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.