Music doesn't change the world—I really don't believe that's the purpose music should have. But I think music gives people a break, where they can recharge and then maybe change themselves. Which is beautiful. | | | | Roy Hargrove in Paris, Oct. 9, 2016.
(Paul Charbit/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images) | | | | | | “Music doesn't change the world—I really don't believe that's the purpose music should have. But I think music gives people a break, where they can recharge and then maybe change themselves. Which is beautiful.”
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| | rantnrave:// From learning to play music on his father's pawn-shop cornet because the family couldn't afford the clarinet he wanted, to his discovery by WYNTON MARSALIS when he was an 11th grader at Dallas’ Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, to his arrival in New York as a precocious 20-year-old, ROY HARGROVE's backstory is the stuff of myth. Many myths, all of them true. My favorite, perhaps, is his story about hearing bebop for the first time during a demonstration by his high school principal. Hargrove had been largely self-taught, and listened mostly to funk, R&B and blues. "I asked him, 'Where do you get all this stuff?,'" he told the NEW YORK TIMES in 1990. "He said, 'I listen to CLIFFORD BROWN.' I said, 'Who?' He couldn't believe I had never heard of him. Two days later, I was sitting in my algebra class and I got called to go to the principal's office. When I got there, he sat me down and played Clifford Brown for me. Then he let me borrow all the records. I haven't been the same since.'' Teachers, parents, everyone: Nurture your kids' talents. Encourage their curiosity. Rescue them from math class and play them your old records. Hargrove, who died Friday at 49, blossomed into a giant of the trumpet and flugelhorn, a harbinger of jazz's new century, a downtown New York fixture and a generous collaborator with musicians across many universes. Jazz, for him, wasn't a section of the record store for specialists and purists; it was an open invitation to every other section of that store. The records he made with the SOULQUARIANS crew—classic albums by D'ANGELO, ERYHAH BADU, COMMON and more—continue to cast a wide shadow over soul, hip-hop and pop today, and his three albums with his own RH FACTOR were ahead of their time (and magically behind their time, too) in crossing and erasing borders behind jazz, funk and pop. But all the while, and for the rest of his life, he continued to explore and expand on bop and other jazz styles as one of the foremost players of his generation. There were substance-abuse problems and years of ill health, but he remained a jazz-club fixture until the end, and the fluidity of his playing, like the breadth of his curiosity, never wavered. RIP... Trumpeter NICHOLAS PAYTON's remembrance of Hargrove, a close friend, will have you laughing once or twice and then dripping with tears... We're not much interested in gossip here at MusicREDEF, but when someone can turn gossip in on itself and make it into a song as good as ARIANA GRANDE's serial breakup ballad "THANK U, NEXT," we are very much there for that. Grande's "I'm so f***in' grateful for my ex" hook is some kind of "thank you for the days" for the 2010s... Watching CARRIE UNDERWOOD sing the theme song for one of the most popular sports events and TV shows anywhere leaves me wondering how country radio continues to think female singers are bad for ratings in middle America. What am I missing?... MTV's EMAs had no problem with women. The big winners Sunday night included CAMILA CABELLO, DUA LIPA, CARDI B, NICKI MINAJ and JANET JACKSON... AXL ROSE and RIHANNA have things to say about PRESDIENT TRUMP using their music... Let's go crazy, say the MINNESOTA TIMBERWOLVES' new alternate jerseys. Too bad his Purpleness himself isn't around to fill in for the Timberwolves' JIMMY BUTLER... RIP also: JOSH FAUVER, TOM DIAZ, MARK FOSSON and WOLFGANG ZUCKERMANN. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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