But with Emergence a year later, Hargrove’s familiarity with big orchestras surfaced in a sophisticated confection of Ray Charlesian bluesiness, hip Count Basiesque swing, and the floating, vaporous chords of the classic Davis/ Gil Evans ensembles.Īnd though this quiet, slightly built Hargrove was no extravagant showman, he knew how to turn an audience on. With Earfood in 2008, his vibrant band of young recruits shrewdly captured the 60s soul-jazz atmosphere unleashed by stars such as Lee Morgan and Horace Silver. Hargrove always sought to deepen his knowledge of African-American music so that – as he once put it to the New York Times – “maybe I’ll be able to develop something that hasn’t been done yet”.Īt the Jazz Cafe in London in 2003, when Hargrove introduced his new RH Factor band, and featured soul vocals and hip-hop grooves alongside the jazz swing that had so long preoccupied him, his ensemble sound seemed to bridge that of a D’Angelo R&B outfit, a 60s soul-bop group, and one of Miles Davis’s late-career electric ensembles but in the same year, he reminded fans of his deep roots when he shared a Grammy award for best jazz instrumental with Herbie Hancock and Michael Brecker for their work on the album Directions In Music. Hargrove began his jazz career in the late 80s sounding as if he could have dropped neatly into a classic Blue Note Records session band of 20 years earlier – and looking like it, too, in his sharp suits, natty hats and shades.īut as the years passed, Hargrove found himself less dedicated to Marsalis’s fastidious avoidance of pop/jazz crossovers – and by the turn of the millennium, he was often working with such creative neo-soul vocal stars as D’Angelo and Erykah Badu, and helping to spur new fusions of jazz, soul, hip-hop and R&B that would bring eager younger listeners to jazz. One of the most gifted of them was the trumpeter and flugelhornist Roy Hargrove, who has died aged 49 after a cardiac arrest. When the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis emerged as the champion of a return to traditional acoustic-jazz values in the 1980s, his single-minded charisma inspired talented disciples all over the world.

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