ROY HARGROVE QUINTET
SATURDAY, JUNE 26 • 8 PM
PANTAGES PLAYHOUSE THEATRE
$38 (PLUS AGENCY FEES)
Trumpeter Roy Hargrove has firmly established himself as among the premier players in jazz and beyond. Ever stretching into more challenging and colourful ways to flex his musical chops, Hargrove has left indelible imprints in a vast array of artful settings. In the past decade, he has recorded an album of standards with strings (Moment to Moment), introduced his own hip hop/jazz collective, The RH Factor, and has recorded and toured with his 19-piece big band. Hargrove has also won Grammy Awards for two vastly different projects. In 1997, Roy’s Cuban-based band Crisol won the Best Latin Jazz Performance Grammy for the album Habana. And in 2002, Hargrove, Herbie Hancock, and Michael Brecker won Best Instrumental Jazz Album, Individual or Group, for their three-way collaboration Directions in Music.
Roy Hargrove was born in Waco, TX on October 16, 1969. Inspired by the gospel music he heard in church on Sundays and the R&B and funk music that played on the radio, Roy began learning the trumpet in the fourth grade. By junior high school, he was playing at an advanced level of proficiency. At 16, he was studying music at Dallas’s prestigious Booker T. Washington School for the Visual and Performing Arts.
Midway through his junior year, Roy was “discovered” by Wynton Marsalis, who was conducting a jazz clinic at the school. Impressed, Marsalis invited Roy to sit in with his band at Ft. Worth’s Caravan of Dreams Performing Arts Center. Subsequently, Hargrove was able to return to the venue over a period of the next three months, sitting in with Dizzy Gillespie, Herbie Hancock, Freddie Hubbard, and Bobby Hutcherson.
The Roy Hargrove Quintet features Justin Robinson on saxophone and flute, Jonathan Batiste on piano, Montez Coleman on drums, and Ameen Saleem on bass. Their latest CD, Earfood, was released in 2008 on Emarcy Records.
