There’s a scene in the poignant documentary Hargrove where Erykah Badu gets teary-eyed recalling the late Dallas trumpeter Roy Hargrove.
The two had been tight since the ‘80s, when both were learning their craft at Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts. By 2003, Badu was the bigger star of the two. But she was still nervous when the pint-size trumpeter with the big, muscular tone invited her to sing on his genre-blurring album Hard Groove.
“It’s intimidating to play with such a gifted musician, even though we were great friends,” says Badu, an executive producer of the film.
Hargrove had that effect on people. And for good reason.
One of the most soulful players in jazz, he was a legend the moment he put out his debut album in 1990. Onstage, he was an exquisite improviser. On record, he was a gifted composer and shapeshifter, jumping from bebop to hip-hop to funk and beyond. When he experimented with Cuban music on the 1997 album Habana, he nabbed his first Grammy.
An entire generation of young jazz players idolized him. “He was our hometown hero. He was, like, the goal,” Norah Jones once told me.
Sadly, he crossed the finish line way too soon. Hargrove was just 49 when he died in 2018 of complications from kidney disease, after years of battling drug addiction.
First-time director Eliane Henri — a long-time friend of Hargrove’s — doesn’t shy away from the thorny side of Hargrove’s story in the film, which is now streaming on pbs.org and the PBS app. Wisely, she doesn’t make it the movie’s main focus either. Instead, she deals with it quickly and sensitively.
Wynton Marsalis — who helped discover Hargrove in 1986 during a visit to Booker T. — talks about sending his young disciple to rehab, with no success. “I should have been more proactive,” he says in the film.
The movie then jumps to Europe, where Hargrove was on tour in 2018, struggling to stay clean. “I’m fighting with myself,” he says. “I really want to go outside and try to find some drugs, but I can’t do that.”
Honest moments like those prompted Aida Brandes-Hargrove and Kamala Hargrove, his widow and daughter, to issue a statement saying the trumpeter never saw or approved the final movie. “While the film contains some beautiful and important footage of Roy, this is not the film he envisioned.”
It truly is a beautiful movie, shot mostly on the Mediterranean coast of Italy and France in 2018. It turned out to be Hargrove’s final tour.
While Henri was denied the rights to use the trumpeter’s own compositions, she includes stunning scenes of Hargrove covering classics like Miles Davis’ “So What” and Michael Jackson’s “Rock With You.” His radiant trumpet style comes through loud and clear. So does his passion for teaching young musicians at the all-night jam sessions he thrived on.
“He’s here every night, trying to push us in different ways,” a wide-eyed young pianist says at a New York jazz club.
There are plenty of light-hearted scenes, too. Hargrove explodes in delight when when he scores an expensive pair of sneakers he’s been coveting. Later, out of the blue, he croons the entire theme song to The Beverly Hillbillies.
At other times, the movie is heartbreaking. Filmed in the last two years of the musician’s life, Hargrove finds the trumpeter looking tired and frail as he stops walking so he can catch his breath and light up another cigarette. Henri — who’s very much a part of the film, onscreen and off — asks him about the grueling kidney dialysis he’d been undergoing for more than a decade and presses him on why he’s not seeking a kidney transplant.
“Right now, I’m on the fence about it … eventually, I’ll do something,” he says, his eyes hidden by omnipresent shades.
There’s a cinema verité element to Hargrove, especially the scene where he and his longtime manager Larry Clothier yell at each other about what Henri can and cannot film. That leads to a long tangent where Hargrove’s friends debate whether Clothier was fleecing his client, an accusation the trumpeter flatly denies: “He’s like a father to me.”
The film includes incisive commentary from more than a dozen of Hargrove’s colleagues, including two of jazz’s greatest living elders, Sonny Rollins and Herbie Hancock. “I had no idea how amazing he was. [His playing] was like lightning,” Hancock says, recalling their first jam session at Caravan of Dreams in Fort Worth when Hargrove was 17.
But as deep as Hargrove goes in defining his music, a few chapters are missing in his life story. The movie skips over his unconventional childhood, which saw young Roy living with relatives, not his parents, for a big chunk of his early life. And it never explores how, as a shy teenager, Hargrove was totally unequipped to deal with the white-hot spotlight, the hype and the temptations that came with sudden fame.
“When I first heard about Roy, frankly, I was a little worried about him. There was so much attention being paid to this young kid, and I didn’t want the industry to overrun him, you know?” trumpeter Terence Blanchard told me last year.
Yet those are minor quibbles about an eloquent film that captures the power of Hargrove’s music and the ultimate sadness of his story. Near the end of the film, Henri sits next to Hargrove in a French cemetery and asks him his thoughts on death.
“No!” he says, laughing. “I don’t want nothin’ to do with that yet … I guess, maybe because I’m close to it.”
Hargrove isn’t a feel-good music doc that will ever show up on the “Top 10 Movies on Netflix Right Now” list. It’s a complicated portrait of an all-too-brief life that recalls Let’s Get Lost, the famous 1988 documentary about another doomed trumpeter, Chet Baker.
Let’s hope aspiring young jazz players watch both films and try to emulate the superb musicianship, not the musicians’ lifestyles.
