Jazz Trumpeter, Roy Hargrove, Dead at 49
by John Lawrence, January 15, 2019
Grammy winner Roy Hargrove was the best of the next generation of jazz musicians in my opinion. He was just a year older than my daughter. He died last November of cardiac arrest in New York City. NPR reported that Hargrove, who’d been on dialysis for many years, had been admitted to the hospital for “reasons related to kidney function” at the time of his death. Such a tragedy recalling the tragedy of Clifford Brown's early death at age 26 in a car crash late on a rainy night on the Pennsylvania turnpike.
According to NPR: "A briskly assertive soloist with a tone that could evoke either burnished steel or a soft, golden glow, Hargrove was a galvanizing presence in jazz over the last 30 years. Dapper and slight of build, he exuded a sly, sparkling charisma onstage, whether he was holding court at a late-night jam session or performing in the grandest concert hall. His capacity for combustion and bravura was equaled by his commitment to lyricism, especially when finessing a ballad on flugelhorn." He grew up in Dallas, where he attended Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, an arts magnet school.
In 2000 Hargrove's album Moment to Moment featuring the strings of the Monterey Jazz Festival Chamber Orchestra broke into Billboard's Top Jazz albums chart grabbing the #4 position. It is one of my favorite albums. Another one of my favorite albums, which I thought Hargrove was on, but actually it's trumpeter Nicholas Payton, is Fingerpainting with bassist Christian McBride and guitarist Mark Whitfield. Payton and Hargrove are my two favorite young (er than me) jazz trumpeters. The prolific Mr. McBride has a talk show on Sirius XM called "The Lowdown" on Saturday mornings at 9 AM in which he interviews other jazz musicians. My Uber and Lyft riders are treated to this show as I drive around San Diego picking them up and dropping them off. I am fortunate that, as I drive around all day in my 2018 Toyota Camry hybrid, I get to listen to jazz on Pandora, Sirius XM, iHeart radio, Slacker and many other stations from all over the world. San Diego's jazz station, KSDS, actually has better sound as an app streaming through my iphone than it does on the FM button on my radio. I have iHeart tuned to KCSM, the San Francisco Bay jazz station where Clifford Brown Junior is a disc jockey. How sweet is that!
The generation of Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Thelonius Monk has passed. That is the generation I grew up with having seen most of them at the Village Vanguard in New York City or at the Five Spot (Thelonius) or the Half Note where Al the waiter was as famous as the musicians who performed there. It's such a crying shame when the best talent of the younger generation is dying. However, there are some like Christian McBride who are carrying on the jazz tradition of their elders started by trumpeter Louis Armstrong who was born at the beginning of the 20th century. Jazz has always been primarily a motive force in the black community and the center of gravity in the jazz world is still there although it has morphed into many quasi art forms, some acceptable and some totally ersatz. There are those like Christian and Roy Hargrove who remained true to that code, however.
Some of the elders like Benny Golson, who is still alive at the age of 90, are still touring and performing. Thank God for that. Please listen to Roy Hargrove perform Golson's classic ballad, I Remember Clifford:
