PRACTICE, as the old joke says, is the best way to get to Carnegie
Hall. Roy Hargrove, the young American trumpeter who brings his quintet
to Scotland for the first time this week, confirms this. ''One day I was
sitting at home practising and I had a phone call. 'Hey, this is Sonny,'
this guy said. 'Sonny who?' I said.''
When the caller said ''Sonny Rollins'', Hargrove almost fell off his
chair. ''He said he wanted me to play with him at Carnegie Hall. I was
overjoyed. It was one of my dream gigs. We did a short rehearsal, him,
his pianist and me. On the night I came out and played a ballad, Once in
a While, and then we played a blues, which turned out to be the
highlight of the whole evening.''
Hargrove seems to have made a habit of showing up and shining on major
players' dates. He was born in Waco, Texas, and took up the cornet at
the age of nine. He had wanted to play clarinet. ''But we couldn't
afford to buy anything. My dad had a cornet laying around that he had
bought from some pawnshop, so I just played that and fell in love with
it after a couple of weeks.''
A lot of practice must have gone in over the next eight years. When
fellow trumpeter Wynton Marsalis dropped in unannounced to hear
Hargrove's high school band at Dallas Arts Magnet, the then-17-year-old
so impressed Marsalis that he was invited to sit in with the Marsalis
band at Fort Worth.
There, Hargrove acquitted himself so well that Marsalis arranged
further studies, and even enlisted his own manager, who set up musical
trips to New York, Europe, and Japan. Soon Hargrove was recording
alongside top-flight saxophonists Bobby Watson and Ricky Ford. By the
time he graduated from high school in June, 1988, he was fully initiated
into the jazz life.
Playing with older musicians, he says, has been the biggest aid to
arriving at a style which, on The Vibe, Hargrove's third album, recorded
last January, oozes confidence and clarity at all tempi. ''I try to
surround myself with musicians who can kick my ass. Musicians like Frank
Morgan, whom I went on my first tour of Europe with. I would be on the
bandstand, listening to what they do; afterwards I'd ask about how they
approached a tune, so I'd learn lots of little things from cats like him
and Jimmy Cobb, Walter Booker, Idris Mohammed. These are the masters.
There's no way you can get experience of playing with cats like those in
the classroom.''
He is still working hard to achieve ''a personal sound with an
identity so that people know it's me playing after two or three notes.''
He also stresses his concern with economy and concision, factors which
several reviewers have noted when discussing The Vibe. The point, says
Hargrove, is that audiences don't pay to hear him changing his mind
mid-sentence.
What they will hear this week is a young band which has gelled through
working together constantly over the past year.* The Roy Hargove Quintet
play at the Queen's Hall, Edinburgh, tonight.
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