Roy Hargrove RIP....

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

"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 Saturday morning 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; he was on dialysis for many years.

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.

Hargrove had been scheduled to perform on Saturday in a jazz vespers service at Bethany Baptist Church in Newark, N.J., as part of the TD James Moody Jazz Festival."..... Nate Chinen. WCSU.FM

Way way too young,

BN.

[Serial_Apologist]

How very sad. I liked Hargrove's unflashy but very musical approach as an improviser, (even with added multiplier effects which can cover for paucity of inventiveness), and particularly in the Directions of Music project, which was up there with the Shorter quartet for me in the great jazz stakes.

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

He was someone who really lived the jazz life and as others perhaps "bourgeoisified", he was always out in the clubs etc, "on the scene, hanging out" even when not playing himself. He reminded me a lot of Lee Morgan. Very fine player and someone who moved with the times without ever forgetting the tradition he came from. His quintet was a smashing little outfit.

All very sad.

BN.

[Joseph K]

The name rung a bell, from this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uYDBVoUjPo

RIP

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

"Joshua Redman
Twitter › Joshua_Redman
Roy Hargrove, one of the most soulful and natural musicians of our (or for that matter, of any) jazz generation: Irrepressible joy, effortless swing, boundless versatility, inimitable beauty… I remain, always and forever, in debt and in awe. RIP, Hero."

A LOT of tributes out there.

BN.

[Jazzrook]

Very sad news. A few weeks ago I bought his tribute to Charlie Parker, 'Parker's Mood'(Verve) - a drummerless trio with Christian McBride & Stephen Scott in 1995. A wonderful album.

JR

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

"Monday November 5th, WKCR will celebrate the life and work of the recently departed trumpet master, Roy Hargrove (b. 1969), who died November 2nd at the age of 49. Hargrove began his professional career in 1988 with the saxophonist Bobby Watson and in 1989, co-led the group Superblue which featured jazz greats such as Mulgrew Miller, Frank Lacy and Kenny Washington. Since then he has released over 20 albums as a leader beginning in 1990 and has played as a sideman with luminaries such as Herbie Hancock, Sonny Rollins, Johnny Griffin, Christian McBride, Erykah Badu and more. In addition to jazz, Hargrove has made Grammy winning Afro-Cuban music with his group Crisol, worked on important neo-soul and hip-hop records such as D’Angelo’s “Voodoo,” and contributed his own innovative compositions to the standard jazz repertoire. We hope you join us November 5th for 24 hours of Hargrove’s music."

WKCR is associated with Columbia University and is available on most internet radio apps. Usually very worthwhile.

BN

[burning dog]

His trumpet playing was a real joy, hugely influenced by Clifford Brown and also reminded me of Lee Morgan. He himself discovered an affinity with Louis Armstrong.

First track I heard.

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

Hargrove's "Strasbourg-St. Denis" is an incredibly catchy piece and the band always seems like they had a shed load of fun playing it - as much as the audience. There's a great live version on YouTube from the New Morning club in Paris. He could reach out and entertain with "quality", in a variety of settings, much as the Adderleys did before him.

BN

[Ian Thumwood]

Interesting reading some of the comments about Roy Hargrove because none of them really cover the range of his music. Looking back, I think I have seen him perform on four occasions. The first time I saw Hargrove was in the context of the "New Directions" band which also featured Herbie Hancock and the late Michael Brecker. I am surprised that this band had not been lauded by anyone other than SA as there was a consensus at the gig that this band was radically re-thinking jazz. Billed as a tribute to Miles and Coltrane, standards were cut and shuffled so that the form of the tunes was only loosely referred to. This was my second time at Vienne and I happened to sit next to an elderly couple, the wife of which had spent the build up to the gig explaining how she grew up listening to the greats in the 1950s and was working her way through collecting a series of French re-issues from the period. She felt like the gig was a Second Coming and was enthusiastic in her praise. I felt that this band was a revelation and nailed for more just how much potential acoustic jazz had. They truly experimented with form and song structure and I don't think Hargrove really worked in such an explorative musical situation before or since.

The second time I saw him was with his RH Factor which was so noisy and brutish that I walked out of the gig. I was hugely disappointed with this set and the amplification was so loud that it was a pain to listen to. At the time I didn't really care for anything that was electronic and it is worth recalling that this almost felt like an American response to the then popular Nu-Jazz which writers like Stuart Nicholson had suggested was going to transform jazz.


The third time I saw Hargrove was in a double bill. The first set featured his excellent big band which covered an amazing range of bases, some of them very nostalgic for a style of writing that would have been fashionable in the 1940s and 50's. Other pieces seemed to nail the contemporary mainstream but as opposed to any similarity with Lee Morgan, the obvious comparison was Dizzy Gillespie. It seems convenient for some people on here to ignore the compulsion many jazz musicians have to front a big band and I believe that this was one of the projects he was most proud of. I loved this part of the gig and even enjoyed the return visit of RH Factor which seemed to have calmed down from it's previous onslaught.


I also saw him perform in July this year with quintet of unknown musicians. He seemed to have been absent from the scene for a long while but this did not strike me as being the most remarkable thing about his re-appearance. The music was terrific and Hargrove's playing still had the ability to communicate. However, from a musical perspective the obvious reference was Dizzy Gillespie's R n; B influenced music of the 1950's. He also chose to sing on a good proportion of the numbers. It was an enjoyable set yet exceedingly retrospective and indeed populist. This is music that communicated to a broader audience and I sometimes wondered if this was his ultimate intention. Compared to the set by Ambrose Akinmusire, Hargrove was very conservative whereas Akinmusire sounded like an avant garde Kenny Dorham. The history and sense f tradition may have been with Hargrove set the younger musician certainly gave the impression that the baton had been well and truly passed on.

I feel obliged to say that I am somewhat on the fence about Roy Hargrove. There is some brilliant music that he put on disc but for a musician of his calibre he should have produced a larger recorded legacy. It is a shame that he had some demons which ultimately claimed him. Given the stories that regularly manifested themselves on the AAJ chatroom=m, I cannot say this sad news is a surprise. He was a player who consolidated a tradition and whilst more multi-faceted than the Lee Morgan clone suggested in this thread, I think some of the projects like RH Factor were of there time. I really like the big band album which is great fun and has some good writing but for the more "serious" work, the obvious starting point is the New Directions groups which is somewhat indicative that his ability as an improvisor went beyond the Hard Bop trope of the likes of Marsalis and Blanchard. I totally concur with Bluesnik's assessment about Hargrove's music having the trait of communicating - something he shares with another musician sadly under-rated on this board - Kenny Garrett. For me, Roy Hargrove's gigs were usually very enjoyable yet I think his time had been and gone and he effectively squandered his talent. It is extremely tragic because this kind of player is becoming increasingly rare these days. Interesting to see that the trumpeters who are getting the media attention at the moment ( Ambrose Akinmusire, Jaimie Branch, Josh Berman, Nate Woolley,etc) are no longer coming from the Hard Bop tradition with the avant garde definitely taking the position that influence of a player like Lee Morgan had 20-30 years ago.

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

I purposely didn't refer to the many stories of Hargrove's personal issues, of which, as you suggest, there are many tales, most of which are no one's business, except when he didn't show or "was not at home", as someone once said about Dexter Gordon. I think your summary is good, I really did like his playing. One thing omitted, of which he was also proud, was his work with Latin bands and his own Latin projects. I've just been listening to some of those. Maybe there's a Dizzy link there also. I've also seen a tribute from Anita Baker and he did work in a lot of other "popular" areas.

BTW, from all the comments I've read, he was extremely generous with his time and expertise with younger musicians and even school level players. I think he knew he was part of that tradition and in one of the interviews I've seen he bemoaned that some of his contemporaries had become detached from jazz "as a scene", the community "life" of the thing. I don't think he was ever that.

BN.

[Ian Thumwood]

I purposely didn't refer to the many stories of Hargrove's personal issues, of which, as you suggest, there are many tales, most of which are no one's business, except when he didn't show or "was not at home", as someone once said about Dexter Gordon. I think your summary is good, I really did like his playing. One thing omitted, of which he was also proud, was his work with Latin bands and his own Latin projects. I've just been listening to some of those. Maybe there's a Dizzy link there also. I've also seen a tribute from Anita Baker and he did work in a lot of other "popular" areas.

BTW, from all the comments I've read, he was extremely generous with his time and expertise with younger musicians and even school level players. I think he knew he was part of that tradition and in one of the interviews I've seen he bemoaned that some of his contemporaries had become detached from jazz "as a scene", the community "life" of the thing. I don't think he was ever that.

BN.

There are quite a few records where Hargrove materialised on other people's projects. In my own collection, I have discs where he performed with Shirley Horn when the Verve label was hitting a run of form that probably exceeded the output the record was making in it's alleged heyday. There are some superb discs on Verve from that era. But as I alluded, he also worked with a lot of pop and Rap acts and this was another side of his playing which has largely been ignored in this thread. I think he played on one of the discs by Angelique Kidjo also ("Oyo") and the notion that he was simply a Hard Bop player with respective for the heritage really undersells what he was about. For me, he was a player who definitely was looking beyond the hard and fast notions of jazz and, for this reason, I think most people contributing to this thread may be under-appreciating how broad the scope of his work was. The only think he didn't really flirt with as out and out traditional jazz or the avant garde but so suggest he was a "mainstream" player really underplays the contexts within which he worked. It would be easy to lazily categorise him as a "New Neo" yet he had his fingers in so many pies that this does him a disservice.

It is thankfully the case that narcotics abuse is not as significant a problem these days as it was up until the 1970s. In recent years, the two most high profile casualties have been Kenny Kirkland and Hiram Bullock. Hargrove's passing is so sad because he was a musician who respected the heritage as opposed to so many younger ( European) musicians who have spent most of the 2000's rejected it and also because he should have left behind a far more consistent recorded legacy. I think his last official release was "Emergence" in 2009 - over nine years ago.

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

From Nate Chinen's NPR Hargrove Obit...

"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"

BN.

[Alyn_Shipton]

We have a tribute to Roy (with interview) in Jazz Now a week tonight 12 Nov.

[Serial_Apologist]

We have a tribute to Roy (with interview) in Jazz Now a week tonight 12 Nov.

That should be really good. Thanks Alyn.