Hargrove
I saw Eliane Henri’s documentary “Hargrove,” about her friend and jazz trumpeter and ex-classmate of mine last night at our old/new high school (the “Arts Magnet,” now famously known again as “Booker T.”) with a couple of old classmates, Tahnee and Damon. It was hard to fall asleep after I got home. It’s still in my head. This film is that good. It documents a year in Roy’s life on tour in Europe and the States and ended up an in memoria when he died shortly after returning home from that tour in 2018. He was 49 years old. It captures the career and life trajectory of a man I only ever knew as a young boy — a young boy we all knew was possessed of an extraordinary talent.
As a musician he was clearly an otherworldly force, a channel for the great creative power and poetic soul of instrumental music. But he was not just a conduit. Someone in the film said music was his language, that “he spoke music.” We’ve all known of or have been lucky enough to have met musicians who we think fit that bill — I can think of a few. What comes across in this film, and surely to anyone who knew or played with Roy, is that he fulfilled that embodied capacity as far as it was possible to in his short life.
The transformation from the high school kid as I knew him (and I didn’t really know him well — I was a classical piano student a year or so ahead of him at Arts Magnet) to the adult he became I can hardly imagine, but the images and clips Henri gives us in her film help illustrate that chrysallis. The film made me wish that I had followed his career more closely. I wish I could explain why what is so staggering to me is watching him as a grown man, as the quintessential — the ur-form — jazz musician, embodied in his style and manner and way of speaking to be sure, the outward cues, but also in the sense that being a musician was all there was room for in him and he filled that space utterly and completely. No intimate relationship outside “the gig.” I understand that he stopped recording albums in 2009 (no money in it, no way to make a living), the rest of his career pure performance, collaboration. Jamming, touring, gigging and mentoring the next generation. He livedbreathedspoke — he was — his art form.
I got the sense from seeing “Hargrove” that Roy, that musicians like Roy, are these rare human jewels. Here is this density, this mass of powerful creative energy contained in one person, orbiting as close to the source as is possible and burns so brightly before returning to that source. So few of us have our lives laid out for us like that. And I have friends who’ve made careers in music. Friends who knew somehow that they would do whatever it took, work as hard as they had to to do that. For them, comparatively, and I could be wrong, these were as much conscious choices as they were fulfilling an unconscious drive. Maybe that happens on a spectrum, given the conditions of your life, your upbringing, your ancestors. Maybe it’s because I know them and can only surmise how it was for Roy. Maybe it was seeing the juxtaposition of him as a young man with the man he became. Maybe it was having it all framed and filmed that let you see clearly his daimon at work. His genius. Something came into him from the universe, uniquely coding itself in him. You understand from watching him that there was never a choice, no other consideration, no other path.
To watch his circle of colleagues, mentors and mentees — names you’ll know when you see this film, and you really should — describe him without hesitation as heir to the legacies of Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis, and now with his own musical legacy to pass on, is a profound testament to his gift.
The filmmaker, Eliane Henri was an intimate of Roy’s. They’d been friends for 30 years. That intimacy shows in her film. They eat ice cream together. She buys him a pair of shoes. They quarrel with his manager. She’s in the shot with him. Henri’s PR around the film describes it as a love letter. And considering Roy’s untimely death and the obvious pain he endured until he died, that description is both fitting and heartbreaking.
Watch the trailer here, donate and pray this film gets picked up for wider distribution.