Music
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.
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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.”
A few months later Clothier convinced Paul Acket, the impresario of Holland’s North Sea Jazz Festival, to bring Hargrove overseas. The youngster played in an all-star trumpet group with Marsalis, Woody Shaw, and Jimmy Owens and then toured Europe with Frank Morgan. By the time he got back to the States, his fame was beginning to spread. “Everybody thought I was crazy to throw him out there like that,” Clothier says. “But I saw how he responded in Fort Worth. It really wasn’t a gamble.”
After high school, Hargrove went to Boston’s Berklee School of Music for eighteen months on a scholarship, then transferred to the New School for Social Research in New York. He quickly became a hot item and was drawn into the marketing machinery of the jazz business. Yet as the packagers and imagemakers have shaped his career, Hargrove has concentrated on his music and the music of his trumpet heroes. He studies the records of Hubbard, Gillespie, Davis, Fats Navarro, Clifford Brown, and Kenny Dorham, and he’s a fan of two underappreciated trumpeters, Bobby Shew and Tom Harrell. “Yeah! Yeah! Tom Harrell,” he says. “His harmonic concept is so deep, man, it’s beautiful. The way he weaves in and out of the chord changes—it’s really nice to hear him play.”
Hargrove enters the contemporary lore of the jazz scene as an inveterate sitter-in, playing for hours with whoever is on the bandstand at clubs like Small’s near his Greenwich Village apartment, Deep Ellum’s Sambuca, and the lamented Chumley’s in Dallas. None of that, of course, substitutes for the kind of demanding on-the-job training Charlie Parker gave the young Miles Davis night after night or what Freddie Hubbard once described to me as “the foot in your ass” applied over the years by Art Blakey to a platoon of trumpet players who learned and flourished in his band.
McCoy Tyner, who served a five-year apprenticeship as John Coltrane’s pianist before becoming a leader, understands the supply-and-demand forces of the marketplace that have spawned the youth movement. He knows it would be unrealistic to expect an ambitious young musician to reject opportunity, but he speaks for many in older musical generations when he muses about the future of the Young Lions. “These guys have reached the pinnacle,” he says. “So what’s next for them? I was gifted as a young kid, but I was thrilled to work with older people, learn tunes, pick up their wisdom. You have to play with older musicians to get depth. It’s not the technique—it’s what the notes mean.”
Tyner’s concerns about depth and meaning came back to me at a concert by Hargrove’s band at the Wadsworth theater in Los Angeles. Hargrove, tenor saxophonist Ron Blake, bassist Gerald Cannon, drummer Karriem Riggins, and pianist Charles Craig captivated the audience with their technique and fire. Hargrove’s intensity was physical as well as musical. He moved like a shortstop, dancing, making little jumps with scissor kicks and half-turns. He radiated rhythm and excitement in his music and his presence. He played ballads beautifully on flügelhorn, the instrument that Clothier calls Hargrove’s “true voice.”
As the concert proceeded, the excitement and energy built, but a kind of smugness began clouding my enjoyment. In their interval leaps, pauses for effect, and falsetto squeals, Blake’s solos had some of the architecture but little of the cohesion of the brilliant saxophonist Wayne Shorter, an icon of the Young Lions. Hargrove also seemed to aspire to what Shorter did in the late sixties in Miles Davis’ most daring, most challenging, and least understood band. The music grew increasingly edgy and self-conscious. Soon it was clear to me, as it must have been to much of the audience, that the members of Hargrove’s band were playing to one another. The audience had to admire the game for its action, but it was not in on the rules, the strategy, or the tactics.
I reflected on what I’d been told by veteran saxophonist, composer, and historian Bill Kirchner about this kind of playing in the emerging jazz generation. “Many of them know just enough about harmony that they try for pentatonic intervals, superimposed changes, and other sophisticated harmonic devices,” he said. “They end up exposing their naiveté. They have some of the vocabulary but don’t know how to construct sentences. They haven’t fully internalized the innovations made in the early sixties by Coltrane, Shorter, Hubbard, Shaw, Booker Little, and Joe Henderson.”
After the intermission, Hargrove’s band came back with a straight-ahead blues at the tempo of a comfortable walk. The uncomplicated swing and directness in the playing of Hargrove, Blake, and Craig brought the audience back inside the music. Cheers filled the theater. In his flügelhorn solo on Johnny Griffin’s “When We Were One,” Hargrove again projected deep feeling in a ballad. Then, following a workout on his old hero David Newman’s “13th Floor,” he played an encore. It was “September in the Rain,” a 1937 Harry Warren song with a pert melody and a pleasant harmonic structure. Blake abandoned the tension and striving of his Shorterisms in favor of a solo that in its relaxation and wit was his most affecting work of the night. Aside from a misfired attempt to quote the theme from Bonanza, Hargrove played with the artlessness and clarity that he has yet to realize are his most attractive qualities.
Roy Hargrove may not see a need to, but he can probably overcome the disadvantages of his advantaged youth. As he collects awards, royalties, and praise, it will require a struggle for balance and growth to compensate for what he missed by not being on the band bus. But it would be a mistake to dismiss the assessment of his Dallas teacher, Dean Hill: He was always one to keep digging and reaching for all he could.
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