part. This was the first time I actually had someone who would come to my house and work with me. Man, I learned so much. I couldn’t pay him. We were poor. But he did this out of his heart. He was a classical player, but he also did musicals and shows and so on, and he was very versatile. Actually, he came to the Vanguard the last time we played there, and it blew my mind, because I hadn’t seen him in so long. But Kerry Hughes would come to my house every week or so, and show me little things to help me with endurance. We worked on Cichowicz flow studies and stuff like that, and also the Arban method. This really instilled in me the importance of an everyday routine on the trumpet, certain rudimental things that you do just to keep your chops up. With a hectic schedule and touring when you have to go to the airport and so on, you don’t get a lot of opportunities to practice, so you have to develop a daily routine to keep your chops up. I learned a lot from him in that respect.
I’ve picked up things as I go. A few years ago, I learned something called the Whisper Tone that really opened me up, helped my range a lot, helped me to be able to play more around the horn. I’m still developing, trying to learn as much as I can about the trumpet. It’s a beast. Dizzy says, “It lays there in luxury, waiting for someone to pick it up, so it can mess up your head.” [LAUGHS]
Dizzy Gillespie sure messed up the heads of a lot of people. You don’t hear too many who can emulate him.
I was just listening to something last night, “Birks Works” with Milt Jackson.
At what point do you feel you got past influences?
I’m still not. I’m still there.
Were you transcribing trumpeters? Were you doing it more by feel?
When I was at Berklee, I had to transcribe some Fats Navarro. Jeff Stout was my teacher, and he had me transcribe a couple of Fats Navarro solos. But I never got into transcription as far as writing it down. I don’t think that you get much from that. It’s better if you transcribe by ear and learn it, because some things you can’t really write down all the way—certain inflections and the feel that comes from someone’s conception. But I transcribe a lot by ear, not even really trying to. If I hear something more than three times, I’ve pretty much got it memorized.
That’s a gift, to be able to do that.
Yes, I think so. Thank God for that. But it’s also training. Because if you listen to music all the time, which I do, then it becomes part of you. It becomes part of your breathing. It’s just like drinking water or eating. I listen to music all the time. Even when I’m not listening, it’s still in my head.
So the quintet is your longest continuous entity.
Yeah, I like the quintet format. It has everything there. I have tried some other formats, though. That’s why I like coming to the Jazz Gallery to play, because I get to do other things—like the organ trio is fun.
You’ve also paired off with other trumpeters on various gigs here. Back to the notion of camaraderie and collegiality, it seems that you like to have another voice to play off of.
Yes, I like it.
It doesn’t seem that quartet would be your favorite format.
Well, it depends. With quartet, I would probably play more ballads. But it’s hard to play ballads now, because the young guys don’t know the American Songbook. They don’t KNOW the songs. It’s difficult. I go to jam sessions a lot, and when I start calling tunes, nobody knows anything. You either get “Beatrice” or “Inner Urge.” That’s it!
Gerald Clayton, who was your pianist for several years, has command of that…
He does. He knows the language of it. If he doesn’t know the tune, he can figure it out. For his generation, he’s one of the better ones. But then, his father is John Clayton, so he’s getting it honest. But I could stump him, too. He didn’t know “After the Morning.”
But in any event, you’re always bringing new young musicians into the band. Is there a disconnect for you with that generation?
I miss being able to hear some music that I just can’t get enough of! I’ll give you an example. Just two nights ago, I went into Smalls, and we were hanging out, jam session, everything’s pretty straight line, and then my friend Duane Clemons gets up and plays—and I was so happy! It was like touchdown! Know what I’m saying? It was like throwing a pork chop into the middle of a hunger-starved place. I felt so good just for that little bit. Man, if I could just have a LITTLE bit of that all the time. I was telling Duane that, “Man, you should really play more, because that’s FOOD.” He was playing the real language. He was playing bebop. He was playing the real New York stuff. The real fabric of the language of the music. When you hear it, you know what it is.
You do some workshops and clinics, too. You’re in touch with younger musicians.
Sometimes. I did a thing with Roy Haynes at Harvard not too long ago. It was real cool.
What do you think is alienating musicians from that way of playing? Is it lack of information, or…
Lack of information.
…is it attitude?
It’s both, One feeds the other. First of all, I think people sometimes come into the arts for the wrong reason now—because they want to be famous and rich and have a nice life, instead of trying to reach people’s consciousness and make a difference. Doing something for someone else besides yourself. People come into this, and, “Yeah, I want to be rich, I want to have a car, I want to have people waiting on me,” and so on. It gets weird when that’s your main focus. So you get the jazz musician who learned how to play in school who already thinks he’s learned it all. I like to meet musicians like that, because then I like to challenge them. That’s why I started this big band. I wanted to challenge the peacocks, musicians who think, “Oh yeah, I already know everything.” But you don’t!
They don’t get it. But if you love this music, you’ll go out and find what you need. That’s one thing I like about Jonathan Batiste, the new piano player who’s been playing with me. He seeks out cats like Kenny Barron and Hank Jones. That’s different than the guys in his generation, who are more into McCoy and Herbie—Jonathan checks out the REAL thing. I have to say, he did a great job on this last tour. I was really excited, because he came out and took care of business. This cat played in all three groups.
Jonathan Batiste is out of New Orleans.
New Orleans. What are they feeding them down there?! I don’t understand. Them New Orleans piano players. I had two of them in the past months, Sullivan Fortner and then Jonathan, and these guys are so complete. There was nothing I couldn’t throw at them. I’ve been working towards having the type of group where if I wanted to show them a new song, I could sit down at the piano and play it, and then they’d hear it—I don’t have to write it out or anything. Now is the first time I’ve ever had a group like that; with Jonathan, I could sit down and play it once, and he’d pick it up. Something about New Orleans.
So the present group is either Sullivan Fortner or Jonathan Batiste on piano…
Yes. Amin Salim is playing bass. Montez Coleman is on drums. Justin Robinson on alto saxophone.
Is the quintet a more open-ended format for you than the big band or R.H. Factor?
“Open-ended.” What do you mean?
In your current bio sheet, you remark about the big band, “There’s not much left to chance.”
Yes. With the quintet, it’s always up in the air. The book is so vast with the quintet right now (excluding the new members, like Amin Saleem, who doesn’t know the whole book yet—but he’s learning it) that we can go in any direction you want. I can actually do the Big Band and R.H. Factor set with them, too. This version of the quintet is probably one of the more versatile units I’ve had. When we play the Latin thing, it’s real Latin. When we play some funk, it’s real funky. When we play straight-ahead, it’s tippin’. We can go anywhere. That’s basically my whole premise. I believe in variety, and also I believe in spontaneity. There’s no rule book. As soon as it starts to get to be in a rut, then I change it right away. With the quintet, we never play the same thing. Each night I try to change up the repertoire a bit so that everyone stays focused. We never get bored.
Being a bandleader is very interesting and challenging in that way. You have to keep everybody focused, and also motivated. Even outside of the music, trying to keep morale up is a balancing act as well. When you’re on the road and nobody’s slept for a few days, people get tired of looking at each other and it gets real dark. So I try to keep a very positive energy around everyone, so we keep it going.
You yourself must get tired, too.
Yes. I get tired. But I’m ok. My spirituality is what keeps me going, for sure.
*****
Roy Hargrove, Blindfold Test – Uncut:
Terrell Stafford, “Yes, I Can, No You Can’t” (BrotherLee Love: Celebrating Lee Morgan, Capri, 2015) (Stafford, trumpet; Tim Warfield, tenor saxophone; Bruce Barth, piano; Peter Washington, bass; Daryl Hall, drums)
Wow. This is recent? [2015] Oh, that recent! It sounds good. I like it. It’s recent but it sounds… It’s nostalgic. I know that’s a Lee Morgan tune. I don’t know about the trumpet player, though. That’s Tim Warfield on tenor saxophone. I know his sound. He plays very melodic and I can tell the way he does the vibrato at the very end of his phrase. I remember that from when we used to play together. He sings. [trumpet solo] Huh! You got me. It could be Nicholas. It could be Sean Jones…no, it’s not Sean Jones. Kermit Ruffins? No, not him. I know he’s probably from New Orleans, though. I thought New Orleans because of Tim. He used to play with Marlon Jordan. I couldn’t recognize who the trumpet player is, but I like it. He’s got the blues in there. He’s got a feeling. But you got me. I can’t guess. [last unison] Oh, it’s Terrell. I heard another cut from the same record on the radio, and I remember the sonic quality. I had the same feeling when I heard this on the radio—this sounds like an old record but it’s new…a new musician. It’s a great choice for Lee Morgan, one of my favorite trumpet players, and the execution is great. It’s not easy to play those melodies. The stuff that Lee wrote was hard to play. I know Terrell; he deals with that. 4½ stars.
Alex Sipiagin, “From Reality and Back” (From Reality and Back, 5Passion, 2013) (Sipiagin, trumpet; Seamus Blake, tenor saxophone; Gonzalo Rubalcaba, piano; Dave Holland, bass; Antonio Sanchez, drums)
I don’t know who it is, but I like it. It kind of reminds me of… This is somebody young; it’s one of the younger guys. The style is very progressive. It reminds me a lot of the music I hear the younger guys players now. [this player is older than you.] He is? Is it Wallace? Not Wallace. Wow, you got me again. It’s not Terence. I would have heard that bend. The tune is pretty. I couldn’t really tell what the meter was at first. That’s real nice. That’s pretty. It’s new. It’s a new sound. You can’t really tell what’s going on with the meter. It has its own identity as far as the harmonic approach. It’s very different. I haven’t heard anything like that before. It’s real pretty. It reminds me a bit of Wayne Shorter’s writing style. I was going to say it was Dave Douglas, because I know him. But Alex Sipiagin, I’ve never heard of him. That’s a good player. Nice pretty dark sound. 5 stars. That’s some original stuff there.
Geri Allen-Marcus Belgrave, “Space Odyssey” (Motown and Motor City Inspirations, Motéma, 2013) (Geri Allen, piano; Marcus Belgrave, trumpet)
I don’t think the trumpet player is American. It reminds me of another musician I heard who isn’t American who uses a lot of effects, which I heard in the beginning—an echo thing. I can’t guess that one either. If he’s American, you got me. The trumpet player has a nice sound, great attack, good chops. But I can’t figure out from the improvising; his style is throwing me a little. It’s very expressive. It makes me think of Don Cherry a little, but I know it’s not him. Could it be Olu? [That generation.] Who’s the pianist? [Geri Allen.] Could it be Graham Haynes? It’s in that style, though—sort of. 3 stars. [after] That was Marcus? A new record? Well, that makes sense. It has that darkness to it, like Marcus. Yeah, Detroit. I feel it. That was cool. That sound was very mature. I couldn’t guess it. It was probably an original tune. I’ll have to up the stars on that since it was Marcus—I’ve got to give it 5.
Rodriguez Brothers, “Fragment” (Impromptu, Criss Cross, 2014) (Michael Rodriguez, trumpet; Robert Rodriguez, piano; Carlos Henriquez, bass; Ludwig Afonso, drums; Samuel Torres, percussion)
It’s got some percussion. That’s definitely one of the Latin cats. Which one? I have not a clue! It’s got some Cuban flavor. Is this the kid, Zack O’Farrill, that I did the trumpet thing with? No. It reminds me of the music of Yosvany Terry and some of those guys from Cuba, with the odd meters. They’re swinging now, though. They swing with a Latin thing in it—the tempo. Stumped. I like the rhythm; it’s very strong on this, and the trumpet player has great time. Good sound, too, on the harmony. It’s real nice. 4 stars. [after] I do know him, but I don’t know his sound that well. I haven’t heard him enough to be able to pick him out. We’ve hung out at jam sessions, back when they used to have it at Sweet Rhythm and this other place on the East Side. He was in the Monk Competition, one of the last three guys—him, Ambrose and Jean Caze. Poor guy, they made him go first. His shoulders was tight; he was up in here like that. He’s a very mature player. He’s got great rhythm, and a beautiful sound, too. He got a good sound on the mute, and it’s not easy to do. The mute causes all kinds of intonation disasters. Sometimes it goes out of tune. It gets a very shrill tone. If you don’t have your tone centered, it can be really weird.
Dave Douglas Quintet, “Pyrrhic Apology” (Brazen Spirit, Greenleaf, 2015) (Douglas, trumpet; Jon Irabagon, tenor saxophone; Matt Mitchell, piano; Linda Oh, bass; Rudy Royston, drums)
I was going to say Terence. Not Terence? This is a young guy? [Older than you.] Wow. Bill Mobley? Not Bill Mobley. No, that doesn’t sound like Terence. I’m telling you, listening to all this music is making me want to start listening to new jazz again. I can’t pick this one out either. It reminds me of Terence just in the style, but it’s not him, clearly. Terence has this one thing he does; I always know when it’s him—he has a dip, like K.D. used to do, and Clark. But the composition and the way it’s written kind of reminds me of the way Terence writes. The trumpet player has kind of a vocal thing in his sound, like he’s singing, sort of. It’s very personal. He’s sounding like himself, whoever that is. The tenor player sounds familiar. It’s not him, but it reminds of Mark Turner—the higher register. All right, tell me who it is. I wouldn’t have been able to guess Dave Douglas. I know him, but I don’t have any of his records. What would make me guess it’s him is if it had been a different instrumentation, because he uses unorthodox stuff, like trumpet and electric guitar, soemthing different like that. I know him for doing stuff that’s unorthodox. 3½ stars.
Eddie Henderson, “Dreams” (Collective Portrait, SmokeSessions, 2015) (Henderson, trumpet; Gary Bartz, alto saxophone; George Cables, Fender Rhodes piano; Doug Weiss, bass; Carl Allen, drums)
Electric keyboard. Flugelhorn? Eddie Henderson maybe? I can pick him up because he does a thing [sings ascending phrase]. And his sound is so broad. He has such a beautiful legato way of playing. It’s very broad and even. When I hear him play, I can tell he’s been around people like Clifford and Lee and all those guys who I’ve listened to. He’s got that thing in his sound. Yeah, that’s it. That’s Eddie. Doctor Strangelove. This past summer, I saw him playing with that group he’s in with David Weiss, the Cookers. They were playing some great music that day. It was very refreshing, because most of these festivals don’t have any jazz at all—hardly. This one had them playing, Ahmad—so I got to hear a little bit of something. Eddie was on fire that day, too. This is the newest? Is it young guys in the group? Oh, in his generation. Whoever the saxophone player is, the sound, the tenor…that’s a tenor? It’s not even a tenor, right? Is it a C-melody or something? It’s alto! Wow. Oh, that’s Bartz. He has that type of sound. You can’t tell what it is, tenor, alto…could be soprano. George Cables? It’s his approach to harmony mostly, and he has a way of laying out the chords that’s like a comfortable bed to lay in. I played with him a few times, and he makes it easy for you to play. Piano players like that are not a dime a dozen. People like Cables or Larry Willis, the way they accompany musicians and make them sound good. It’s hard. It’s a forgotten art, accompaniment. [You’ve got a good one.] Oh, yeah. Sully’s really on his way, man. But those are all them cats from New Orleans, man…forget it, they must feed them something. This is a new release with Eddie? Smoke Sessions, so it’s live? 5 stars, without a doubt. Eddie’s my all-time hero. Every time I see him perform I feel like it’s a special moment, and it shouldn’t be missed by any trumpet player. I always see that in his playing anyway. The rhythm is so free, so I wouldn’t have been able to tell that’s Carl—I’d have to hear him play time.
Tom Harrell, “Family” (Colors Of A Dream, High Note, 2013) (Harrell, trumpet; Esperanza Spalding, Ugonna Okegwo, bass)
Bass and trumpet, duet. Two basses? Wow. The instrumentation is interesting. That’s pretty cool. I wouldn’t think to do that. I’d probably get two drummers. Is it James Zollar? I like the sound. Whoever this is has a great sound. It’s very nice and warm. It’s a very pretty sound. Was that guy older than me, too? It’s very mature, a very mature sound, and original. But I can’t guess. 4 stars. I liked the melody. I liked the sound a lot. It’s very nice, dark, pretty. [after] Tom Harrell! Another one of my favorite players, man. I woudn’t have been able to guess that because he usually plays more stuff. I’ve always admired Tom for his brilliance and his great compositions, and the way he plays harmony and everything. He’s one of my favorite players. I should know him by his sound.
Wadada Leo Smith, “Crossing Sirat” (Spiritual Dimensions, Cuneiform, 2009) (Smith, trumpet; Vijay Iyer, piano, synthesizer; John Lindberg, bass; Pheeroan AkLaff, Don Moye, drums)
Whoa. I’m not going to know this one. [You might. Listen to the sound.] All right. Lester Bowie? Yeah, the piano player’s going for it. Out there in the ozone. Pluto. It’s definitely in the vein of Don Cherry, but it’s not him. It’s a newer recording. Is the pianist Don Pullen? No. These are all people who are still here. It’s not Geri. Jason Moran? Glasper? No, he wouldn’t do it. He’s on another thing right now. The trumpet player… Yeah! I like this! But you know what? If I tried to play this at the house, my girl would leave. She wouldn’t leave, but she would just excuse herself and go buy groceries. It’s an acquired taste. I like the expressiveness of it. I like the boldness, and the sound is very majestic. It reminds me of Lester a little bit. When I met Lester he told, “Man, stop playing all that pretty shit—take it out.” Then I started doing all kinds of crazy stuff, and he was like, “Yeah!” This was late one night in Italy. I don’t know who that is, though. Ok, who is that? Wadada Leo Smith. He’s from the AACM? I knew it was one of those guys. His name rings a bell. 5 stars. Just because I like that! I have yet to do my record like that. It’s coming, though.
Gerald Wilson Orchestra, “Detroit” (Detroit, Mack Avenue, 2009) (Kamasi Washington, tenor sax solo; Sean Jones; flugelhorn solo)
Is this is recent recording? [About six years old.] I know it’s not who it is, but this reminds me a little bit of Griff’s [Johnny Griffin] big band. He did a couple of really nice albums. It’s beautiful. That’s all I can say. I can’t place the tenor player, but it’s someone very mature. The trumpet player also is playing a lot of harmony. Beautiful sound, great range, still playing very soft but in the higher register which is real pretty. The arrangement is incredible. 5 stars, just because I like this kind of stuff—really pretty. Both were older. Definitely older. [after] What?! It’s the arrangement. Kamasi sounds like he’s a grown person. Sean I wouldn’t have been able to figure out, except only when he played the high note—but usually when I hear him, he’s more brass. That was a GOOD one. They sound grown. I’ve only heard both of them playing in different settings completely. I heard Sean playing with Marcus Miller. Kamasi comes to sit in with us whenever I’m in L.A. He’s a very exciting player. I haven’t heard him playing nothing like that, so nice and mellow. [Do you incorporate any of GW’s arrangements or charts in the big band?] We have yet to play any of his stuff. We’ve been playing my stuff, and some of the guys in the band write, too. I’ve got some outside guys, too. Dave Gibson, the trombonist, has given me a few charts. But I would be open to do that if he’d give me some of them.
Nate Wooley, “Skain’s Domain” ((Dance To) The Early Music, Clean Feed, 2015) (Wooley, trumpet; Josh Sinton, bass clarinet; Matt Moran, vibraphone; Eivind Opsvik, bass; Harris Eisenstadt, drums)
You know who does that? Enrico does that—multiphonics. This is going to be interesting. I can see that now. Oh. Wynton? Just because I hear he plays… [Hums the refrain] That’s Wynton’s thing. Oh, he wrote the song. Is it one of his disciples? It could be Marlon. I’m hearing some quarter tones. No, it’s definitely not Wynton. I take that back. Pshew, great technique. Arturo? Is that a bass clarinet in there? Jonathan Finlayson? Is it an older guy? [Younger than you.] Is this guy from New Orleans? You never cease to amaze me with your depth of musical knowledge. I hear a vibraphone, and there’s a bass clarinet, some drums. I don’t know how to give this stars, because it’s an acquired taste—not everybody will like this kind of music. I would give it a 5, just based on the creativity and also 5 on technique, dexterity. He’s definitely getting some sounds out of the trumpet that you wouldn’t normally hear people do. Just a few bars back there, there was something very airy but then also kind of a high-pitched note. It’s different. [Did you listen to Wynton’s music a lot in the ’80s?] Yeah. I really liked the Standard album he did, and I especially liked his classical records. This trumpet player isn’t from New Orleans? And he’s young.
Ambrose Akinmusire, “J.E. Milmah (Ecclesiastes 6:10)” (The Imagined Savior Is Far Easier To Paint, Blue Note, 2014) (Akinmusire, trumpet; Sam Harris, piano; Charles Altura, guitar; Harish Raghavan, bass; Justin Brown, drums)
Is it Ambrose? His sound I recognize. It’s very original. Ambrose has an original style. I can pick him out. He just makes me think about the future when I hear him play. I heard him play for the first time when he was only 12 or 13. They used to have a matinee show in Oakland where they would bring the kids out, and both him and Jon Finlayson were like a team together when they were still in school, so they would come up and sit in with us. I noticed even back then that he had his own thing going on. He has a voice. I liked that. 5 stars. I like Ambrose, man. I think he’s doing something special. He makes me think of where the music’s heading. It’s definitely like he’s reaching for something there. I can feel it. Whenever I hear him on the radio, I can tell it’s him. I like to hear him and Gerald Clayton play their original stuff. It’s real cool.
Mack Avenue 2015 Super Band, “Sudden Impact” (Live From The 2015 Detroit Jazz Festival, Mack Avenue, 2015) (Freddie Hendrix, trumpet, composer; Tia Fuller, alto saxophone; Kirk Whalum, tenor saxophone; Gary Burton, vibraphone; Christian Sands, piano; Christian McBride, bass; Carl Allen, drums)
Is there a vibraphone underneath? Is Nicholas in there? Freddie Hendrix? [That was before he even soloed.] I can tell. I know how he plays his eighth notes. He has a very nice rhythmic thing. Plus, I just saw him a couple of weeks ago. But I can tell it’s him because of the way he plays his eighth notes, the way he swings. You don’t get to hear it that often any more, where cats play time like that, play rhythm that way. So when I hear him doing this, I know it’s him, because he’s one of the few guys who still do that. Is this his record? [No, but it’s his tune.] Is the pianist Anthony Wonsey? Younger? Wow. I don’t know Christian Sands. Freddie Hendrix has been playing his ass off lately; I’ve noticed that. I like it. 4 stars.
https://musicians.allaboutjazz.com/royhargrove
ZA Do you know the story of Duke Ellington and how he started out—selling concert posters, booking bands, and then he’d do gigs at fancy supper clubs. He had a whole sideline of businesses while he was launching his own career as a bandleader. Later he copyrighted his music, which paid off because that money kept his band on the road even in the hard times. I was wondering, how much are you into the business?
RH I’m very involved. Just last year I became incorporated, and now I have a business called Hardgroove Enterprises. We’ve opened a gallery in my rehearsal space. One of the things that we’re trying to cultivate is something that’s a little bit outside the music and that’s with jazz art and photography. Currently there’s a show going on. Hopefully, in the future we’ll get some more of that along with some recitals and small concerts.
ZA Roy, why are you supporting a gallery?
RH I’m very intrigued by art and photography. Eventually, it’s going to make a profit for the business. That definitely makes me supportive of it. My vision involves more of the musical side the space—maybe doing some recording.
ZA You say you’re intrigued with art and photography. How did that develop?
RH I’ve always liked to look at jazz photographs, at pictures of the musicians from the past. When I look at paintings, what I really enjoy the most is the detail. Sometimes they can really be abstract but you can get a message.
ZA Do you have any ideas that you want to see come to fruition at the jazz Gallery?
RH Eventually I hope to have a production company so that we can send other artists out on the road in their own groups, but they’ll be affiliated with Hardgroove Enterprises. It’s very important to be aware of what is going on in the world of the business of music because there’s so many people out there who will take you for a ride, and you have to keep your eyes open.
ZA There’s a lot of people who live off music, and a lot of musicians who don’t benefit from the music they’ve created. I can’t figure it out.
RH It’s pretty sad. Once, I went into an in-store in Detroit, and the cat from my former label didn’t even know who I was. He came up to me and asked me if I knew where Roy was, and I was like, “You’re looking at him!” That was the kind of thing I was going through. Now I’m with PolyGram Verve, which is probably one of the best jazz labels in the country. The people who are on staff are very knowledgeable about the music. My product manager, and a lot of the people in the publicity department were at the Vanguard every night that I was there. And that really shows support.
ZA Also respect. What videos have you done?
RH When we were at the Vanguard, that became a video, it’s been sold to BET [Black Entertainment Television].
ZA Why don’t we see more jazz videos?
RH I couldn’t tell you. Financially, there aren’t a lot of people who will get behind a jazz artist to make a video. There’s a new artist, a cat by the name of D’Angelo, you ever run into him? Well anyway, he’s bad, really bad. You never heard of him? You got to. If he comes out with a record and makes trillions of dollars, now that record company is going to get their money back, so they’re willing to finance a video. They’re really taking a chance on a jazz artist. The world of jazz is so small…
ZA Parker’s Mood came out just in time for Charlie Parker’s birthday. It’s beautiful. He’s really admired for what he did with those tunes. I like what you did with them.
RH The conditions in which we recorded that CD were really nice. It felt like we were playing in a living room with a couch and a piano only it was soundproof. We were very comfortable. We had to learn those tunes, which was pretty hard.
ZA Everyone says that about Charlie Parker. Roy, are you interested in writing film scores?
RH Oh yeah, I’m really into doing that. I write a lot, I like writing. I think that to know yourself, you have to write. I watch movies all the time—that’s my other hobby, going to the movies. I could sit up and watch HBO all day. So I’m ready to do that.
ZA Do you have any complaints, gripes…something you wish you could change about the music industry, about the jazz life, or do you accept it pretty much?
RH Well, you have to accept it, but sometimes I wish that promoters and club owners would respect artists just a little more and stop treating us like second class citizens. Not everyone is like that, but in some cases it’s true and it’s not right, you know? We deserve better than that because we’re out here working hard to get from one gig to the next, and when you get there people treat you shabbily, it’s not really cool. That hasn’t happened to me a lot, but it has happened a couple of times and when it does, it’s very frustrating. The only thing that you can do is deal with it and go on.
ZA When you go onstage to face the public, whoever’s acting foul, stays behind the scenes.
RH Yeah, they’re behind alright. I’m like, what instrument do you play? (laughter) That’s one of the things that I would change. Just that. The other thing is that here in the United States, I think there should be more jazz venues. There are lots of musicians coming onto the scene, and yet there aren’t that many places for us to work. Overall, I don’t have many complaints. I think that it’s a blessing to he able to do what we’re doing now—for us to be playing music we love and get paid doing it.
ZA When you’re on the road, you’re always meeting great musicians. Have there been any memorable encounters lately?
RH One that comes to mind right this very moment was being on stage with Doc Cheatham and Harry “Sweets” Edison at Wolf Trap for a tribute to Louis Armstrong. That had a great effect on me because Doc Cheatham is 90 years old, and he’s still playing strong, stronger than some young guys I know who are playing trumpet. He has such a centered sound, a big sound. And he’s playing all this authentic music from the Louis Armstrong era. And you hear that, and it makes you think, I want to be like that. I want to be playing when I’m 90-something years old—strong like that. And even Sweets, he’s still got all that fire and energy that he’s had for years. So that’s inspiring. Another thing that comes to mind is the Sonny Rollins concert a couple of years ago at Carnegie Hall. That was one of the highlights of my career. I’ll always remember it. Sonny, he’s so unpredictable. When he stumps off a tune, you don’t know what you’re going to do from there. I just watched him. We started trading and got into some really exciting exchanges there.
ZA He’s 65, but from what you’re saying his age is a blessing too.
RH Music is like wine—it gets better as you get older,
ZA Are you getting better?
RH Yeah!
ZA So what’s in the can? I heard you recorded for days last trip to the studio.
RH We recorded 45 tunes. There’s nothing that’s not usable.
ZA How much writing did you do?
RH Umm, I wrote about seven or eight tunes. Most of my tunes went on Family, but there are a couple of others.
ZA When we hear Louis Armstrong or see a film of him performing, he was such a strong performer, a virtuoso. What does Louis Armstrong mean to you?
RH Louis Armstrong’s spirit is within me, within all of us. If you play the trumpet, you had to have dealt with Louis Armstrong at some point. When I listen to him or see him in film, it’s always inspiring to me because he has such a beautiful spirit. For me, Louis Armstrong is an example of what I was talking about. When you’re having a good time playing music, people can feel it and that’s the reason why I think his music was accepted so widely—because it’s happy music. People gave him a hard time because he was always smiling, but that’s just part of the musician’s world. Some people carry that whole cynical thing too far, people are just negative sometimes. They don’t have anything better to do than talk bad about some musicians. That’s part of that world. It reminds me of how I hear people talk about Wynton. A few musicians always have something wrong to say about him. Maybe they resent his success. As a musician, he’s very good.
ZA What about Clifford Brown?
RH Clifford was the first cat I heard in high school. My principal was a trumpeter and he was listening to Clifford Brown. One day he pulled me out of my algebra class and I just knew I had done something wrong, that I was in trouble. He said, man, sit down, and played me three of Clifford’s recordings. One was an EmArcy recording. The other was Sonny Rollins — Sonny Rollins Plus 4 which included Clifford Brown and Max Roach. After we heard them, he said, Here, these are yours. And that was the beginning of my experience listening to acoustic jazz. After Clifford, I checked out Freddie Hubbard and then I listened to Lee Morgan and Kenny Dorham and Roy Eldridge and all these other cats I didn’t even know were around. As a result of hearing Clifford Brown, my interest sparked to the point that I wanted to hear more.
ZA Who among the contemporary trumpeters are you fond of?
RH Freddie has always been my biggest influence. Freddie Hubbard! When I heard him it really just opened me up. He has a sound that reaches back to people like Clifford Brown, Bird and Coltrane, but he can still turn around and play contemporary… The first recording I heard of his was a thing called The Hub of Hubbard. There was one side where he plays one song for 20 minutes and then he plays this beautiful ballad called “The Things we Did Last Summer.” When I heard that I said, “Oh man, that’s the way I wanted to play.” I started learning all of his licks and stuff. (laughter)
He’s got a thing called “Topsy,” and a couple of recordings I really like, Double Take and Eternal Triangle with Woody Shaw. Those are really good. He was playing at his peak. As far as contemporary trumpet players now, Terence Blanchard is one of my favorites. And Wallace Roney. I just heard him at the end of my summer tour. We were in Malta and he was the first act that night. I listened to his whole set and I was like, wow, where has this cat been? He’s really playing beautifully. I think he gets a lot of flack from people because he’s very much into Miles Davis. He is, but he’s extending Miles Davis’s music. It’s not like he’s just copying it… He has a tremendous amount of virtuosity, plus he plays with feeling. He’s probably one of my favorites now, along with Terence. And Graham Hayes.
ZA What do you think your role is at your age?
RH Oh, wow. I feel that I have a responsibility to celebrate the history of this music and to also educate others who don’t really know about it… I noticed that when we were doing clinics in high schools and junior high schools, there were quite a few young people who were inspired just by the energy that was flowing between us—you know, in our unit.
ZA Do you enjoy and welcome the chance to go into schools?
RH Yes, I do. Although the government is cutting money to the arts. People think they can do without it, that it’s not important. You can see how this affects things in the reflection of violence, the clashes in society. Part of it is due to people’s lack of respect for things like the arts. You know what I mean?
ZA Definitely. I remember when you played upstairs at the Village Gate on your own gig and ran downstairs to play with a hip-hop band for Giant Steps.
RH Yeah, I used to do that. Actually, I went over to Nell’s the other night. It was very interesting. I like to crash gigs. Naaah. I’m just kidding.
ZA Is this “My Love is You?” (Abbey Lincoln’s “A Turtle Dream”)
RH Yeah. You got it?
ZA For sure.
RH I love Abbey. She’s a perfectionist.
Roy Hargrove
Trumpeter Roy Hargrove has firmly established himself as one of this generation's premier players in jazz and beyond. Hargrove was born in Waco, TX on October 16, 1969. Inspired by the gospel music he heard in church on Sundays and the R&B and funk music that played on the radio, Roy began learning the trumpet in the fourth grade. By junior high school, he was playing at an advanced level of proficiency. At 16, he was studying music at Dallas's prestigious Booker T. Washington School for the Visual and Performing Arts.
Midway through his junior year, Roy was “discovered” by Wynton Marsalis, who was conducting a jazz clinic at the school. Impressed, Marsalis invited Roy to sit in with his band at Ft. Worth's Caravan of Dreams Performing Arts Center. Subsequently, Hargrove was able to return to the venue over a period of the next three months, sitting in with Dizzy Gillespie, Herbie Hancock, Freddie Hubbard and Bobby Hutcherson. Word of Roy’s talent reached Paul Ackett, founder and Director of The North Sea Jazz Festival who arranged for him to perform there that summer. This led to a month-long European Tour.
Hargrove spent one year (1988-1989) studying at Boston's Berklee School of Music, but could more often be found in NYC jam sessions, which resulted in his transferring to New York’s New School. His first recording in NYC was with the saxophonist Bobby Watson followed shortly by a session with the up-and-comers super group, Superblue featuring Watson, Mulgrew Miller and Kenny Washington. In 1990, he released his solo debut, Diamond In The Rough, on the Novus/RCA label, for which he would record a total of four albums that document his incubational growth as a “young lion” to watch. Hargrove made his Verve Records debut in 1994 on With The Tenors Of Our Time, showcasing him with stellar sax men Joe Henderson, Stanley Turrentine, Johnny Griffin, Joshua Redman and Branford Marsalis.
Every album Roy has released on Verve has been different from the one preceding it. And the same can be said of the array of talents who have invited him to grace the stage and/or their recordings - from jazz legends Sonny Rollins and Jackie McLean to song stylists Natalie Cole, Diana Krall and Abbey Lincoln. From pop veterans Diana Ross, Steve Tyrell and Kenny Rankin to younger stars John Mayer and Rhian Benson to the crème de la crème of jazz divas: Carmen McRae and the late, great Shirley Horn. Hargrove was also commissioned by the Lincoln Jazz Center to compose the piece “The Love Suite: In Mahogany,” which was performed in 1993. He is also a superstar of the international touring scene with his quintet, RH Factor, and as a soloist.
In 2005, he was a featured guest with Slide Hampton and The Dizzy Gillespie All Star Band in bi-coastal tributes to James Moody in honor of the saxophonist's 80th birthday at Disney Hall in Los Angeles, the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, and approximately 25 other concerts around the globe. As RH Factor attests, Roy is also a product of the hip hop generation. He can be heard on a cover of rapper Method Man’s “All I Need” the album- opening track of producer Tony Joseph’s 2005 Verve project Def Jazz (instrumental interpretations of rap classics from the Def Jam label).
He has further ventured into the black pop mainstream as a collaborator with edgy soul star D'Angelo and guest appearances on albums by neo soul priestess Erykah Badu, thought-provoking rapper Common, and English acid jazz DJ/producer Gilles Peterson.
Ever stretching into more challenging and colorful ways to flex his musical chops, Hargrove has left indelible imprints in a vast array of artful settings. During his tenure on the Verve label alone, he has recorded an album with a hand- picked collection of the world’s greatest tenor saxophonists (With The Tenors Of Our Time), an album of standards with strings (Moment to Moment) and, in 2003, introduced his own hip hop/jazz collective The RH Factor with the groundbreaking CD Hard Groove (swiftly followed by the limited edition EP, Strength). Hargrove has also won Grammy® Awards for two vastly different projects. In 1997, Roy’s Cuban-based band Crisol — including piano legend Jesus “Chucho” Valdes and wonder drummer Horatio “El Negro” Hernandez, and guitar virtuoso Russell Malone - won the Best Latin Jazz Performance Grammy for the album Habana. And in 2002, Hargrove, Herbie Hancock and Michael Brecker won Best Instrumental Jazz Album, Individual or Group, for their three-way collaboration, Directions In Music.
Hargrove brought two of his musical worlds closer together with the simultaneous releases of Distractions and Nothing Serious — all new recordings by both of Roy Hargrove’s touring ensembles. Distractions features the contemporary funk/jazz sounds of The RH Factor. Nothing Serious features straight ahead jazz by The Roy Hargrove Quintet with special guest Slide Hampton on trombone. Verve A&R executive Dahlia Ambach-Caplin explains, “When it came time to work on a new album, it became clear that Roy currently has two sides to his music. Choosing one over the other would not do him justice, so we went for both, approaching them as two separate projects. The quintet recorded in March of 2005 with 15-time GRAMMY award winning engineer Al Schmitt at Capitol Studios in Los Angeles, California. The RH Factor recorded later in May at Sausalito’s The Record Plant with engineer Russell Elevado.”
“I've been doing more touring with RH Factor than my quintet lately,” Hargrove muses. “People are turning a deaf ear to jazz. Some of that is the fault of jazz musicians trying too hard to appear to be cerebral. They aren’t having fun playing the music and that's why people aren't coming to hear it live anymore.
Hargrove goes on to say, “What do we have to offer in the world of jazz today? It's about being innovative, which is cool. But innovation right now will come in music that's swinging and feels good. It's meaningless if it doesn't make you feel something.”
The bulk of the new 12-track RH Factor disc is inspired vocal ruminations. Most telling is the knee-deep funk of “A Place,” the hook of which poses the musical question, “If I Take You To A Place I love/If I Change My Style/Would You Like It?” For the man who came to prominence in the jazz realm, these lyrics reflect the on-going challenge he has bridging the gap between the two styles of music that dominate his direction. “My goal with RH Factor has always been to try to erase the lines between the mainstream and the underground - straight ahead and hip hop/R&B. You have musicians who know all the theory and harmony. Then you have the musicians who have a direct line to the masses and what they like to hear. If you can combine the two, it can be something innovative as well.”
Other vocal numbers on the RH Factor disc include the feel- good track “Crazy Race” (in which some of Hargrove’s trumpet lines recall a melody from Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Brazilian Rhyme”) and “Can’t Stop,” both uplifting messages about striving in the face of adversity. Singer/songwriter Renee’ Neufville, a former member of the female soul duo Zhane, who has been performing with RH Factor for the last two years, wrote the laidback “On The One” (about missing an old lover), and co-wrote three others with Hargrove: the aforementioned “A Place,” the chill meditation “Family” and “Hold On,” which features vocals by none other than Roy himself, Renee’ and RHF drummer Jason “JT” Thomas. Commenting on his vocal feature on this album, Hargrove quips, “I sang on “I’ll Stay” from the first RH Factor album, but this is the first time I’ve sung several bars by myself.”
The man who sang with Roy on “I’ll Stay” was neo soul pioneer D’Angelo, who returns on the new album producing, writing, singing and signifying on the fiery “Bull****.” “I guess he brought me a track he thought would be good for me to play over,” Roy states modestly. “He did the automation at the Record Plant in Sausalito. The band played along to what he programmed, he took it to L.A. to work on it some more, then sent it back to me in New York where I worked on it at Electric Lady Studios.” The song recalls old New Orleans as filtered through a funky haze of modern hip hop boom-bap. “‘D’ most definitely blessed me,” Roy concludes. The remaining RH Factor tracks are groove interludes titled “Distractions” (1-4), plus the percolating psychedelics of the instrumental “Kansas City.”
Recalling the humorous origin of the latter, Hargrove begins, “I was playing a gig there with Directions in Music featuring Michael Brecker and Herbie Hancock and I always carry my portable studio with me. I wrote that in the hotel just after walking to get some fried chicken and Blue Bell ice cream, which they don't sell in New York. I used to OD on that stuff when I was living in Texas. When I got to KC and saw that they were selling it there, I was so happy, I went back to the hotel and wrote that song on the spot!”
Bringing all this RH Factor funk to life is a unique ensemble of Roy on trumpet, two saxophonists (Keith Anderson and the legendary David “Fathead” Newman), three keyboardists (Charles McCampbell, Bobby Sparks and Neufville), one guitarist (Todd Parsnow), two drummers (Jason “JT” Thomas and Willie Jones III), and - most amazingly - two bass players (Lenny Stalworth and Reggie Washington). “My regular bass player, Reggie, couldn't make the recording sessions at first,” Hargrove shares. “So I hired Lenny, a friend from Berklee, to do the record. But when Reggie heard about Lenny - not wanting him to creep in and take his gig - he was like ‘Wait a minute!’ I thought, ‘two bassists-two drummers - let's go!’”
Going with the flow in more ways than one has long been a hallmark of Hargrove’s approach. A major influence along those lines is sax man David “Fathead” Newman, a world class player and among the most fabled members of the late great Ray Charles’ band. It was an honor for Roy to have him in the band for this special RH Factor project. “Fathead was the first musician I ever saw improvise,” Hargrove remembers. “I was about 14 when he came to Oliver Wendell Holmes Middle School in Dallas. My band director, Dean Hill, was friends with Fathead and invited him to the school. Fathead did a baritone solo over our tuba and drum sections playing (Herbie Hancock’s) “Chameleon”. He was making a whole lot of music without reading anything and I became very fascinated with that. It put me on the road to learning how to improvise.”
Where Roy describes the RH Factor disc Distractions as “coming more from my personal archives,” Nothing Serious featuring his jazz quintet is a completely different animal...and not just stylistically. “It's important with a straight ahead group for everyone to contribute,” Hargrove explains. “Opening things up compositionally keeps the program well-rounded. And even when they're playing my tunes, everybody’s sound shapes the song.” A key to this cohesiveness can be found in the title of the quintet disc’s fourth track: “Camaraderie.” “That tune is a vehicle for the band to play in a more avant garde way yet still keep it ‘in,’” Hargrove states. Breaking it down even further, he elaborates, “The title suggests togetherness, and a good group has to be very cohesive...everybody knowing where everyone else is breathing. That way if you decide to take the music ‘out,’ whatever happens remains musical. The song is organized chaos, all coming together within a minor blues.” “Camaraderie” also has the distinction of being inspired by the late trumpet great, Lester Bowie, the forward thinking co-founder of the acclaimed Art Ensemble of Chicago. Roy recalls their meeting. “I was playing a jam session one night in Italy and Lester was there listening. I was playing all my bebop. He came up to me and said, ‘Man, take it out!’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘Stop playing all that pretty stuff. Play something ugly!’ So I started playing less inside...screamin'...makin’ a lot of noise. Lester lit up like, ‘Yeah!’ It was a lesson for me.”
The 8-song Roy Hargrove Quintet disc Nothing Serious moves from Roy’s breathtaking and sensual flugelhorn ballad “Trust” and the enveloping warmth of “The Gift” to a fierce waltz time swinger “Salima’s Dance” (from the pen of pianist Ronnie Matthews), a relentlessly winding study in melody from bassist D’Wayne Burno evocatively titled “Devil Eyes,” and a whirl through the magical changes of Branislau Kaper’s “Invitation,” the set’s sole jazz standard. Rounding out the stellar quintet are alto saxophonist Justin Robinson (who also plays some lovely flute on “Trust”) and drummer Willie Jones III, the latter of whom has been playing in Hargrove’s groups for eight years. As a whole, this incarnation of the Roy Hargrove Quintet has been playing together for four years, the tightness of which is evident throughout the disc. The band perfected most of the material on the road before the recording.
One glowing exception is the lushly swingin’ “A Day in Vienna,” contributed by special guest Slide Hampton, a living giant of jazz. Roy cut his teeth with Hampton’s band in a trumpet section that included greats Jon Faddis and Claudio Roditi (documented on the Telarc Records CD Dedicated to Diz, a Slide Hampton & The Jazz Masters set from `93 recorded live at the Village Vanguard). “Slide has been a big part of my education. I can't tell you know much playing charts from the original Dizzy Big Band book with that group helped me. The way that Slide arranges and voices, he knows how to take a small group of horns and make it sound like an orchestra.” Listen to Roy’s own “Trust” to hear that he learned Slide’s lessons well.
Touching back on the statement Roy made at the outset about the state of jazz and jazz audiences today, the music world would be hard pressed to find another ambassador capable of traversing the worlds of straight ahead swingin’ and the funky underground better than Brother Hargrove. The RH Factor’s Distractions and The Roy Hargrove Quintet’s Nothing Serious stand as the actual proof.
~ 2 0 0 8 ~
Virtuoso US trumpeter Roy Hargrove returns with his latest album, Earfood, a richly hued acoustic jazz suite that effortlessly brings together his multi- faceted musical vision — of deep grooves, memorable tunes and superb ensemble playing and solos. Thus Earfood presents a richly coloured snapshot of an artist reaching his prime, a young player once dubbed ubiquitously as the ‘Young Lion’, is now head of The Jazz Pride. He’s nothing left to prove as his current trumpet sound reveals in his total command of tone that’s inflected with subtle emotions and, when needed, pure hard bop power. Yet as he reveals in his liner notes, he now just wants to play tuneful, melodic music, that reaches out to an audience “wherever they are coming from.”
Hargrove explains his simple inspirations behind this great new addition to his illustrious catalogue of work: “This recording was made to bring sonic pleasure to the listener. It is my working quintet, playing a repertoire consisting of songs we play live while on tour, mixed in with a few new originals. Simple melodies moving around luscious chords, allow us to capture the attention, and give a feeling of transcendence. The cohesive sound of the group is a result of our constant touring, and getting to know one another, on and off of the bandstand. These are key elements in developing a tight sound, and in less time wasted in the studio. My goal in this project is to have a recording that is steeped in tradition and sophistication, while maintaining a sense of melodic simplicity.”
The following is an excerpt from C. Michael Bailey's article (AAJ 8/10/08):
Trumpeter Roy Hargrove emerged into jazz consciousness as one of the “young lions” who beamed into the late 1980s and early 1990s. Other notable contemporary trumpeters include Terence Blanchard, Nicholas Payton, Kermit Ruffins, and Wallace Roney. All are associated with different genre traditions, Hargrove's being most closely associated with Lee Morgan.
Hargrove's association with Morgan's style nevertheless has not prevented the young trumpeter from approaching music from a broad perspective. Hargrove and his Latin- Cuban band, Crisol, won a Grammy Award in 1998 for Habana (Verve, 1997). Hargrove participated in pianist Herbie Hancock's Directions in Music (Verve, 2002), earning a second Grammy Award.
Hargrove does not limit himself to “jazz,” however. He has also been active in the neo-electric-funk-soul arena with his band RH-Factor, releasing Distractions (Verve, 2006). If Roy Hargrove has been approaching his time to shine, it is here now.
Hargrove returns to his roots with Earfood (Emarcy, 2008). [The liner notes quote Hargrove] “My goal in this project is to have a recording that is steeped in tradition and sophistication, while maintaining a sense of melodic simplicity.” One would suspect that many of Hargrove's generation desire the same projects. That said, Hargrove enjoys complete success in achieving his goal with Earfood.
As a trumpeter, composer, and an arranger, Roy Hargrove has been a mainstay of the contemporary music scene in a variety of formats for nearly two decades. Nevertheless, his big band experience has been limited mostly to his appearances with the Dizzy Gillespie All-Star Big Band, with which he has most ably proved himself an heir to the late trumpet legend's mantle. Hargrove has been steadily accumulating big band experience in his own right since 1995, however, and Emergence is therefore most aptly titled, for it represents Hargrove's full-fledged emergence into the large ensemble idiom.
Source: Kandi Le Britain Webster, Editor
1989, wee hours into the last set at Bradley’s; leading a trio, John Hicks trills the high end of the ivories; they chime buoyant over a capacious roll of chords. In the low light, acoustic colors funnel front to back. It’s the traditional moment for a rookie to make an entrance under Billie Holiday’s decoupaged gaze. Sure enough, a young cat rolls in. Born in Waco, Texas, October 16, 1969; a musical kid, on a trumpet since 11, noteworthy at 16 when Wynton Marsalis heard him at a Dallas high school workshop. This night his instrument’s pocked by a few dimples and stripped of its lacquer, which darkens its porous sound. Doorman Terry shoos him in, then Hicks gives that look. The trumpeter steps into the curve of the grand, closes his eyes and begins playing the horn held straight out recital style. Slowly at first, the lines ascend to a crystalline state, then pop into rapid-fire quarter notes that accelerate to full amplitude. The sonic transport—”unmediated, unmitigated, and immediate” as in Bell’s Theorem—undeniably moves the house. As soon as his bopped notes pop like bubbles, John Hicks kicks into his solo and the trio takes it out. In his short brim and jacket-too-big, the young trumpeter saddles up to his spot to set off a finale of fireworks. Roy Hargrove just down from the Berklee School of Music, just up from Texas, just on his way.
Reminiscing as if it’d been 50 instead of five years ago, Roy Hargrove muses, “Yeah, that was my style back then. I used to love wearing jackets with the sleeves coming down right to here.” The edge of his hand hacks at an imaginary demarcation just above his knuckles. Now an all-pro and usually on the road, Hargrove and his lyric silver tone add up to gold for The Roy Hargrove Quintet with the Tenors of Our Time. On the Billboard charts find Family. With co-Verve mates pianist Stephen Scott and bassman Christian McBride (whose own hit doesn’t let on he can recite Muhammad Ali and do James Brown), Roy leads the threesome in a true test of their chops on Parker’s Mood—a re-vision of tunes once re-rhythmed by Bird, the great altoist Charlie Parker.
Roy also appears as most favored guest on a host of CD’s for the cats he digs. As Dave Brubeck discovered, and quotes in the liner notes to the all-star TELARC CD, Young Lions & Old Tigers, Roy’s trumpet “sings the ballad like a human voice.”
Under a Sonny Rollins poster in Roy Hargrove’s Greenwich Village digs, cool with a view and correct with health club and roof pool up the elevator, we touch upon the recent passing of his father, the past, present and futures.
Zoë Anglesey Sorry to be intervening on your private space right now. Before we start, I want to say that lots of people send their condolences…
Roy Hargrove That’s alright. There’s a lot of people intervening on my space as a result of this album.
ZA I hear Tenors of Our Time was doing well.
RH It’s doing pretty good.
ZA It sold a hundred thousand copies?
RH I think it went over that.
ZA So what about Family?
RH It just came out. But all the reports that I’ve gotten have been really positive.
ZA The first part of your trilogy is dedicated to your father. When did you write that?
RH While I was on tour with the band this spring. I had been putting it together for months, I didn’t really decide it was going to be a trilogy until after I wrote the part for my dad. I wrote the blues in D- flat for my little brother. After that I just added the tune for my mother, making the trilogy.
ZA But what made you write “Roy Allan”?
RH Well, I remember sitting at the piano one day, and just messing around with some chords… It was very simple, nothing complicated, just something you could remember. The bass line was the strongest part of the tune. My father had a really good ear for music, most of the parts that he sang were bass parts. Back in high school he was playing sousaphone and he sang baritone or bass in the choir.
ZA What was his response when he heard it?
RH I never got a chance to talk to him about it or hear his feedback. By the time he got the album, I was away. When I found out that he had passed, I was in Finland. But from everything my relatives told me, he liked it.
ZA And your brother, Brian?
RH Brian is eleven…he’s a scholar, nothing like what I was. (laughter) I hated homework and all that stuff but he just loves it.
ZA So do you talk to him about what you’re doing?
RH Yeah, we have some interesting conversations. He’s young, but he’s awfully intelligent for his age, very ahead of himself. He surprises me with some of the things he says, I’m like, what? When we were at my father’s funeral, he was so calm…everyone was crying, and he just sat there—he knew my father was in a better place. I played a little bit from “Roy Allan” and later he says, “You know, man, you were playing good.” I was like, wow. Thanks!
ZA What’s important to you, as a professional musician?
RH That I’m respected by my peers, but also by my elders, because for me, it’s very important to establish a rapport with musicians who have been out here for a long time. Those are the cats that I can learn the most from. That’s why on every recording that I make, I have had a guest artist who is a veteran in jazz. We can all learn something from that exchange. And I want people to know that my music has a lot to do with emotion. I want people to really feel the expression when we perform or record because we are giving a lot of that.
ZA Could you talk a little about the Brubeck session?
RH Dave wrote a tune for me and it’s called “Roy Hargrove.” It ended up being the first cut on the album. It’s kind of a ballad thing, you know with a rubato intro. I had a good time doing that… He seemed to be in very good spirits.ZA Do you look at this date as being an honor or another gig?
RH Well, I don’t look at it as being another gig. Whenever I get an opportunity to record with veterans like that, with that caliber of musicianship, it’s always an honor.
ZA Do you mind guesting or the role of sideman?
RH No, I don’t. Playing as a sideman is much different from when you’re a leader. If it’s a date where the leader has his own compositions, you have to understand what he really meant in the writing. You have to immerse yourself in being a follower. In my case, I always humble myself and try to do the best I can.
ZA I remember, in ‘89 being in Bradley’s when I first heard you.
RH I was probably still going to Berklee at that time.
ZA When did you finally get here?
RH ’90. I came in the winter. It was snowing when we drove up here. I stayed at this little apartment on Charlton Street.
ZA Is that when you hooked up with John Hicks?
RH Yeah. I was doing a lot of work with John, I played a bunch of times with him at Bradley’s, and I actually went into the Vanguard with his quintet, that was four or five years ago.
ZA You seem to pay him his due on your CDs by playing his tunes.
RH Yeah, I think we’re related in a way! (laughter) He taught me so much about composition… The way he writes tunes is so beautiful and melodic.
ZA Did you meet your manager, Larry Clothier, when Wynton showed up at your high school in Texas?
RH Yeah, he was there.
ZA Has Larry ever filled you in on stories about Sarah Vaughan that make you more endeared to her?
RH I don’t know if it’s possible to be any more endeared to her than I already am—I mean, I love Sarah Vaughan. I’ve always loved her music, ever since the first time I heard the EmArcy recordings with Clifford Brown. That was my first experience with Sarah. Larry’s always telling stories about musicians, and when he talks about Sarah, he’s always praising her. Larry is a closet singer himself. I don’t know if you knew that. He knows all the lyrics to just about any tune you can name. If I want to learn a tune, I say, “Hey, man, what’s the words to this?” Yeah. He worked with Sarah, and Carmen, he was Carmen’s manager until she cut out.
ZA You’ve been fortunate because the people you’ve hooked up with are still with you. What are the advantages to that?
RH Larry knows quite a few jazz promoters in Europe and Japan; they’ve had long relationships with him over the years because he’s worked with people like Dizzy, Sarah and Carmen. It’s true, that gives me a foot in the door. Larry hooked me up with my very first tour of Europe five years ago this summer.
ZA And from then on…
RH It’s been non-stop. (laughter)
ZA I think that’s been an advantage. You’ve been on the road, led a working band—many musicians only dream about that. It’s partly due to your talent and the way you stage your music but it’s also who’s behind you.
RH Well, my career’s been put together very strategically…. I went out for a little while as a sideman playing with the older cats. This built up a reputation for me, in Europe mostly, so when it came time for me to put together my own band, they knew who I was. “Okay, fine, bring him.” We put together that group three years ago. It was me, Antonio Hart, Rodney Whitaker, Greg Hutchinson and Marc Cary. Since then I’ve gone through many changes.
ZA Word is out that you really work bands and your tour schedule causes burn out.
RH Me?
ZA I don’t know… (laughter)
RH Me, personally?
ZA Maybe not you personally, but I’ve heard some of your band members were looking for more time off.
RH Yeah, well, we were out there hittin’ it. I don’t know what to tell you. When we were out there, we were goin’ from one performance to another. I’m still goin’. Those cats.., like Rodney [Whitaker], he’s got a family at home, Greg [Hutchinson] is starting a family. They really wanted to be home a little bit more than I was able to afford. I just got a new band, Ruben Rogers on bass and Karriem Riggins on drums, and they’re both really young. Ruben’s still a student at Berklee and Karriem is like 19. He’s still living at home in Detroit with his folks. They’re a lot more eager to work, because they’re just getting started.
ZA And burnout with you, you’re not tired?
RH (laughter) Nooo.
ZA It seems as though you’re singing more often when you perform.
RH I used to like to sing a lot in high school, I had a little funk band, and we played mostly top 40 but we had some of our own stuff. I never took singing seriously, I just did it for fun, or as a novelty. Even now, I might sing one tune to break the monotony. People are very surprised to hear that. But I’m inspired by cats like Dizzy Gillespie, Roy Eldridge, and Louie Armstrong—all the trumpet players who sang. Sometimes people make fun of me for singing. In the end, people wouldn’t be making fun if they didn’t like it. I sing for fun, because I like to have a good time on the bandstand. If we’re enjoying ourselves, then the people have to be enjoying themselves too.
ZA Is that important to you? To enjoy yourself?
RH Yeah. I don’t like negative vibes. A lot of times I go to see cats play, and they’re so serious: “I am a jazz musician. I am super-cool and super-hip.” I mean, that’s cool, but it’s boring. You know what I mean? I try to enjoy myself on the bandstand because if I’m not, the people aren’t. One of the main things about music is to uplift the people.
Source: Kandi Le Britain Webster, Editor
Roy Hargrove
Interviewed by Zoë Anglesey
Roy Hargrove. Photo by Michael Levine,
courtesy of Verve Records.
1989, wee hours into the last set at Bradley’s; leading a trio, John Hicks trills the high end of the ivories; they chime buoyant over a capacious roll of chords. In the low light, acoustic colors funnel front to back. It’s the traditional moment for a rookie to make an entrance under Billie Holiday’s decoupaged gaze. Sure enough, a young cat rolls in. Born in Waco, Texas, October 16, 1969; a musical kid, on a trumpet since 11, noteworthy at 16 when Wynton Marsalis heard him at a Dallas high school workshop. This night his instrument’s pocked by a few dimples and stripped of its lacquer, which darkens its porous sound. Doorman Terry shoos him in, then Hicks gives that look. The trumpeter steps into the curve of the grand, closes his eyes and begins playing the horn held straight out recital style. Slowly at first, the lines ascend to a crystalline state, then pop into rapid-fire quarter notes that accelerate to full amplitude. The sonic transport—”unmediated, unmitigated, and immediate” as in Bell’s Theorem—undeniably moves the house. As soon as his bopped notes pop like bubbles, John Hicks kicks into his solo and the trio takes it out. In his short brim and jacket-too-big, the young trumpeter saddles up to his spot to set off a finale of fireworks. Roy Hargrove just down from the Berklee School of Music, just up from Texas, just on his way.
Reminiscing as if it’d been 50 instead of five years ago, Roy Hargrove muses, “Yeah, that was my style back then. I used to love wearing jackets with the sleeves coming down right to here.” The edge of his hand hacks at an imaginary demarcation just above his knuckles. Now an all-pro and usually on the road, Hargrove and his lyric silver tone add up to gold for The Roy Hargrove Quintet with the Tenors of Our Time. On the Billboard charts find Family. With co-Verve mates pianist Stephen Scott and bassman Christian McBride (whose own hit doesn’t let on he can recite Muhammad Ali and do James Brown), Roy leads the threesome in a true test of their chops on Parker’s Mood—a re-vision of tunes once re-rhythmed by Bird, the great altoist Charlie Parker.
Roy also appears as most favored guest on a host of CD’s for the cats he digs. As Dave Brubeck discovered, and quotes in the liner notes to the all-star TELARC CD, Young Lions & Old Tigers, Roy’s trumpet “sings the ballad like a human voice.”
Under a Sonny Rollins poster in Roy Hargrove’s Greenwich Village digs, cool with a view and correct with health club and roof pool up the elevator, we touch upon the recent passing of his father, the past, present and futures.
Zoë Anglesey Sorry to be intervening on your private space right now. Before we start, I want to say that lots of people send their condolences…
Roy Hargrove That’s alright. There’s a lot of people intervening on my space as a result of this album.
ZA I hear Tenors of Our Time was doing well.
RH It’s doing pretty good.
ZA It sold a hundred thousand copies?
RH I think it went over that.
ZA So what about Family?
RH It just came out. But all the reports that I’ve gotten have been really positive.
ZA The first part of your trilogy is dedicated to your father. When did you write that?
RH While I was on tour with the band this spring. I had been putting it together for months, I didn’t really decide it was going to be a trilogy until after I wrote the part for my dad. I wrote the blues in D- flat for my little brother. After that I just added the tune for my mother, making the trilogy.
ZA But what made you write “Roy Allan”?
RH Well, I remember sitting at the piano one day, and just messing around with some chords… It was very simple, nothing complicated, just something you could remember. The bass line was the strongest part of the tune. My father had a really good ear for music, most of the parts that he sang were bass parts. Back in high school he was playing sousaphone and he sang baritone or bass in the choir.
ZA What was his response when he heard it?
RH I never got a chance to talk to him about it or hear his feedback. By the time he got the album, I was away. When I found out that he had passed, I was in Finland. But from everything my relatives told me, he liked it.
ZA And your brother, Brian?
RH Brian is eleven…he’s a scholar, nothing like what I was. (laughter) I hated homework and all that stuff but he just loves it.
ZA So do you talk to him about what you’re doing?
RH Yeah, we have some interesting conversations. He’s young, but he’s awfully intelligent for his age, very ahead of himself. He surprises me with some of the things he says, I’m like, what? When we were at my father’s funeral, he was so calm…everyone was crying, and he just sat there—he knew my father was in a better place. I played a little bit from “Roy Allan” and later he says, “You know, man, you were playing good.” I was like, wow. Thanks!
ZA What’s important to you, as a professional musician?
RH That I’m respected by my peers, but also by my elders, because for me, it’s very important to establish a rapport with musicians who have been out here for a long time. Those are the cats that I can learn the most from. That’s why on every recording that I make, I have had a guest artist who is a veteran in jazz. We can all learn something from that exchange. And I want people to know that my music has a lot to do with emotion. I want people to really feel the expression when we perform or record because we are giving a lot of that.
ZA Could you talk a little about the Brubeck session?
RH Dave wrote a tune for me and it’s called “Roy Hargrove.” It ended up being the first cut on the album. It’s kind of a ballad thing, you know with a rubato intro. I had a good time doing that… He seemed to be in very good spirits.ZA Do you look at this date as being an honor or another gig?
RH Well, I don’t look at it as being another gig. Whenever I get an opportunity to record with veterans like that, with that caliber of musicianship, it’s always an honor.
ZA Do you mind guesting or the role of sideman?
RH No, I don’t. Playing as a sideman is much different from when you’re a leader. If it’s a date where the leader has his own compositions, you have to understand what he really meant in the writing. You have to immerse yourself in being a follower. In my case, I always humble myself and try to do the best I can.
ZA I remember, in ‘89 being in Bradley’s when I first heard you.
RH I was probably still going to Berklee at that time.
ZA When did you finally get here?
RH ’90. I came in the winter. It was snowing when we drove up here. I stayed at this little apartment on Charlton Street.
ZA Is that when you hooked up with John Hicks?
RH Yeah. I was doing a lot of work with John, I played a bunch of times with him at Bradley’s, and I actually went into the Vanguard with his quintet, that was four or five years ago.
ZA You seem to pay him his due on your CDs by playing his tunes.
RH Yeah, I think we’re related in a way! (laughter) He taught me so much about composition… The way he writes tunes is so beautiful and melodic.
ZA Did you meet your manager, Larry Clothier, when Wynton showed up at your high school in Texas?
RH Yeah, he was there.
ZA Has Larry ever filled you in on stories about Sarah Vaughan that make you more endeared to her?
RH I don’t know if it’s possible to be any more endeared to her than I already am—I mean, I love Sarah Vaughan. I’ve always loved her music, ever since the first time I heard the EmArcy recordings with Clifford Brown. That was my first experience with Sarah. Larry’s always telling stories about musicians, and when he talks about Sarah, he’s always praising her. Larry is a closet singer himself. I don’t know if you knew that. He knows all the lyrics to just about any tune you can name. If I want to learn a tune, I say, “Hey, man, what’s the words to this?” Yeah. He worked with Sarah, and Carmen, he was Carmen’s manager until she cut out.
ZA You’ve been fortunate because the people you’ve hooked up with are still with you. What are the advantages to that?
RH Larry knows quite a few jazz promoters in Europe and Japan; they’ve had long relationships with him over the years because he’s worked with people like Dizzy, Sarah and Carmen. It’s true, that gives me a foot in the door. Larry hooked me up with my very first tour of Europe five years ago this summer.
ZA And from then on…
RH It’s been non-stop. (laughter)
ZA I think that’s been an advantage. You’ve been on the road, led a working band—many musicians only dream about that. It’s partly due to your talent and the way you stage your music but it’s also who’s behind you.
RH Well, my career’s been put together very strategically…. I went out for a little while as a sideman playing with the older cats. This built up a reputation for me, in Europe mostly, so when it came time for me to put together my own band, they knew who I was. “Okay, fine, bring him.” We put together that group three years ago. It was me, Antonio Hart, Rodney Whitaker, Greg Hutchinson and Marc Cary. Since then I’ve gone through many changes.
ZA Word is out that you really work bands and your tour schedule causes burn out.
RH Me?
ZA I don’t know… (laughter)
RH Me, personally?
ZA Maybe not you personally, but I’ve heard some of your band members were looking for more time off.
RH Yeah, well, we were out there hittin’ it. I don’t know what to tell you. When we were out there, we were goin’ from one performance to another. I’m still goin’. Those cats.., like Rodney [Whitaker], he’s got a family at home, Greg [Hutchinson] is starting a family. They really wanted to be home a little bit more than I was able to afford. I just got a new band, Ruben Rogers on bass and Karriem Riggins on drums, and they’re both really young. Ruben’s still a student at Berklee and Karriem is like 19. He’s still living at home in Detroit with his folks. They’re a lot more eager to work, because they’re just getting started.
ZA And burnout with you, you’re not tired?
RH (laughter) Nooo.
ZA It seems as though you’re singing more often when you perform.
RH I used to like to sing a lot in high school, I had a little funk band, and we played mostly top 40 but we had some of our own stuff. I never took singing seriously, I just did it for fun, or as a novelty. Even now, I might sing one tune to break the monotony. People are very surprised to hear that. But I’m inspired by cats like Dizzy Gillespie, Roy Eldridge, and Louie Armstrong—all the trumpet players who sang. Sometimes people make fun of me for singing. In the end, people wouldn’t be making fun if they didn’t like it. I sing for fun, because I like to have a good time on the bandstand. If we’re enjoying ourselves, then the people have to be enjoying themselves too.
ZA Is that important to you? To enjoy yourself?
RH Yeah. I don’t like negative vibes. A lot of times I go to see cats play, and they’re so serious: “I am a jazz musician. I am super-cool and super-hip.” I mean, that’s cool, but it’s boring. You know what I mean? I try to enjoy myself on the bandstand because if I’m not, the people aren’t. One of the main things about music is to uplift the people.
Photo by Tanayi Seabrook,
courtesy of the Village Vanguard © 1995
ZA Do you know the story of Duke Ellington and how he started out—selling concert posters, booking bands, and then he’d do gigs at fancy supper clubs. He had a whole sideline of businesses while he was launching his own career as a bandleader. Later he copyrighted his music, which paid off because that money kept his band on the road even in the hard times. I was wondering, how much are you into the business?
RH I’m very involved. Just last year I became incorporated, and now I have a business called Hardgroove Enterprises. We’ve opened a gallery in my rehearsal space. One of the things that we’re trying to cultivate is something that’s a little bit outside the music and that’s with jazz art and photography. Currently there’s a show going on. Hopefully, in the future we’ll get some more of that along with some recitals and small concerts.
ZA Roy, why are you supporting a gallery?
RH I’m very intrigued by art and photography. Eventually, it’s going to make a profit for the business. That definitely makes me supportive of it. My vision involves more of the musical side the space—maybe doing some recording.
ZA You say you’re intrigued with art and photography. How did that develop?
RH I’ve always liked to look at jazz photographs, at pictures of the musicians from the past. When I look at paintings, what I really enjoy the most is the detail. Sometimes they can really be abstract but you can get a message.
ZA Do you have any ideas that you want to see come to fruition at the jazz Gallery?
RH Eventually I hope to have a production company so that we can send other artists out on the road in their own groups, but they’ll be affiliated with Hardgroove Enterprises. It’s very important to be aware of what is going on in the world of the business of music because there’s so many people out there who will take you for a ride, and you have to keep your eyes open.
ZA There’s a lot of people who live off music, and a lot of musicians who don’t benefit from the music they’ve created. I can’t figure it out.
RH It’s pretty sad. Once, I went into an in-store in Detroit, and the cat from my former label didn’t even know who I was. He came up to me and asked me if I knew where Roy was, and I was like, “You’re looking at him!” That was the kind of thing I was going through. Now I’m with PolyGram Verve, which is probably one of the best jazz labels in the country. The people who are on staff are very knowledgeable about the music. My product manager, and a lot of the people in the publicity department were at the Vanguard every night that I was there. And that really shows support.
ZA Also respect. What videos have you done?
RH When we were at the Vanguard, that became a video, it’s been sold to BET [Black Entertainment Television].
ZA Why don’t we see more jazz videos?
RH I couldn’t tell you. Financially, there aren’t a lot of people who will get behind a jazz artist to make a video. There’s a new artist, a cat by the name of D’Angelo, you ever run into him? Well anyway, he’s bad, really bad. You never heard of him? You got to. If he comes out with a record and makes trillions of dollars, now that record company is going to get their money back, so they’re willing to finance a video. They’re really taking a chance on a jazz artist. The world of jazz is so small…
ZA Parker’s Mood came out just in time for Charlie Parker’s birthday. It’s beautiful. He’s really admired for what he did with those tunes. I like what you did with them.
RH The conditions in which we recorded that CD were really nice. It felt like we were playing in a living room with a couch and a piano only it was soundproof. We were very comfortable. We had to learn those tunes, which was pretty hard.
ZA Everyone says that about Charlie Parker. Roy, are you interested in writing film scores?
RH Oh yeah, I’m really into doing that. I write a lot, I like writing. I think that to know yourself, you have to write. I watch movies all the time—that’s my other hobby, going to the movies. I could sit up and watch HBO all day. So I’m ready to do that.
ZA Do you have any complaints, gripes…something you wish you could change about the music industry, about the jazz life, or do you accept it pretty much?
RH Well, you have to accept it, but sometimes I wish that promoters and club owners would respect artists just a little more and stop treating us like second class citizens. Not everyone is like that, but in some cases it’s true and it’s not right, you know? We deserve better than that because we’re out here working hard to get from one gig to the next, and when you get there people treat you shabbily, it’s not really cool. That hasn’t happened to me a lot, but it has happened a couple of times and when it does, it’s very frustrating. The only thing that you can do is deal with it and go on.
ZA When you go onstage to face the public, whoever’s acting foul, stays behind the scenes.
RH Yeah, they’re behind alright. I’m like, what instrument do you play? (laughter) That’s one of the things that I would change. Just that. The other thing is that here in the United States, I think there should be more jazz venues. There are lots of musicians coming onto the scene, and yet there aren’t that many places for us to work. Overall, I don’t have many complaints. I think that it’s a blessing to he able to do what we’re doing now—for us to be playing music we love and get paid doing it.
ZA When you’re on the road, you’re always meeting great musicians. Have there been any memorable encounters lately?
RH One that comes to mind right this very moment was being on stage with Doc Cheatham and Harry “Sweets” Edison at Wolf Trap for a tribute to Louis Armstrong. That had a great effect on me because Doc Cheatham is 90 years old, and he’s still playing strong, stronger than some young guys I know who are playing trumpet. He has such a centered sound, a big sound. And he’s playing all this authentic music from the Louis Armstrong era. And you hear that, and it makes you think, I want to be like that. I want to be playing when I’m 90-something years old—strong like that. And even Sweets, he’s still got all that fire and energy that he’s had for years. So that’s inspiring. Another thing that comes to mind is the Sonny Rollins concert a couple of years ago at Carnegie Hall. That was one of the highlights of my career. I’ll always remember it. Sonny, he’s so unpredictable. When he stumps off a tune, you don’t know what you’re going to do from there. I just watched him. We started trading and got into some really exciting exchanges there.
ZA He’s 65, but from what you’re saying his age is a blessing too.
RH Music is like wine—it gets better as you get older,
ZA Are you getting better?
RH Yeah!
ZA So what’s in the can? I heard you recorded for days last trip to the studio.
RH We recorded 45 tunes. There’s nothing that’s not usable.
ZA How much writing did you do?
RH Umm, I wrote about seven or eight tunes. Most of my tunes went on Family, but there are a couple of others.
ZA When we hear Louis Armstrong or see a film of him performing, he was such a strong performer, a virtuoso. What does Louis Armstrong mean to you?
RH Louis Armstrong’s spirit is within me, within all of us. If you play the trumpet, you had to have dealt with Louis Armstrong at some point. When I listen to him or see him in film, it’s always inspiring to me because he has such a beautiful spirit. For me, Louis Armstrong is an example of what I was talking about. When you’re having a good time playing music, people can feel it and that’s the reason why I think his music was accepted so widely—because it’s happy music. People gave him a hard time because he was always smiling, but that’s just part of the musician’s world. Some people carry that whole cynical thing too far, people are just negative sometimes. They don’t have anything better to do than talk bad about some musicians. That’s part of that world. It reminds me of how I hear people talk about Wynton. A few musicians always have something wrong to say about him. Maybe they resent his success. As a musician, he’s very good.
ZA What about Clifford Brown?
RH Clifford was the first cat I heard in high school. My principal was a trumpeter and he was listening to Clifford Brown. One day he pulled me out of my algebra class and I just knew I had done something wrong, that I was in trouble. He said, man, sit down, and played me three of Clifford’s recordings. One was an EmArcy recording. The other was Sonny Rollins — Sonny Rollins Plus 4 which included Clifford Brown and Max Roach. After we heard them, he said, Here, these are yours. And that was the beginning of my experience listening to acoustic jazz. After Clifford, I checked out Freddie Hubbard and then I listened to Lee Morgan and Kenny Dorham and Roy Eldridge and all these other cats I didn’t even know were around. As a result of hearing Clifford Brown, my interest sparked to the point that I wanted to hear more.
ZA Who among the contemporary trumpeters are you fond of?
RH Freddie has always been my biggest influence. Freddie Hubbard! When I heard him it really just opened me up. He has a sound that reaches back to people like Clifford Brown, Bird and Coltrane, but he can still turn around and play contemporary… The first recording I heard of his was a thing called The Hub of Hubbard. There was one side where he plays one song for 20 minutes and then he plays this beautiful ballad called “The Things we Did Last Summer.” When I heard that I said, “Oh man, that’s the way I wanted to play.” I started learning all of his licks and stuff. (laughter)
He’s got a thing called “Topsy,” and a couple of recordings I really like, Double Take and Eternal Triangle with Woody Shaw. Those are really good. He was playing at his peak. As far as contemporary trumpet players now, Terence Blanchard is one of my favorites. And Wallace Roney. I just heard him at the end of my summer tour. We were in Malta and he was the first act that night. I listened to his whole set and I was like, wow, where has this cat been? He’s really playing beautifully. I think he gets a lot of flack from people because he’s very much into Miles Davis. He is, but he’s extending Miles Davis’s music. It’s not like he’s just copying it… He has a tremendous amount of virtuosity, plus he plays with feeling. He’s probably one of my favorites now, along with Terence. And Graham Hayes.
ZA What do you think your role is at your age?
RH Oh, wow. I feel that I have a responsibility to celebrate the history of this music and to also educate others who don’t really know about it… I noticed that when we were doing clinics in high schools and junior high schools, there were quite a few young people who were inspired just by the energy that was flowing between us—you know, in our unit.
ZA Do you enjoy and welcome the chance to go into schools?
RH Yes, I do. Although the government is cutting money to the arts. People think they can do without it, that it’s not important. You can see how this affects things in the reflection of violence, the clashes in society. Part of it is due to people’s lack of respect for things like the arts. You know what I mean?
ZA Definitely. I remember when you played upstairs at the Village Gate on your own gig and ran downstairs to play with a hip-hop band for Giant Steps.
RH Yeah, I used to do that. Actually, I went over to Nell’s the other night. It was very interesting. I like to crash gigs. Naaah. I’m just kidding.
ZA Is this “My Love is You?” (Abbey Lincoln’s “A Turtle Dream”)
RH Yeah. You got it?
ZA For sure.
RH I love Abbey. She’s a perfectionist.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/03/obituaries/roy-hargrove-dead-jazz-trumpeter.html
Roy Hargrove, Trumpeter Who Gave Jazz a Jolt of Youth, Dies at 49
by
New York Times
CreditMylan Cannon/The New York Times
Roy Hargrove, a virtuoso trumpeter who became a symbol of jazz’s youthful renewal in the early 1990s, and then established himself as one of the most respected musicians of his generation, died on Friday in Manhattan. He was 49.
His death, at Mount Sinai Hospital, was caused by cardiac arrest brought on by kidney disease, according to his manager, Larry Clothier. He said Mr. Hargrove had been on dialysis for 13 years.
Beginning in his high school years Mr. Hargrove expressed a deep affinity for jazz’s classic lexicon and the creative flexibility to place it in a fresh context. He would take the stock phrases of blues and jazz and reinvigorate them while reminding listeners of the long tradition whence he came.
“He rarely sounds as if he stepped out of a time machine,” the critic Nate Chinen wrote in 2008, reviewing Mr. Hargrove’s album “Earfood”for The New York Times. “At brisk tempos he summons a terrific clarity and tension, leaning against the current of his rhythm section. At a slower crawl, playing fluegelhorn, he gives each melody the equivalent of a spa treatment."
In the late 1990s, already established as a jazz star, Mr. Hargrove became affiliated with the Soulquarians, a loose confederation of musicians from the worlds of hip-hop and neo-soul that included Questlove, Erykah Badu, Common and D’Angelo. For several years the collective convened semi-regularly at Electric Lady Studios in Manhattan, recording albums now seen as classics. Mr. Hargrove’s sly horn overdubs can be heard, guttering like a low flame, on records like “Voodoo,” by D’Angelo, and “Mama’s Gun,” by Ms. Badu.
“He is literally the one-man horn section I hear in my head when I think about music,” Questlove wrote on Instagram after Mr. Hargrove’s death.
CreditChang W. Lee/The New York Times
Even as he explored an ever-expanding musical terrain, Mr. Hargrove did not lose sight of jazz traditions. “To get a thorough knowledge of anything you have to go to its history,” he told the writer Tom Piazza in 1990 for an article about young jazz musicians in The New York Times Magazine. “I’m just trying to study the history, learn it, understand it, so that maybe I’ll be able to develop something that hasn’t been done yet.”
In 1997 he recorded the album “Habana,” an electrified, rumba-inflected parley between American and Cuban musicians united under the band name Crisol. The album, featuring Hargrove originals and compositions by jazz musicians past and present, earned him his first of two Grammy Awards.
His second was for the 2002 album “Directions in Music,” a live recording on which he was a co-leader with the pianist Herbie Hancock and the tenor saxophonist Michael Brecker. That album became a favorite of jazz devotees and music students trying to envision a future for acoustic-jazz innovation.
In the 2000s, Mr. Hargrove released three records with RH Factor, a large ensemble that built a style of its own out of cool, electrified hip-hop grooves and greasy funk from the 1970s.
He held onto the spirit that guided those inquiries — one of creative fervor, tempered by cool poise — in the more traditionally formatted Roy Hargrove Quintet, a dependable group he maintained for most of his career. On “Earfood,” a late-career highlight, the quintet capers from savvy updates of jazz standards to original ballads and new tunes that mix Southern warmth and hip-hop swagger.
By his mid-20s, Mr. Hargrove was already giving back to the New York jazz scene that had made him its crown prince. In 1995, with the vocalist Lezlie Harrison and the organizer Dale Fitzgerald, he founded the Jazz Gallery, a little downtown venue that today stands as New York’s most reliable home for cutting-edge presentations by young jazz musicians.
Into his final days, dogged by failing health, Mr. Hargrove remained a fixture of the jam sessions at Smalls in Greenwich Village. When not on tour, he spent multiple nights each week in that low-ceilinged basement, his slight, nattily dressed frame emerging occasionally from a corner to blow a smoky, quietly arresting solo.
Roy
Anthony Hargrove was born on Oct. 16, 1969, in Waco, Tex., to Roy Allan
and Jacklyn Hargrove, and raised primarily in Dallas, where his family
moved when he was 9. His father served in the Air Force and then worked
in a factory for Texas Instruments. His mother held clerical jobs,
including as an administrator at the Dallas County Jail.
Mr. Hargrove is survived by his mother; his wife, Aida; a daughter, Kamala; and his brother, Brian.
Quiet and retiring by nature, Mr. Hargrove developed a close attachment to music. “My parents weren’t around that much; I was pretty much in solitude,” he told Mr. Piazza. “Originally I wanted to play the clarinet, but we didn’t have any money. My dad had a cornet that he’d bought from a pawn shop, so I just played that. I learned to love it.”
Mentored by his high school band teacher, Mr. Hargrove showed his talents early. He played at jazz-education festivals and conferences with his high school band, and rumors of his virtuosity spread.
When Mr. Hargrove was in 11th grade, the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis visited his high school during a tour stop in Fort Worth, asking to hear the young phenom. Mr. Marsalis was so impressed that he invited Mr. Hargrove to join him at a nearby club date. That led to a trip to Europe in the summer before his senior year to take part in the North Sea Jazz Festival in The Hague as a member of an all-star band.
After a year at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, Mr. Hargrove moved to New York City in 1990, at 20. He briefly attended the New School, but his home base was Bradley’s, the Greenwich Village club and jam-session hub peopled by many of jazz’s most esteemed elders. He usually stayed until closing each night. (Bradley’s closed in 1996.)
For his first six months in New York, he slept on the couch at the home of Wendy Cunningham, the owner of Bradley’s. By the end of that time, he had recorded a well-regarded debut album, “Diamond in the Rough,” for RCA and become the talk of the town.
“Among the newcomers, the one name everyone mentions is Roy Hargrove,” Mr. Piazza wrote in 1990. “His playing incorporates a wide, rich sound, something like that of the great Clifford Brown,” he added. “Barely out of his teens, Hargrove is a mixture of shyness and cockiness, boyish enthusiasm and high seriousness. Music is his whole life.”
The New Orleans trumpeter Nicholas Payton, who rose to prominence alongside Mr. Hargrove in the early 1990s, reflected on his significance in a blog post on Saturday. “I often say two things changed the New York City straight-ahead music scene: Art Blakey passing and Bradley’s closing,” Mr. Payton wrote. “Now I have to add a third, the departure of Roy Hargrove. New York will not be the same without you.”
Correction:
An earlier version of this obituary misspelled the middle name of Roy Hargrove’s father. He was Roy Allan Hargrove, not Allen. Because of an editing error, the earlier version also misspelled the given name of Mr. Hargrove’s mother. She is Jacklyn Hargrove, not Jackyn.
A version of this article appears in print on , Section D, Page 8 of the New York edition with the headline: Roy Hargrove, Trumpeter Who Gave Jazz a Jolt of Youthfulness, Dies at 49. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper
http://somethingelsereviews.com/2008/07/30/roy-hargrove-quintet-earfood-2008/
My, how time flies.
It didn’t seem so long ago when Wynton Marsalis spotted this young trumpet talent at a Dallas high school in the mid-eighties. Since then, Roy Hargrove has recorded fourteen albums as a leader, and another co-led with Herbie Hancock and Michael Brecker. For these efforts, he’s won two Grammies so far. Hargrove has also recorded with such diverse talents as Slide Hampton, Erykah Badu, Sonny Rollins, Diana Krall, John Mayer, D’Angelo and Common.
Throughout it all, Hargrove’s technical skills on the trumpet is matched only by his versatility. To my ears, he plays with the quiet elegance of Marsalis, but is more apt to groove than swing. He’s also been compared to Lee Morgan and his longtime hero Freddie Hubbard, but Hargrove remains firmly his own man.
RH also follows his own path when deciding what kind of music to play on his records. While he did start off in post-bop and showed everyone he had the basics down good, he’s since branched out into mildly Cuban-styled jazz (the wonderful Habana (1997)), backwards in time to vintage bebop (Parker’s Mood (1995)) and forward to a fusion of jazz and hip-hop (Distractions (2006)). And so, any new Hargrove release is likely to take off in a different direction from what came just before. Sure enough, this week’s release of his 15th album, Earfood, finds Hargrove zigging after he zagged.
Earfood is nominally another post-bop Hargrove album, but it’s more than just that. There’s nearly an equal mixture of covers and originals and the tempos, styles and within this music form vary greatly, providing a well-rounded look at how the leader plays within the forms presented by the songs.
Notably, Hargrove recorded this album with his road band, which audibly lends to the energy and cohesiveness of the group playing on this record. Besides Hargrove on trumpet, the band includes Justin Robinson (alto sax, flute), Gerald Clayton (piano), Danton Boller (bass) and Montez Coleman (drums).
It didn’t seem so long ago when Wynton Marsalis spotted this young trumpet talent at a Dallas high school in the mid-eighties. Since then, Roy Hargrove has recorded fourteen albums as a leader, and another co-led with Herbie Hancock and Michael Brecker. For these efforts, he’s won two Grammies so far. Hargrove has also recorded with such diverse talents as Slide Hampton, Erykah Badu, Sonny Rollins, Diana Krall, John Mayer, D’Angelo and Common.
Throughout it all, Hargrove’s technical skills on the trumpet is matched only by his versatility. To my ears, he plays with the quiet elegance of Marsalis, but is more apt to groove than swing. He’s also been compared to Lee Morgan and his longtime hero Freddie Hubbard, but Hargrove remains firmly his own man.
RH also follows his own path when deciding what kind of music to play on his records. While he did start off in post-bop and showed everyone he had the basics down good, he’s since branched out into mildly Cuban-styled jazz (the wonderful Habana (1997)), backwards in time to vintage bebop (Parker’s Mood (1995)) and forward to a fusion of jazz and hip-hop (Distractions (2006)). And so, any new Hargrove release is likely to take off in a different direction from what came just before. Sure enough, this week’s release of his 15th album, Earfood, finds Hargrove zigging after he zagged.
Earfood is nominally another post-bop Hargrove album, but it’s more than just that. There’s nearly an equal mixture of covers and originals and the tempos, styles and within this music form vary greatly, providing a well-rounded look at how the leader plays within the forms presented by the songs.
Notably, Hargrove recorded this album with his road band, which audibly lends to the energy and cohesiveness of the group playing on this record. Besides Hargrove on trumpet, the band includes Justin Robinson (alto sax, flute), Gerald Clayton (piano), Danton Boller (bass) and Montez Coleman (drums).
While the songs do sounds very distinct from each other, the common thread in them is that none of them are so harmonically complex as to turn off all but the jazz snobs. As Hargrove himself put it, “My goal in this project is to have a recording that is steeped in tradition and sophistication, while maintaining a sense of melodic simplicity.” In other words, you can instantly tell there’s some good, thoughtful music being played but sounds appealing at the gut level all the same.
There’s several examples of those kinds of songs. “Strasbourg/St. Denis” is a bass-driven groover that has a catchy sax/trumpet line. “Style” is also built from the bottom provided by Boller, and is a sophisticated mid-tempo finger-snapper and features a fine piano solo by Clayton. The pretty, loose-limbed “Brown” provides an excellent showcase for Hargrove’s muted trumpet.
There’s several examples of those kinds of songs. “Strasbourg/St. Denis” is a bass-driven groover that has a catchy sax/trumpet line. “Style” is also built from the bottom provided by Boller, and is a sophisticated mid-tempo finger-snapper and features a fine piano solo by Clayton. The pretty, loose-limbed “Brown” provides an excellent showcase for Hargrove’s muted trumpet.
Lou Marini’s “Starmaker,” the longest track of this collection, mimics the same underlying rhythmic pattern of Hancock’s “Maiden Voyage” along with the solemn horn lines without copying the melody at all. On this cut, Robinson’s sax solo packs some passion. “Rouge” is a brief, mostly tempo-free piece that seems to float from one chord to the next.
The Hubbard-styled “The Stinger” is one of the cookers of this batch of songs and whose melody sticks with the listener long after the song is over. Other highlights includes a Cedar Walton song “I’m Not So Sure,” which the band attacks with precision and makes the composition simpler than it probably really is. “Speak Low” is perhaps the only of the six non-originals that could be called a standard, but Hargrove’s sublime phrasing on his flugelhorn manages to make it sound almost like he owned that song all along.
If for some reason you’re still not sure if Hargrove wants the listener to have fun through the first 12 tracks, all doubts are dispelled on the last one. The old Sam Cooke tune “Bring It On Home To Me,” was recorded live in Gleisdof, Austria, but the way these cats play it, you’d think they were smack dab in the middle of the New Orleans’ French Quarter. A very festive way to end the album.
Just as last May’s release of James Carter’s Present Tense provided a good sampling of the many facets of Carter’s acoustic music, so does Earfood does much the same for fellow “young lion” Roy Hargrove.
Earfood, on the Emarcy/Groovin’ High label, became available for sale on July 29.
The Hubbard-styled “The Stinger” is one of the cookers of this batch of songs and whose melody sticks with the listener long after the song is over. Other highlights includes a Cedar Walton song “I’m Not So Sure,” which the band attacks with precision and makes the composition simpler than it probably really is. “Speak Low” is perhaps the only of the six non-originals that could be called a standard, but Hargrove’s sublime phrasing on his flugelhorn manages to make it sound almost like he owned that song all along.
If for some reason you’re still not sure if Hargrove wants the listener to have fun through the first 12 tracks, all doubts are dispelled on the last one. The old Sam Cooke tune “Bring It On Home To Me,” was recorded live in Gleisdof, Austria, but the way these cats play it, you’d think they were smack dab in the middle of the New Orleans’ French Quarter. A very festive way to end the album.
Just as last May’s release of James Carter’s Present Tense provided a good sampling of the many facets of Carter’s acoustic music, so does Earfood does much the same for fellow “young lion” Roy Hargrove.
Earfood, on the Emarcy/Groovin’ High label, became available for sale on July 29.
Roy Hargrove, 1969-2018
by Doug Ramsey
November 3, 2018
ArtsJournal
Trumpeter Roy Hargrove died of a heart attack in New York yesterday at the age of 49. Hargrove was one of a coterie of young musicians who came to prominence following the sudden superstardom of fellow trumpeter Wynton Marsalis in the 1990s. Record companies scrambled to find their own Marsalises. Hargrove became famous not long after he was graduated from the Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing Arts in Dallas, Texas. His technical accomplishments, youth, personality and attractiveness brought him a contract with RCA’s Novus Records. By his early twenties he had won two Grammy awards.
His longtime manager Larry Clothier told NPR News that Hargrove had been undergoing years of dialysis as treatment for kidney failure. In a 1996 piece that I wrote for Texas Monthly, I quoted Clothier’s recollection of a 1987 jam session in which Hargrove sat in with Marsalis at the Fort Worth jazz club Caravan of Dreams.
Marsalis had heard Hargrove earlier and told Clothier, “Man, I heard this little kid today that’s gonna be a bitch. No, that’s wrong, that kid’s a bitch today.”
Clothier described Hargrove at the jam session.
He was like this, Clothier says, drawing his head into his shoulders and casting his eyes to the floor. Wynton said, “You want to play something?” and he sort of shrank and looked down and nodded. And I thought, man, this kid’s scared to death. But when it came time, you could just see him draw himself up and expand. And it was like Wynton said. He was a bitch.
That spring, Clothier persuaded other jazz stars at Caravan Of Dreams to let Hargrove sit in. Among them were vibraharpist Bobby Hutcherson, pianist Herbie Hancock and alto saxophonist Frank Morgan. Hargrove listened at the back of the stage while Hancock, bassist Buster Williams and drummer Al Foster soloed. Herbie and the guys were still struggling with this piece Buster had written,” Clothier says. “They thought Roy had decided not to try, but he stepped up to the microphone and played the hell out of it. Herbie almost fell off the stool ‘cause Roy had it and they didn’t.”
Like many trumpeters, Hargrove had a side love affair with the trumpet’s mellow cousin the flugelhorn. He excelled at summoning the flugel’s depth and warmth, as in this performance conducted and introduced by trombonist Slide Hampton at the Internationale Jazzwoche Burghausen in Wackerhalle, Gemany in 2007.
At this writing, funeral arrangements for Hargrove have not been announced.
Roy Hargrove RIP.
Riffs on Roy
At 26, Oak Cliff native Roy Hargrove is the hottest trumpeter in the world, and he deserves to be—even if his lack of seasoning is something of an off note.
by Doug Ramsey
April 30, 1996
Issue: May 1996
From the May 1996 Issue Subscribe
A TAPE IS MAKING ITS WAY through the underground of professional musicians and writers who keep one another up to date on developments in jazz. It captures a jam session led by trumpeter, saxophonist, and flutist Jay Thomas at the Water Street Deli in Port Townsend, Washington, during the Centrum jazz festival last summer. Following a guitar solo on the Charlie Parker blues composition “Relaxin’ at Camarillo,” a trumpet solo materializes at some distance from the microphone.
As the player moves closer, it becomes apparent that he has technical adroitness, range, and vigor. The enthusiasm and drive of the performance excite the audience. Yet the solo has flaws that indicate a lack of seasoning: hesitancy in phrasing, repeated runs, cracked notes that come from strain, a tendency to get trapped in eighth-note patterns, ideas that work rhythmically but not harmonically, dependence on phrases appropriated from Freddie Hubbard. Still, any knowledgeable listener would identify it as the work of a talented youngster capable of moving into the first rank. The trumpeter is Roy Hargrove, the 26-year-old prodigy who grew up in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas.
At the end of Hargrove’s solo, the 46-year-old Thomas picks up his trumpet and plays a solo of his own. It has assurance, continuity, easy swing, a burnished tone, and originality of ideas. Its harmonic sophistication shows a deep understanding of chords. The contrast in the two solos is between potential and achievement, and it illuminates the facts of life in a category of music dominated by the marketing of the youth movement. Hargrove, who unseated Wynton Marsalis to take first place in the trumpet division of the 1995 Down Beat readers poll and has won the Jazz Times readers poll for the past four years, is in demand around the world. As a bandleader, he has recorded nine CDs for two major labels, more albums than many name jazz musicians with forty-year careers, and he is a guest star on dozens of recordings, including the latest by Dave Brubeck. Thomas’ four albums are on obscure labels with little distribution. Most of his playing is in Seattle, and he doesn’t get as much jazz work as he wants.
At age twenty, Louis Armstrong was still a sideman on Mississippi riverboats. When Harry James was twenty, he was perfecting his virtuosity in Ben Pollack’s band. At twenty, Dizzy Gillespie moved from Philadelphia to New York and landed a job with Teddy Hill. The year before Miles Davis reached adulthood, he was enrolled at Juilliard but did his real learning under Charlie Parker, Benny Carter, and Billy Eckstine. Twenty-year-old Chet Baker was between stretches in Army bands. Marsalis at twenty was into his second year with Art Blakey. For each of them, stardom as a jazz trumpeter came only after apprenticeship, struggle, and seasoning. But since Marsalis zoomed to success in the early eighties, establishing youth and attractiveness as commodities that quickly crowded out depth and experience in the jazz marketplace, times and possibilities have changed for talented young musicians. Envious of Columbia Records’ success with him and desperate for their own Wyntons, record companies began signing players who in previous decades could only have dreamed of recording contracts as they bounced through their early careers at the back of the band bus.
Roy Hargrove never took the bus: He jumped directly onto the jazz rocket train engineered by Marsalis. At age twenty, two years out of Dallas’ arts magnet school, Booker T. Washington High School for the Visual and Performing Arts, he was signed by Novus Records. Ever since, he has been in the top tier of a new generation of jazz players—referred to in the press as the Young Lions—that includes saxophonist Joshua Redman, trumpeters Nicholas Payton and Ryan Kisor, pianists Brad Mehldau and Jacky Terrasson, drummers Brian Blade and Gregory Hutchinson, and bassist Christian McBride. While they are all talented, gifted in technique but still absorbing the jazz vocabulary, Hargrove in particular has demonstrated a competitive drive and a love of playing reminiscent of Hubbard or the late Roy Eldridge. Slight and cocky, with the alertness and coordination of a superflyweight boxer, he has shown major strengths as an improviser: an ability to transmit emotion, a fierce sense of swing, and an ear finely tuned to harmonic possibilities. His maturation as an artist may be blocked only by his early fame, which kept him from traveling the hard road that seasons sidemen, or by his tendency to lead his band through self-indulgent posturing that can shut out listeners.
Hargrove was born in Waco on October 16, 1969. His father, Roy Allan Hargrove, was an Air Force noncommissioned officer whose career forced him and his wife, Jacquelyn, to move often around the United States and Europe; so young Roy lived with relatives in Waco, Mart, and Groesbeck for most of the first eight years of his life. At the end of the senior Hargrove’s service, the reunited family moved to Oak Cliff. Roy’s father took a job as a sheet metal assembler for Texas Instruments, where he was employed until he died last July. His mother worked as a clerk and still does, at a dialysis center.
Encouraged by his dad, when he was nine Hargrove took up the cornet at William B. Miller Elementary School. The next year, as a fourth grader, he volunteered to play a solo intended for an older trumpeter who had taken ill. He amazed his music teacher and band director, Dean Hill, by executing it without a flaw. “He kept stepping out there,” Hill told the Dallas Morning News. “He was always one to keep digging and reaching for all he could. We knew we had something special.” “Special” is also how Hargrove describes Hill. “I came from a very special kind of atmosphere,” he told me recently over dinner in Los Angeles, “because Mr. Hill, a very special person, could teach the kids how to improvise. That’s how I learned—based on the blues.”
Both Hill and Hargrove moved on to Oliver Wendell Holmes Middle School, where the budding musician developed with astonishing speed. Maynard Ferguson was the idol of the trumpeters in the marching band, Hargrove says, because “you were really bad if you could play high and loud, as high and as loud as possible.” At age twelve, he resolved to master Ferguson’s recorded solo on “The Way We Were.” The highest note was an A above high C, beyond the top of the trumpet’s range for most student players. “I practiced it day and night trying to hit that note,” he says. “I drove my parents up the wall. They were like, ‘Don’t you want to go outside and play football with the other little kids?’
“I went in the closet, trying to get that high A,” he recalls, shrieking to imitate the trumpet. “Finally got it, though, and we made a record of it.”
The next year, Dallas saxophonist and flutist David “Fathead” Newman played for a junior high assembly. Hargrove knew about improvisation, but Newman was the first professional he heard doing it. “It was so soulful,” he says. “I just kept thinking, like, ‘Man, he’s making all this music, and it’s all coming straight from him.’” Thirteen years later, Newman is a guest soloist on Hargrove’s latest album, Family (Verve).
Another guest is Wynton Marsalis, who heard Hargrove early in 1987 at an impromptu clinic at Booker T. Washington. Larry Clothier, now Hargrove’s manager and producer, was overseeing Marsalis’ engagement that week at Fort Worth’s Caravan of Dreams. “Wynton came back to the hotel in the afternoon and called me up in my room and said, ‘Man, I heard this little kid today that’s gonna be a bitch. No, that’s wrong, that kid’s a bitch today.’” Marsalis asked Hargrove to come by the club and sit in with his band. On the last night, Clothier and Marsalis spotted three young men standing in the back of the club. “One of them had a little tweed topcoat on, a porkpie hat sittin’ on the back of his head, and a trumpet case in his hand,” Clothier says. “When the band got done playing the tune they were on, Wynton called Roy up.
“He was like this,” Clothier says, drawing his head into his shoulders and casting his eyes to the floor. “Wynton said, ‘You want to play something?’ and he sort of shrank and looked down and nodded. And I thought, man, this kid’s scared to death. But when it came time, you could just see him draw himself up and expand. And it was like Wynton said. He was a bitch.”
That spring, Clothier persuaded other jazz stars at Caravan of Dreams to let Hargrove sit in. Among them were vibraharpist Bobby Hutcherson, pianist Herbie Hancock, and alto saxophonist Frank Morgan. Hargrove listened at the back of the stage while Hancock, bassist Buster Williams, and drummer Al Foster soloed. “Herbie and the guys were still struggling with this piece Buster had written,” Clothier says. “They thought Roy had decided not to try, but he stepped up to the microphone and played the hell out of it. Herbie almost fell off the stool ’cause Roy had it and they didn’t."
https://www.npr.org/2018/11/03/663895387/roy-hargrove-grammy-winning-jazz-trumpeter-dies-at-49
Roy Hargrove, Grammy-Winning Jazz Trumpter, Dies At 49
Nov. 3, 2018
Trumpeter Roy Hargrove performs at the Brooklyn Masonic Temple on May 1, 2013. Hargrove died at age 49 Friday in New York.
Roy Hargrove, an incisive trumpeter who embodied the brightest promise of his jazz generation, both as a young steward of the bebop tradition and a savvy bridge to hip-hop and R&B, died on Friday night in New York City. He was 49.
The cause was cardiac arrest, according to his longtime manager, Larry Clothier. Hargrove had been admitted to the hospital for reasons related to kidney function.
A briskly assertive soloist with a tone that could evoke either burnished steel or a soft, golden glow, Hargrove was a galvanizing presence in jazz over the last 30 years. Dapper and slight of build, he exuded a sly, sparkling charisma onstage, whether he was holding court at a late-night jam session or performing in the grandest concert hall. His capacity for combustion and bravura was equaled by his commitment to lyricism, especially when finessing a ballad on flugelhorn.
Roy Hargrove, Grammy-Winning Jazz Trumpter, Dies At 49
Nov. 3, 2018
From 88.3 fm WBGO.org
Matthew Eisman/Getty Images
Trumpeter Roy Hargrove performs at the Brooklyn Masonic Temple on May 1, 2013. Hargrove died at age 49 Friday in New York.
The cause was cardiac arrest, according to his longtime manager, Larry Clothier. Hargrove had been admitted to the hospital for reasons related to kidney function.
A briskly assertive soloist with a tone that could evoke either burnished steel or a soft, golden glow, Hargrove was a galvanizing presence in jazz over the last 30 years. Dapper and slight of build, he exuded a sly, sparkling charisma onstage, whether he was holding court at a late-night jam session or performing in the grandest concert hall. His capacity for combustion and bravura was equaled by his commitment to lyricism, especially when finessing a ballad on flugelhorn.
Roy Hargrove Quintet: Live At The Village Vanguard
Hargrove is also known for his vital presence in the turn-of-the-century movement known as neo-soul. He made crucial contributions to Voodoo, the epochal album by D'Angelo, released in 2000. He appeared the same year on Erykah Badu's Mama's Gun and Common's Like Water for Chocolate, and later formed his own hybrid project, The RH Factor, with the aim of furthering the dialogue between modern jazz, hip-hop and R&B. But Hargrove always maintained his foothold in the mainstream jazz tradition; he saw his forays into other forms of black music as an extension of, rather than any departure from, that tradition.
He first emerged in the late 1980s, at a cultural moment when his precocity and poise amounted to a form of currency in jazz. His first album, Diamond in the Rough, was released on the Novus imprint of RCA in 1990. Soon afterward, he went on tour with a package called Jazz Futures, featuring a peer group of other young torchbearers, including alto saxophonist Antonio Hart and bassist Christian McBride.
Hargrove was also quick to earn the coveted approval of his elders — not only alto saxophonist Bobby Watson, who provided some of his first experience in a recording studio, but also tenor saxophone titan Sonny Rollins, who featured him on a tune called "Young Roy" in 1991 (and also at his 80th birthday concert in 2010).
As he achieved his own wealth of experience, Hargrove was generous as a mentor himself. Among the younger musicians who responded to his death on social media was fellow trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire, who wrote on Twitter: "I don't think I would be alive if I hadn't met him when I did. I am extremely grateful I got to tell him as a grown man to his face."
Roy Anthony Hargrove was born on Oct. 16, 1969, in Waco, Texas, to Roy Allan and Jacklyn Hargrove. He grew up in Dallas, where he attended Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, an arts magnet that also produced Erykah Badu and Norah Jones.
The first jazz musician who made a substantial impression on him was David "Fathead" Newman, a tenor saxophonist best known for his long tenure with Ray Charles; he was a Dallas-area native, and Hargrove heard him at a junior high assembly. Then in 1987, Wynton Marsalis heard a teenaged Hargrove in a clinic at Booker T. Washington and was so impressed that he invited the young trumpeter to sit in on his gig that week in Fort Worth.
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Hargrove attended the Berklee College of Music on scholarship for 18 months, before transferring to the New School in New York. In jazz's close-knit musician community, the meteoric force of his arrival was comparable only to that of Marsalis' about a decade earlier.
Hargrove was a two-time Grammy winner, in two illustrative categories: best jazz instrumental album in 2003 for Directions in Music, featuring a post-bop supergroup with pianist Herbie Hancock and saxophonist Michael Brecker; and best Latin jazz performance in 1998 for Habana, a groundbreaking Afro-Cuban project recorded in Havana.
Early in his New York experience, in 1992, Hargrove and a business partner, Dale Fitzgerald, signed a lease on a loft in Lower Manhattan with the intention of finding a place for practicing and rehearsals. Three years later, Hargrove and Fitzgerald partnered with Lezlie Harrison to convert it into a nonprofit performance space, The Jazz Gallery. Though it moved to a new location in 2013, The Jazz Gallery continues to be an integral hub for the music. Hargrove continued to play there, just as he never stopped being a late-night fixture at Smalls.
He is survived by his wife, singer and producer Aida Brandes; a daughter from a previous relationship, Kamala Hargrove; his mother, Jacklyn Hargrove; and his younger brother, Brian Hargrove.
Along with his quintet — a sterling hard-bop unit that released an album called Earfood in 2008, and was recorded at The Village Vanguard in 2011 by WBGO and NPR Music — Hargrove intermittently led a big band. He often stood in for one of his many trumpet totems in the Dizzy Gillespie All-Star Big Band. And he continued to sit in and pop up as a special guest; he's prominently featured on an album released last year by singer and pianist Johnny O'Neal.
For a number of years, Hargrove struggled with substance abuse and its attendant problems. In 2014, he pleaded guilty to cocaine possession in Manhattan criminal court and was sentenced to two days of community service.
But those close to Hargrove say he had recently made great strides with any issues of dependency. "Whatever it was for a lot of years, it was radically, drastically curtailed over the last year or two," attests Clothier. "He was playing great; he really had himself back together. This last run we did in Europe, it was as good as I heard him play in the last 10 years."
Hargrove had been scheduled to perform on Saturday, Nov. 3, in a jazz vespers service at Bethany Baptist Church in Newark, N.J., as part of the TD James Moody Jazz Festival.
Nov. 5, 2018
Roy Hargrove performing at the Zelt-Musik-Festival in July 2018 (Courtesy Creative Commons/Ice Boy Tell)
Trumpeter Roy Hargrove, an immensely skilled trumpeter whose melodic, groove-centric style bridged a divide between straightahead jazz, hip-hop and R&B, died November 2 in Manhattan. He was 49. The cause of death, according to his manager, was cardiac arrest brought on by kidney disease.
Born in Waco, Texas, and raised in Dallas, Hargrove was a naturally gifted musician who showed early signs of virtuosity. A local phenom in the Fort Worth and Dallas jazz scenes, he was discovered while still in high school by trumpeter and jazz tastemaker Wynton Marsalis, who would eventually take the young horn player on a European tour. After studying at Berklee College of Music in Boston, Hargrove moved to New York City, where he became a frequent presence at the now-shuttered jazz club Bradley’s, a beacon for straightahead jazz in New York City during the 1990s.
Hargrove’s style — which was largely informed by blues, funk and soul — represented something of a departure from the “Young Lion” trumpet players of the latter 20th century, who were focused on reviving the languages from jazz’s past. On early recordings, such as his debut, Diamond in the Rough (Novus, 1990) and The Vibe (Novus, 1992), Hargrove seemed intent on developing a language that would serve jazz’s future, which meant embracing the sounds of contemporary American pop.
His penchant for hybridity would lead him to important crossover work with artists like neo-soul singer Erykah Badu, drummer Questlove, vocalist D’Angelo and rapper Common, who together formed the musical collective The Soulquarians. Hargrove was a formidable presence on albums recorded by fellow Soulquarian members, including D’Angelo’s masterpiece Voodoo and Common’s Like Water For Chocolate. Several members of the group would appear in recordings by the trumpeter’s own groundbreaking group, The RH Factor, which served as an early pacesetter for the jazz-meets-rap trend that would launch the careers of Kamasi Washington and Kendrick Lamar.
For all his genre-defying innovation, Hargrove was also a studious disciple of the jazz tradition, and would record several outstanding albums in the bebop and hard-bop veins. His career included notable sideman credits alongside some of the biggest names in jazz, including Sonny Rollins, Bobby Watson, Mulgrew Miller and Kenny Washington. In 1997 he recorded the Afro-Cuban jazz album Habana with his band Crisol (featuring Gary Bartz, David Sanchez and Frank Lacy, among others). The album was heralded for its groundbreaking approach to traditional Latin music, winning the Grammy Award for Best Latin Jazz Performance in 1998.
In 2003, Hargrove would win his second Grammy Award for Directions In Music: Live at Massey Hall, which featured a modern jazz dream team of Herbie Hanock on piano, Michael Brecker on saxophone, John Patitucci on bass and Brian Blade on drums.
In the wake of Hargrove’s death, fans and fellow musicians took to social media to remember the pioneering trumpeter. “He played with an unusual and infectious combination of fire, honesty and sweet innocence,” Wynton Marsalis wrote in a Facebook note. “The first time I heard him it was clear, he was an absolute natural with phenomenal ears, a great memory and tremendous dexterity on our instrument.”
Saxophonist Antonio Hart, a longtime partner in Hargrove’s quintet, took to Facebook to post his gratitude for his mentor: “He’s at peace with God and the other masters now,” he wrote. “Let’s remember his genius, and the joy he has given the world.”
As with all of the phenomenal musicians in our “Life in Music” series, it would be impossible to summarize Hargrove’s outsize impact on music in just five songs. Nevertheless, here are some of our favorites. We hope that, in the words of Antonio Hart, they can bring some joy into your world.
Born in Waco, Texas, and raised in Dallas, Hargrove was a naturally gifted musician who showed early signs of virtuosity. A local phenom in the Fort Worth and Dallas jazz scenes, he was discovered while still in high school by trumpeter and jazz tastemaker Wynton Marsalis, who would eventually take the young horn player on a European tour. After studying at Berklee College of Music in Boston, Hargrove moved to New York City, where he became a frequent presence at the now-shuttered jazz club Bradley’s, a beacon for straightahead jazz in New York City during the 1990s.
Hargrove’s style — which was largely informed by blues, funk and soul — represented something of a departure from the “Young Lion” trumpet players of the latter 20th century, who were focused on reviving the languages from jazz’s past. On early recordings, such as his debut, Diamond in the Rough (Novus, 1990) and The Vibe (Novus, 1992), Hargrove seemed intent on developing a language that would serve jazz’s future, which meant embracing the sounds of contemporary American pop.
His penchant for hybridity would lead him to important crossover work with artists like neo-soul singer Erykah Badu, drummer Questlove, vocalist D’Angelo and rapper Common, who together formed the musical collective The Soulquarians. Hargrove was a formidable presence on albums recorded by fellow Soulquarian members, including D’Angelo’s masterpiece Voodoo and Common’s Like Water For Chocolate. Several members of the group would appear in recordings by the trumpeter’s own groundbreaking group, The RH Factor, which served as an early pacesetter for the jazz-meets-rap trend that would launch the careers of Kamasi Washington and Kendrick Lamar.
For all his genre-defying innovation, Hargrove was also a studious disciple of the jazz tradition, and would record several outstanding albums in the bebop and hard-bop veins. His career included notable sideman credits alongside some of the biggest names in jazz, including Sonny Rollins, Bobby Watson, Mulgrew Miller and Kenny Washington. In 1997 he recorded the Afro-Cuban jazz album Habana with his band Crisol (featuring Gary Bartz, David Sanchez and Frank Lacy, among others). The album was heralded for its groundbreaking approach to traditional Latin music, winning the Grammy Award for Best Latin Jazz Performance in 1998.
In 2003, Hargrove would win his second Grammy Award for Directions In Music: Live at Massey Hall, which featured a modern jazz dream team of Herbie Hanock on piano, Michael Brecker on saxophone, John Patitucci on bass and Brian Blade on drums.
In the wake of Hargrove’s death, fans and fellow musicians took to social media to remember the pioneering trumpeter. “He played with an unusual and infectious combination of fire, honesty and sweet innocence,” Wynton Marsalis wrote in a Facebook note. “The first time I heard him it was clear, he was an absolute natural with phenomenal ears, a great memory and tremendous dexterity on our instrument.”
Saxophonist Antonio Hart, a longtime partner in Hargrove’s quintet, took to Facebook to post his gratitude for his mentor: “He’s at peace with God and the other masters now,” he wrote. “Let’s remember his genius, and the joy he has given the world.”
As with all of the phenomenal musicians in our “Life in Music” series, it would be impossible to summarize Hargrove’s outsize impact on music in just five songs. Nevertheless, here are some of our favorites. We hope that, in the words of Antonio Hart, they can bring some joy into your world.
1. “Soppin’ the Biscuit,” Roy Hargrove Quintet, from With the Tenors of Our Time (UMG)
2. “Afrodisia,” Roy Hargrove’s Crisol, from Habana (Verve)
3. “The Sorcerer,” Herbie Hancock/Michael Brecker/Roy Hargrove, from Directions in Music
4. “Hardgroove,” by the RH Factor, from The RH Factor
5. “Strasbourg-St. Denis,” Roy
https://qwest.tv/media/roy-hargrove-the-trumpeter-of-a-generation/
Roy Hargrove, The Trumpeter of a Generation
Qwest TV
Founder of RH Factor, composer of "Strasbourg Saint-Denis": the trumpeter hailing from Texas has passed at the age of 49.
For years now, Roy Hargrove’s concerts have born the consequences of his health. He has been seen shining on stage, alive with youth, maneuvering his trumpet with the strength of history blowing in his lungs; he has been seen out of breath, wasting his talent, abandoned by a body that he did not take good care of. Born in 1969 in Waco, Texas, he has passed at the age of forty-nine, just after showing himself at peak form over the course of his last summer tour. The sadness that has unanimously swept the world of jazz on the announcement of his passing testifies to his impact on both the guardians of tradition and the newcomers for whom he was an incredible gateway to jazz.
Whether he was playing with a classic set or with the RH Factor, Roy Hargrove was two jazzmen in one person. He owes his blossoming to Wynton Marsalis, a trumpeter of the historical kind who spotted him in the 90s when he was only just a high schooler in Dallas–he later attended the Berklee College of Music in Boston, and the New School in New York. At the time, he was trying to walk in the steps of Clifford Brown, Freddie Hubbard, Fats Navarro and Woody Shaw, while naming John Hicks, James Williams and Bobby Watson as his influences as a composer. He was only sixteen when he made a decisive encounter with bass player Christin McBride–himself only fourteen at the time–with whom he developed a loyal friendship, one that can be heard on Parker’s Mood, an album released in 1995 that, along with pianist Stephen Scott, showcases a surprising trio. Since the beginning of the 90s, he has forged himself so wide a path that he could count on the collaboration of figures such as Joshua Redman, Johnny Griffin, Stanley Turrentine, Branford Marsalis, Joe Henderson and Ron Blake for With the Tenors of Our Time, ensuring his notoriety in 1994. He was then labeled “neo-bop,” to which he responded (in an interview given to All About Jazz in 1996): “Neobop? What’s that? Neobop. I guess that’s a way to describe the fact that a lot of us are playing in a tradition. Everything that we play in jazz is a reflection of our experiences in life. I’m influenced by the music of John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and Dizzy Gillespie. But I’m also influenced by the music of KRS-One, Woo Tang Clan, and L. L. Cool J, Peaches and Herb, and Earth, Wind and Fire. There’s a difference right there. (…) I know people at home always ask me ‘why don’t you do rap?’ They don’t expect me, as a young person, to be playing jazz. But I’ve always felt I have to challenge myself. And because I love music so much, I didn’t want to fall into any kind of rut.”
The winner of a Grammy Award (the second after the African-Cuban project Habana in 1998) for the album he co-signed with Herbie Hancock and Michael Brecker, Directions in Music: Live at Massey Hall (2002) which explored the repertoire of Miles Davis and John Coltrane, Roy Hargrove was infiltrating the entire neo soul scene at the same time. In 2000, he can be heard on two standards of the genre in particular, Voodoo by D’Angelo and Mama’s Gun by Erykah Badu, all the while playing on Like Water for Chocolate by rapper Common, all of them members of the Soulquarians (together with Questlove, James Poyser, Pino Palladino, etc.). This inspired Hargrove to create RH Factor, whose first opus, Hard Groove (2003), showcases contributions from D’Angelo, Erykah Badu and Common, but also Q-Tip, Stephanie McKay, Meshell Ndegeocello, Steve Coleman, Jacques Schwartz-Bart and Bernard Wright–the whole of New York waltzed through the Electric Lady studio over the course of a fortnight. Undeniably the symbol of an era, this brilliant jazz-funk-rap album–a fusion that has checkmated many who attempted to play with it–was followed by two other records that were accompanied by fiery concerts, drawing a youthful and enthusiastic audience. Roy Hargrove always took pleasure from entertaining.
Roy Hargrove had imagined RH factor as a homage to his father (who passed in 1995) who would often tell him: “I like jazz, but when are you going to do something a little more contemporary, something funky?” Since then, the trumpeter has kept a foot in each camp, leaving the door open to fusions with the likes of Christian Scott or Ambrose Akinmusire, without abandoning the quintet which was always his true point of reference. We could feel him, more often than not, clinging to his own music. After being put on dialysis a few years back, he recently checked in to a New York hospital for a renal issue. He has died just a few weeks after performing his latest and final concerts in Europe and the States. The tributes are pouring in, with Christian Mcbride lamenting the loss of “a brother.” They are fitting for a man whose music not only influenced a generation, but will continue to influence the many generations to come.
Founder of RH Factor, composer of "Strasbourg Saint-Denis": the trumpeter hailing from Texas has passed at the age of 49.
For years now, Roy Hargrove’s concerts have born the consequences of his health. He has been seen shining on stage, alive with youth, maneuvering his trumpet with the strength of history blowing in his lungs; he has been seen out of breath, wasting his talent, abandoned by a body that he did not take good care of. Born in 1969 in Waco, Texas, he has passed at the age of forty-nine, just after showing himself at peak form over the course of his last summer tour. The sadness that has unanimously swept the world of jazz on the announcement of his passing testifies to his impact on both the guardians of tradition and the newcomers for whom he was an incredible gateway to jazz.
Whether he was playing with a classic set or with the RH Factor, Roy Hargrove was two jazzmen in one person. He owes his blossoming to Wynton Marsalis, a trumpeter of the historical kind who spotted him in the 90s when he was only just a high schooler in Dallas–he later attended the Berklee College of Music in Boston, and the New School in New York. At the time, he was trying to walk in the steps of Clifford Brown, Freddie Hubbard, Fats Navarro and Woody Shaw, while naming John Hicks, James Williams and Bobby Watson as his influences as a composer. He was only sixteen when he made a decisive encounter with bass player Christin McBride–himself only fourteen at the time–with whom he developed a loyal friendship, one that can be heard on Parker’s Mood, an album released in 1995 that, along with pianist Stephen Scott, showcases a surprising trio. Since the beginning of the 90s, he has forged himself so wide a path that he could count on the collaboration of figures such as Joshua Redman, Johnny Griffin, Stanley Turrentine, Branford Marsalis, Joe Henderson and Ron Blake for With the Tenors of Our Time, ensuring his notoriety in 1994. He was then labeled “neo-bop,” to which he responded (in an interview given to All About Jazz in 1996): “Neobop? What’s that? Neobop. I guess that’s a way to describe the fact that a lot of us are playing in a tradition. Everything that we play in jazz is a reflection of our experiences in life. I’m influenced by the music of John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and Dizzy Gillespie. But I’m also influenced by the music of KRS-One, Woo Tang Clan, and L. L. Cool J, Peaches and Herb, and Earth, Wind and Fire. There’s a difference right there. (…) I know people at home always ask me ‘why don’t you do rap?’ They don’t expect me, as a young person, to be playing jazz. But I’ve always felt I have to challenge myself. And because I love music so much, I didn’t want to fall into any kind of rut.”
The winner of a Grammy Award (the second after the African-Cuban project Habana in 1998) for the album he co-signed with Herbie Hancock and Michael Brecker, Directions in Music: Live at Massey Hall (2002) which explored the repertoire of Miles Davis and John Coltrane, Roy Hargrove was infiltrating the entire neo soul scene at the same time. In 2000, he can be heard on two standards of the genre in particular, Voodoo by D’Angelo and Mama’s Gun by Erykah Badu, all the while playing on Like Water for Chocolate by rapper Common, all of them members of the Soulquarians (together with Questlove, James Poyser, Pino Palladino, etc.). This inspired Hargrove to create RH Factor, whose first opus, Hard Groove (2003), showcases contributions from D’Angelo, Erykah Badu and Common, but also Q-Tip, Stephanie McKay, Meshell Ndegeocello, Steve Coleman, Jacques Schwartz-Bart and Bernard Wright–the whole of New York waltzed through the Electric Lady studio over the course of a fortnight. Undeniably the symbol of an era, this brilliant jazz-funk-rap album–a fusion that has checkmated many who attempted to play with it–was followed by two other records that were accompanied by fiery concerts, drawing a youthful and enthusiastic audience. Roy Hargrove always took pleasure from entertaining.
Roy Hargrove had imagined RH factor as a homage to his father (who passed in 1995) who would often tell him: “I like jazz, but when are you going to do something a little more contemporary, something funky?” Since then, the trumpeter has kept a foot in each camp, leaving the door open to fusions with the likes of Christian Scott or Ambrose Akinmusire, without abandoning the quintet which was always his true point of reference. We could feel him, more often than not, clinging to his own music. After being put on dialysis a few years back, he recently checked in to a New York hospital for a renal issue. He has died just a few weeks after performing his latest and final concerts in Europe and the States. The tributes are pouring in, with Christian Mcbride lamenting the loss of “a brother.” They are fitting for a man whose music not only influenced a generation, but will continue to influence the many generations to come.
Always In The Moment—Remembering Roy Hargrove (1969-2018)
New Music Box
Roy was a guardian of being.
Just like flowers, trees, winds, or a puppy. He said, “The Universe is moving right on time with us. So move on.” He was always in the moment. All he dealt with was the here and now.
It sounds wonderful, but it is hard to go through life in that way when everyone else around him wanted more than that moment. People wanted friendship, association, love, a relationship—hoping for a bit of crumbs in any shape or form—which created the need for past and future, for remembering and planning. Roy was not that person. He was always only in the moment, hard and sincerely. In that moment, he meant everything he did; he meant every word he said; he felt everything he felt. There was no lie or deception in that. But because the rest of us don’t know how to deal with that trueness of being, he had to lie and deceive and manipulate, so that he could somewhat sustain a facade of being a human and move through this world in flesh.
Roy’s ability to be completely present made him an incredible artist.
Roy Hargrove, Rio Sakairi, and Ravi Coltrane. (Photo courtesy The Jazz Gallery)
Roy was what Eckhart Tolle called a “Guardian of Being”—reminding us of simple joy.
on love #5I wrote this piece a long time ago, while thinking of Roy. I think I wrote this because I felt that he is just like the air we breathe, and not quite a human being like rest of us.
i wish to love you
the way i love the sun
with casual disregard
occasional gratitude
totally taking it for granted
with blind faith
that it will always be.
From
left to right: Pianist Stephen Scott (piano), Cuban trumpeter Yasek
Manzano, Roy Hargove, Rio Sakairi, bassist Tarus Mateen, and drummer
Greg Hutchinson following one of “The Trumpet Shall Sound” concerts at
The Jazz Gallery. (Photo courtesy The Jazz Gallery.)
Elegy for Roy Hargrove by Mr Wynton Marsalis
Roy Hargrove
October 16, 1969 – November 2, 2018
Photo © jeanschoubs
Although he faced an uphill battle with his health over the years, it didn’t deter him or even slow him down from doing what he was undoubtedly born to do – minister through music. That he did until the end.
I first met Roy Hargrove in 1986 at Booker T Washington High School for the Performing Arts in Dallas, Texas. He was a 16 years old phenom playing lead trumpet parts with incredible accuracy and also improvising original solos with gleaming nuggets of melody swimming in harmonic sophistication with generous helpings of downhome blues and soul.
Roy played piano, wrote songs, sang and had a great sense of humor. To top it all off, he possessed an unerring sense of time, in the pocket at any tempo fast or slow. Kids in the school just loved him and were all excited about his great musicianship and about the magic they experienced everyday listening to him and playing with him.
He played with an unusual and infectious combination of fire, honesty and sweet innocence. The first time I heard him it was clear, he was an absolute natural with phenomenal ears, a great memory and tremendous dexterity on our instrument.
He was diligent about his playing technically and emotionally. Playing with an uncommon depth of feeling with a very developed internal sense of that which is unspeakable about the intimate. A Roy ballad was always exquisite.
Just as many in the continuum of our music poured information and aspirations into him, Roy gave selflessly to others, particularly to young musicians. He did everything he could to ensure that the circle would not be broken, at least not on his watch.
His participation on the scene in New York most reminded me of Woody Shaw. Roy continued Woody’s tradition of sitting in all around town and of playing, of encouraging everyone to play (not just with incredible solos), but with knowledge of songs and with advice and with just the feeling of “we are in this together and this is worth doing, and it’s valuable.”
While I am truly saddened as I write this, I am also encouraged by the life and the legacy that Roy left. He meant it.
Rest in Peace Baby."
– Wynton
from the Facebook page of Mr Wynton Marsalis
Photo © jeanschoubs
Roy Hargrove, R.I.P. 1969-2018
by Tom Reney
November 5, 2018
Roy Hargrove
Marek Lazarski / Jazz Times
Roy Hargrove, the brilliant, Texas-born trumpeter, died on Friday, November 2, at age 49 from cardiac arrest following his hospitalization in New Jersey for kidney disease. Roy was one of the most dynamic and engaging jazzmen of his generation, and the torrent of tributes and messages of grief expressed on social media since his death confirm that he was much beloved. The dozens of appearances he made as a sideman with both famous and lesser-known figures underscores how highly respected he was from the moment he hit the scene in 1988. You can tell by the players he continually named as sources of guidance and inspiration, among them Larry Willis, Ronnie Mathews, John Hicks and David "Fathead" Newman, that he was really deep inside the music. Roy lived to play, and notwithstanding his prominence, no stage was too small for this denizen of after-hours jam sessions where he often locked horns with young, emerging players.
In 1991, Billy Taylor profiled the 22-year-old Hargrove for CBS Sunday Morning. This time capsule includes footage of Roy and fellow young lions Christian McBride and Benny Green at the Blue Note, and interviews with Hargrove, his mentor Wynton Marsalis, and jazz impresario George Wein.
I introduced Roy on a couple of occasions (Litchfield Jazz Festival, UMass Fine Arts Center), and saw him numerous times, including his 2001 Directions in Music tour with Herbie Hancock and Michael Brecker that celebrated the 75th birthday anniversaries of Miles Davis and John Coltrane, and where his ballad feature was "My Ship."
At Sonny Rollins's 80th birthday concert in 2010, Hargrove, Russell Malone and Christian McBride appeared as young counterparts to Rollins, Jim Hall, Roy Haynes, and Ornette Coleman. The trumpeter's features with Sonny at the Beacon Theater included "Raincheck," and "I Can't Get Started." Both are included on the Rollins CD, Road Shows, Volume Two. 19 years earlier, Sonny was one of the first established leaders to recruit Roy for a recording date, the 1991 album Here's to the People. For that occasion the tenor saxophone colossus composed, "Young Roy."
In a tweet this weekend, Rollins said, “Having been fortunate to play with the super, super trumpet stars of the day, I found it inconceivable that this new kid on the block could be in that class, could be that good. He was. He is, and will always be.” Clifford Brown was one of those "trumpet star" colleagues. Here's Roy evoking Brownie on "Ghost of a Chance," which he played with pianist Spike Wilner's trio at Smalls in New York City.
As a jazz player, Hargrove had it all: technique, creative fire, lyrical grace, and a galvanizing energy on the bandstand. He was renowned before his 20th birthday, but despite his youth, he evinced an old soul aura that summoned earlier masters, and his Grammy-winning album Habana was a masterpiece of Latin jazz.
Here's Roy in Paris playing Charlie Parker's classic blues, “Parker’s Mood,” which suddenly feels as elegiac as Lennie Tristano's "Requiem" was for Bird. It calls to mind a mantra of Hargrove’s, "Don't close the door on bebop.”
And here's Roy reecalling his youth in Texas and the formative experience of hanging out at Bradley's in the early '90s in an interview conducted in the backroom kitchen of the Village Vanguard.
November 7, 2018
Washington Informer
The music world paid tribute to Grammy-winning jazz trumpeter Roy Hargrove, who died in New York on Friday, Nov. 2 at the age of 49.
In a somber tweet, Erykah Badu posted a large symbol of a heart next to Hargrove’s name while songstress Anita Baker praised the jazz icon as “Tonal, Melodic, from BeBop to Hip-hop. Soulful, brilliant, young master.”
Born Oct. 16, 1969, in Waco, Texas, Hargrove manifested signs of musical aptitude as a young child, and after borrowing an old Bundy cornet, was instructed from the elementary grades through junior high school by teacher Dean Hill, according to an online biography.
Hargrove soon became familiar with the recordings of Maynard Ferguson, Clifford Brown and Freddie Hubbard, and in the spring of 1987, he met the man who would galvanize his dreams of a professional career: trumpet superstar Wynton Marsalis.
Hargrove soon became familiar with the recordings of Maynard Ferguson, Clifford Brown and Freddie Hubbard, and in the spring of 1987, he met the man who would galvanize his dreams of a professional career: trumpet superstar Wynton Marsalis.
When Marsalis made an unannounced visit to the Dallas Arts Magnet, Hargrove’s school, he was so impressed by the young man’s musical talents that he immediately arranged special studies for him. He also recommended the assistance of manager-producer Larry Clothier, and as a result Hargrove had the opportunity to travel to New York, Europe and Japan. He soon became a member of the New York jazz community.
After graduating from High School in June 1988, Roy spent the Summer in Europe, where he had the opportunity to play in several major Festivals, sharing the stage with musical luminaries as Clifford Jordan, Jerome Richardson or Tete Montoliu. That fall, he entered college at the Berklee School of Music on various scholarships, including one from Down Beat magazine, which had selected him as best jazz soloist of the year. In 1990, Roy moved to New York, where he enrolled in the New School’s Jazz and Contemporary Music program.
Eventually, Hargrove would go on to win a Grammy for best Latin jazz album for 1998’s “Habana,” and again in 2002 for best jazz instrumental album with “Directions in Music: Live at Massey Hall,” with co-leaders Herbie Hancock and
Michael Brecker.
“He is literally the one man horn section I hear in my head when I think about music,” Questlove, drummer for hip-hop group and “The Tonight Show” house band The Roots, wrote on Instagram. “Love to the immortal timeless genius that will forever be Roy Hargrove y’all.”
Roy Hargrove
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
ROY HARGROVE
Roy Anthony Hargrove (October 16, 1969 – November 2, 2018) was an American jazz trumpeter. He won worldwide notice after winning two Grammy Awards for differing types of music in 1997 and in 2002. Hargrove primarily played in the hard bop style for the majority of his albums, especially performing jazz standards on his 1990s albums.
Hargrove was the bandleader of the progressive group the RH Factor, which combined elements of jazz, funk, hip-hop, soul, and gospel music. Its members have included Chalmers "Spanky" Alford, Pino Palladino, James Poyser, Jonathan Batiste, and Bernard Wright. His longtime manager was Larry Clothier.
Biography
Hargrove was born in Waco, Texas, to Roy Allan Hargrove and Jacklyn Hargrove.[1][2][3] When he was 9, his family moved to Dallas, Texas.[2] He took lessons on trumpet and was discovered by Wynton Marsalis when Marsalis visited the Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Dallas. One of his most profound early influences was a visit to his junior high school by saxophonist David "Fathead" Newman, who performed as a sideman in Ray Charles's Band.[4]
Hargrove spent one year (1988–1989) studying at Boston's Berklee College of Music but could more often be found in New York City jam sessions. He transferred to the New School in New York. His first recording there was with the saxophonist Bobby Watson. Shortly afterwards he made a recording with Superblue featuring Watson, Mulgrew Miller, Frank Lacy, and Kenny Washington. In 1990 he released his first solo album, Diamond in the Rough, on the Novus/RCA label. He was commissioned by the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra and wrote The Love Suite: In Mahogany which premiered in 1993.
In 1994, now contracted to Verve, he recorded With the Tenors of Our Time, with Joe Henderson, Stanley Turrentine, Johnny Griffin, Joshua Redman, and Branford Marsalis. He recorded Family in 1995, then experimented with a trio format on the album Parker's Mood in 1995, with bassist Christian McBride and pianist Stephen Scott.
Hargrove won the Grammy Award for Best Latin Jazz Album in 1998 for Habana with Crisol, the Afro-Cuban band he founded.[3] He won his second Grammy for Best Jazz Instrumental Album in 2002 for Directions in Music: Live at Massey Hall with co-leaders Herbie Hancock and Michael Brecker.
In 2000, Hargrove used a jazz sound with a lot of groove and funk, performing and recording with neo soul singer D'Angelo, resulting in Voodoo. Hargrove also performed the music of Louis Armstrong in Roz Nixon's musical production "Dedicated To Louis Armstrong" as part of the Verizon Jazz Festival. In 2002, he collaborated with D'Angelo and Macy Gray, the Soultronics, and Nile Rodgers, on two tracks for Red Hot & Riot, a compilation album in tribute to the music of afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti. He acted as sideman for jazz pianist Shirley Horn and rapper Common on the album Like Water for Chocolate and in 2002 with singer Erykah Badu on Worldwide Underground.
Personal life and death
A quiet and retiring person in life, Hargrove struggled with kidney failure.[5] He died of cardiac arrest brought on by kidney disease on November 2, 2018 at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. According to his manager, Larry Clothier, Hargrove had been on dialysis for the last 14 years of his life.[2]Discography
As leader
- 1990: Diamond in the Rough (Novus)
- 1991: Public Eye (Novus)
- 1992: Tokyo Sessions, Roy Hargrove and Antonio Hart (Novus)
- 1992: The Vibe (Novus)
- 1993: Jazz Futures: Live in Concert (Novus)
- 1993: Of Kindred Souls: The Roy Hargrove Quintet Live (Novus)
- 1993: Beauty and the Beast – The Jazz Networks (Novus)
- 1994: Blues 'n Ballads – The Jazz Networks (Novus)
- 1994: Approaching Standards – compilation of tracks from 4 albums (BMG Music/Jazz Heritage 1995)
- 1994: With the Tenors of Our Time – The Roy Hargrove Quintet (Verve)
- 1995: Family (Verve)
- 1995: Parker's Mood – with Christian McBride (bass), and Stephen Scott (piano) (Verve)
- 1997: Habana – Roy Hargrove's Crisol (Verve), Latin Jazz Grammy Winner
- 2000: Moment to Moment – Roy Hargrove with Strings (Verve)
- 2002: Directions in Music: Live at Massey Hall – co-led by Herbie Hancock, Michael Brecker (Verve), Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Album, Individual or Group 2003
- 2003: Hard Groove – The RH Factor (Verve)
- 2004: Strength – The RH Factor (EP, Verve)
- 2006: Distractions – The RH Factor (Verve)
- 2006: Nothing Serious (Verve)
- 2008: Earfood – The Roy Hargrove Quintet (EmArcy)
- 2009: Emergence – The Roy Hargrove Big Band (Groovin' High)
As sideman
- 1988: Bobby Watson & Horizon – No question about it
- 1988: Superblue – Superblue (Blue Note)[6]
- 1989 Manhattan Projects – Dreamboat
- 1989: Carl Allen & Manhattan Projects – Piccadilly Square
- 1989: Ricky Ford – Hard Groovin' (Muse)
- 1990: With Frank Morgan – A Lovesome Thing (Antilles)
- 1990: Ralph Moore – Furthermore (Landmark)
- 1991 Antonio Hart – For the First Time
- 1991: Charles Fambrough – The Proper Angle
- 1991: Jazz Futures – Live in Concert (Novus)
- 1991: Sonny Rollins – Here's to the People (Milestone), on "I Wish I Knew" and "Young Roy" only
- 1992: Jackie McLean – Rhythm of the Earth
- 1992: Jazz Networks – Beauty And The Beast (BMG)
- 1992: Danny Gatton, Joshua Redman, Bobby Watson, Franck Amsallem, Charles Fambrough, Yuron Israel – New York Stories (Blue Note)
- 1993: Bob Thiele Collective – Lion Hearted
- 1993: Steve Coleman – The Tao of Mad Phat (Novus)
- 1993: Jazz Networks – Blues 'N Ballads (BMG)
- 1994: David Sanchez – Sketches of Dreams
- 1994: Johnny Griffin – Chicago-New york-Paris
- 1994: Marc Cary – Cary On
- 1994: Rodney Kendrick – The Secrets of Rodney Kendrick
- 1995: Shirley Horn – The Main Ingredient (Verve)
- 1995: Christian McBride – Gettin' to It
- 1995: Jimmy Smith – Damn!
- 1996: Jimmy Smith – Angel Eyes: Ballads & Slow Jams
- 1996: Cedar Walton – Composer (Astor Place)
- 1996: Oscar Peterson – Meets Roy Hargrove and Ralph Moore (Telarc), with Ralph Moore, Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen and Lewis Nash
- 1997: Kitty Margolis – Straight up with a Twist
- 1998: Shirley Horn – I Remember Miles (Verve)
- 2000: Ray Brown Trio – Some of My Best Friends Are... The Trumpet Players (Telarc)
- 2000: Erykah Badu – Mama's Gun
- 2000: D'Angelo – Voodoo
- 2000: Common – Like Water for Chocolate
- 2001: Roy Haynes – Birds of a Feather: A Tribute to Charlie Parker
- 2002: Natalie Cole – Ask A Woman Who Knows "I'm Glad There Is You" (Verve)
- 2003: Erykah Badu – Worldwide Underground
- 2003: Shirley Horn – May the Music Never End (Verve)
- 2006: Anke Helfrich – Better Times Ahead
- 2006: John Mayer – Continuum
- 2006: Steve Davis – Update
- 2007: Jimmy Cobb Quartet – Cobb's Corner
- 2007: Randal Corsen – Armonia
- 2008: John Beasley – Letter to Herbie
- 2008: Johnny Griffin – Live At Ronnie Scott's
- 2008: Roy Assaf & Eddy Khaimovich Quartet – Andarta (Origin)
- 2009: Jimmy Cobb Quartet – Jazz in the Key of Blue, with Russell Malone (guitar) and John Webber (bass)
- 2010: Marcus Miller with L'Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte Carlo – A Night in Monte Carlo (Dreyfus/Concord Jazz), with Raul Midón
- 2010: Angelique Kidjo – Õÿö, on "Samba pa ti" only
- 2011: Cyrille Aimée – Cyrille Aimée & Friends (Live at Smalls)
- 2011: Laïka Fatien - Come A Little Closer
- 2011: Roy Haynes – Roy-Alty
- 2011: Stan Killian – Unified
- 2014: D'Angelo – Black Messiah
- 2015: Ameen Saleem – The Grove Lab
- 2017: Johnny O'Neal – In The Moment
- 2018: The 1975 – A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships
References
- Wynn, Ron. "Superblue". AllMusic. Retrieved February 7, 2014.
External links
 |
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Roy Hargrove. |
- Roy Hargrove discography at Discogs
- Roy Hargrove at Emarcy Records
- Roy Hargrove at Verve Records
- Roy Hargrove at Jazz Trumpet Solos
- Roy Hargrove Quintet: Earfood album review at AllMusic
- Hard Groove album review in Vibe magazine
THE MUSIC OF ROY HARGROVE: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH ROY HARGROVE:
Roy Hargrove Quintet 'Top Of My Head' | Live .
roy hargrove quintet - close your eyes -
Herbie Hancock Quintet playing John Coltrane's tune "Transition", live in Vienne, 2002:
Herbie Hancock Quintet - Live in Vienne 2002 - Transition
Michael Brecker - Tenor Saxophone
Roy Hargrove - Trumpet
George Mraz - Bass
Willie Jones - Drums
