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.