We’re still reeling in the MusiQology orbit over the premature passing of trumpeter and boundary-crosser Roy Hargrove. MusiQology band member and director of the Penn Music Department’s jazz combos Matthew Clayton combines an analysis of Hargrove’s impact with personal remembrances as a fellow horn player and jazz voice.
“Oh, you got the new one!” Roy Hargrove said as he signed my Michael Jordan baseball cap. He was referring to his album Roy Hargrove Quintet with the Tenors of Our Time, released in 1994. I’d bought it in part because of the appearance of saxophonist Joshua Redman on the album, who was my musical hero at the time, but also because Roy Hargrove was my favorite young professional jazz trumpeter. Redman was also there, and he also signed the same cap that Roy Hargrove did. Roy Hargrove was a featured performer at the now-defunct Mellon PSFS Jazz Festival in Philadelphia; he signed my baseball cap before taking the stage for a performance honoring Philadelphia-born jazz bassist Christian McBride, who played with Hargrove frequently. I had been playing saxophone for four years.
When I heard the news that Roy Hargrove had passed on November 2, 2018, at the young age of 49, I dug up that old signed baseball cap, and thought of the impact that he has had on my life, and on jazz music more broadly.
Roy Hargrove was a jazz trumpet stylist who had the ability to make the trumpet sound idiosyncratic in our present historical moment. This was extremely rare. His sound, though his own, was almost a combination of Clifford Brown and Lee Morgan in timbre and proficiency: Like Brown and Morgan, Hargrove was able to make even the most difficult of musical passages sound easy. This was one of his special gifts in addition to an ebullient approach to phrasing and dynamics. There was a definite “magic” to his playing, and while a master of bebop and all of its consequents, he was able to fuse the cerebral with the purely “fun,” something also extremely rare in jazz circles in the 21st century.
Another aspect of Roy Hargrove’s career that I would like to highlight is how he was at the forefront of what has now become, for lack of a better term, a jazz/hip hop fusion that has subsequently taken hold in the pop culture mainstream this past decade. The fusion of jazz and hip hop is nothing new; it began primarily in the early 1990s with Guru and Jazzmatazz, The Roots, and A Tribe Called Quest, among others. Yet at the time, in the 1990s, jazz and hip hop seemed to have a more cursory relationship, given that in these early incarnations each genre seemed to have a hard time compromising its most salient aspects when fusing. However, the more recent rise of jazz celebrities like pianist Robert Glasper, saxophonist Kamasi Washington, and bassist/vocalist Esperanza Spalding—and even tangentially the rap virtuoso Kendrick Lamar, whose GRAMMY-winning album To Pimp a Butterfly has many jazz elements—has shown that such a union of genres can be extremely popular and deeply profound. Roy Hargrove was a pioneer in this same type of fusion several years before these four musicians; though curiously, Hargrove’s efforts received less widespread attention than these aforementioned artists.
In 2003, Roy created the RH Factor, a hip hop/jazz collective that brought together his original compositions with such hip hop and R&B stars as Common, D’Angelo, Erykah Badu, Q-Tip and a list of other jazz and soul music stars. Previously, as early as 1999, he had appeared on albums by Badu, D’Angelo, and Common with much acclaim under the aegis of the Soulquarians, a late ‘90s and early 2000s soul music/hip-hop collective. Yet in light of the success of someone like, say, Glasper, Hargrove’s mainstream success was more limited (thankfully, Hargrove was deservedly a widely acknowledged star in the jazz world). Roy Hargrove was embraced by all of the hip hop and soul music artists with whom he collaborated, and they all saw him as a leading light in hip hop/jazz fusion. Thus, I believe that Roy Hargrove’s efforts directly set the stage for the successes of Glasper, Washington, and Spalding, and they, among others, are indirectly indebted to him for his dogged dedication to musical excellence when fusing jazz and popular music genres.
Read MusiQology’s tribute to Roy Hargrove from this past fall.
I had the pleasure of hearing Roy Hargrove four times live between 1994 and 2015. The last time that I heard him, in 2015, comes with a personal story: In the summer of 2015, I had made many sojourns to New York City, the testing ground for any jazz musician. On one late night at Zinc Bar, at a jam session where I was sitting in, Roy Hargrove had come to sit in as well. I had already played my tunes, and I came out to the dining area, only to turn and see Roy Hargrove standing right next to me. Diminutive in stature, but gigantic in aura, he wore a combination of pastels and bright colors. When he stood up to the mic to start playing, someone next to me whispered, “Here we go!” echoing the excitement that his presence and playing garnered.
“Here we go.” As a master jazz musician, a “sound,” a leader, and a bridge between old and new, Roy Hargrove was someone whose music was the embodiment of the jazz spirit. In the African American church tradition, there is something called “catching the spirit.” Every time that he played the trumpet, Roy allowed “the spirit” to flow through him. It completely took him over. We have lost one of our brightest lights, both in the jazz world and in the music world more broadly. Here we go.
I’d love to hear that sound one more time.
In person.
Dr. Matthew Clayton is a saxophonist, composer, professor, educator, and recording artist. Dr. Clayton earned his B.A. in Music from Yale University, and his Masters and PhD in Music from Harvard University. As a saxophonist, he is a disciple of the bebop school of saxophone playing, with Charlie Parker being his greatest influence. In 2014, Dr. Clayton released his debut album, On The Move, on his own record label, Sound Beacon, LLC. Dr. Clayton is currently Director of Jazz Combos at the University of Pennsylvania, on the faculty of the Nelly Berman School of Music, and a Lecturer at Princeton University.
Share On Facebook
Tweet It
