How a young lion of trumpet lights way for the future
You can't always get what you want, and in this instance it's a shame. The titles of Roy Hargrove's two latest CDs, released simultaneously last month, hint at his dissatisfaction with the record company's presentation of his music.
Nothing Serious is a straight-ahead recording featuring the Hargrove Quintet with guest trombonist Slide Hampton, while Distractions was recorded with his other touring group, the RH Factor, supplemented by his first musical hero, saxophonist David 'Fathead' Newman, who also features here on flute.
The RH Factor made their debut in 2003 with the punningly titled Hard Groove, which combined elements of jazz, funk and hip-hop. It got a mixed reception critically, but opened up a new audience for the trumpeter, and has been taking up increasing amounts of his time.
'I've been doing more touring with RH Factor than my quintet lately. People are turning a deaf ear to jazz. Some of that is the fault of jazz musicians trying too hard to be cerebral. They aren't having fun playing the music, and that's why people aren't coming to hear it live any more,' Hargrove says.
For a player with as much to express in a jazz context as he has, that must indeed be frustrating. From his emergence in the late 1980s - he is still only 36 - Hargrove has consistently demonstrated an ability to function highly effectively as a fresh voice without losing sight of the musical heritage that has shaped him.
His debut, 1990's Diamond in the Rough, mixed contemporary material with bop standards, while his first album for Verve, 1994's With the Tenors of Our Time, again positioned him as a man with an eye on both the future of jazz and on its illustrious past.
Johnny Griffin, Joe Henderson and Stanley Turrentine endorsed the project with their presence, but so did prominent younger voices on the instrument, including Branford Marsalis and Joshua Redman.
Parker's Mood, cut the following year with Christian McBride on bass and Stephen Scott at the piano, cemented his bop reputation, and freed him to go the Dizzy Gillespie route, exploring Cuban rhythms with a new band on Roy Hargrove's Crisol Habana.
He had become a name to conjure with, and had also created an image. His occasionally aloof manner, fashion sense, and, more importantly, understanding of the value of space, marked him out early as a natural heir to Miles Davis, and he was a logical choice for the trumpet spot in Herbie Hancock and Michael Brecker's Miles and John Coltrane-inspired Directions in Music ensemble, which appeared in Hong Kong at the 2003 Arts Festival.
Hargrove had certainly paid his jazz dues, and it was hardly surprising that he also wanted to engage with the music of his own times more fully.
Possibly the experience of working with Hancock, who has for decades maintained a career in straight-ahead jazz while pursuing other projects of limited appeal to the audience for that music, inspired him to take the plunge with RH Factor.
Just as there will always be admirers of Hancock lamenting that he is wasting his talent when he digresses far from jazz, so there are fans of Hargrove's first few albums who certainly do regard his RH Factor work as a 'distraction', hence presumably the defiant choice of title.
Calling the straight-ahead recording Nothing Serious is a similarly off-hand gesture. To some fans it is a milestone. This is the first bop set he has released in just under a decade, but not, according to the artist, the first he has recorded. There is a lot of Hargrove jazz, for which there are apparently no plans, sitting in Verve's tape vault, and it would be nice to hear some of it.
He must be well-pleased with the guests he secured for the two new albums. Slide Hampton and Fathead Newman were both important influences on his development as a musician. Hargrove played in Hampton's band, and he credits him with teaching him to arrange. 'The way Slide arranges and voices, he knows how to take a small group of horns and make it sound like an orchestra,' Hargrove says.
He credits Newman with inspiring him to learn to improvise - the great leap every musician who aspires to play jazz must make - when the sax man came to give a music lesson at his high school.
'I was about 14 when he came to Oliver Wendell Holmes Middle School in Dallas,' Hargrove says. 'Fathead did a baritone solo over our tuba and drum sections, playing Chameleon. He was making a whole lot of music without reading anything and I became fascinated with that.'
Newman, of course, made his name with Ray Charles, a man who based his career on an antipathy to segregation of any kind - racial or musical.
Newman's presence on Distractions underlines the irony of these soul-influenced tracks being forcibly separated from their straight-ahead cousins.
It's all Hargrove's music, and it should all be on one disc. The very least his audience deserves in the not too distant future is a double pack containing both albums, and while we're on the subject, how about a two-for-one of With the Tenors of Our Time and Parker's Mood?
