Earfood for Life
Roy Hargrove at Newport Jazz Festival 2018
Photo: Jazz Times magazine
I first heard Earfood about two or three years after it was released. I came to Roy Hargrove through this album. Much like people of my generation, if you were not in a jazz combo in high school, this music was a foreign tongue. It was the stuff elders listened to. When I became enthralled by the music, my friends would often rag on me as the old soul. Now I embrace that tag, and rebuke the alternative. Lovingly.Unlike many who would come to know Roy Hargrove, I started here, with an album that included music that did not necessarily fit the Wynton Marsalis vision of Jazz™, with cuts like “Strasbourg/St. Denis” charting the way—a composition that I look forward to hearing become a standard. I started here and made my way to the beginning. Even by those standards, I was late. For there were others who I knew had been introduced through the RH Factor and albums like 2003’s Hard Groove—but what I noticed about them is that they were drawn to that sound but never made it to the places I would discover. Like Habana, Directions in Music—his Grammy-winning work, but also his—to my ears—groundbreaking work with figures like Antonio Hart, Mark Whitfield, Christian McBride, Stephen Scott, and many others, an entire generation—that swinging 90s period, connected genealogically and spiritually to—as I tell my students— the only “bop” I’m ready to listen to. I would often would hear his brilliance as a sideman to the many legends: Sonny Rollins, Oscar Peterson, Shirley Horn. Family resonated strongly when I revisited again this past Saturday. In the coming days, I will sit with the earlier records, particularly before he signed with Verve. There is a beauty to that moment, to that iteration of the music.
As I sat and meditated with this music, I have come to realize that Earfood is just as great a place to start as any other in the pantheon of the great catalogue that Hargrove has produced. It contains everything that he is (I will not say was). You hear the early virtuosity of the teenager and young adult who by all accounts took the New York straight-ahead world by storm. In the wake of his passing, I have learned more about that context. From fellow “trumpeteer,”Nicholas Payton, from Hargrove’s own mouth, from others that were there. I would have loved to be there. You see, I came to this music from the place Hargrove began. The place known as hard bop and its immediate parents. It is still where I find the best place to consider what it is and what it can be to have a music that tells the world, but more importantly, ourselves, what is to be, to live. Payton has this hashtag he uses to characterize the moment, #BackInTheNinetiesWhenKatsWasREALLYswingin. I live for those records and Hargrove is everywhere. I have much yet to discover and hear. And learn.But anyone that knows me, knows I also live for how Hargrove connected those worlds to the sort of hip hop and R&B inflected worlds of the Soulquarians. You also hear that moment in Earfood. In that period of some of the most generative musical visions, Hargrove was there, with Questlove, D’Angelo, Erykah Badu, James Posyer, and others too numerous to name—it is how folks of my generation came to know and appreciate his work. And anyone that knows me knows how much I live for the work of another artist similarly connected to this moment: the pianist, Robert Glasper. And it was clear to me as it was to Lester Spence, that the moments of generativity of that period were connected in the lives of these two musicians and to many others. Over a year before Hargrove’s passing, Glasper remarked, “Roy Hargrove was the first guy I saw that was hip. He was the only one. Roy came to my high school and had on overalls and Timberlands and I was like, “You can look like that and play jazz?!? Oh, snap! You look like me! Roy opened my eyes and catapulted me into being who I am. Now people feel it is more OK to look and sound like who they really are.” The sound produced out of Glasper’s piano—particularly the connection between the Black musics he has forged—was already in Hargrove’s trumpet. As was the style, the self-confidence of the hip hop generation’s interpretation of the music. But to leave it there would be too limiting. This is not about merely crossing over, in the way critics make a big deal of (and ultimately miss).
It is about starting from a place where the music is altogether capacious enough to contain these multitudes, ways of accessing our spirituality, accessing our sense of the possible—much deeper than a blended genre. It is about that work of creating a path out of this kind of murkiness, this sort of dis-ease. This is the music we are after, both performer and listener, and it is not to be taken lightly. For it as Esperanza Spalding says, “the performance of the truth” and “it is about the spirit.” We know what it is when we play it, when we hear it. One has to be able to see that, to play that, to imagine that. And that’s what I appreciated about Hargrove. He did that all in a solo. He played that music over the course of his life, a musical contribution too large to be known as jazz, too deep and wide to be characterized as a crossing over—unless we redefine what is being crossed, what the bridge is and who the journeyers are. Maybe later.For now, I am thinking about what it means to live in the reality that I will never witness that playing live again. But I am thinking about what Roy will mean as an ancestor too. I am ready to be moved again. I live for this music.
