Roy Hargrove’s RH Factor album is a real breath of fresh
air that seems to greatly expand the possibilities for jazz
musicians and R&B/hip-hop performers to cross-pollinate
their respective music with new ideas and sounds. Though straight
ahead jazz listeners will not find a lot here that they can
relate to, adventurous music fans will welcome the sound of
new possibilities. Likewise, there’s not enough straightforward
rap or chart-breaking stuff here to satisfy hardcore hip-hop
or R&B fans, but those who follow some of the guest artists
who appear on Hard Groove will surely appreciate
the jams that Roy and the band lay down.
Hargrove sidesteps one pitfall of combining jazz with more
current black popular music forms, and that is the mistake
(made since Miles Davis’s doo-bop album and
repeated by many others) of simply including too much rap,
or of collaborating with artists who are not particularly
sympathetic to the spontaneous nature of jazz improvisation.
The fact is, no matter what you put underneath it, rapping
still sounds like what it is—someone reciting lyrics
with a relatively simple rhyme scheme over music. That difficulty
surfaces early in the album, with the second track, “Common
Free Style” featuring rapper Common. While the groove
is fine and the flourishes played by Hargrove and sax player
Jacques Schwarz-Bart are interesting enough, what you’ve
got at heart is a free style rap track that, ultimately, fails
to hold the listener’s interest. This is due, in large
part, to the less-than-profound nature of Common’s lyrics.
Still, he deserves some credit for being there at all.
Once we’ve gotten through the opening track, “Hardgroove,”
a nice performance that reminds me, for some reason, of a
Herbie Hancock R&B-type joint, and “Common Free
Style” the real meat of Hard Groove emerges.
D’Angelo arrives for a steamy reading of the early George
Clinton hit “I’ll Stay,” and there is much
more soul here than you’re likely to hear on what passes
for R&B to today’s radio-addled listeners. With
Bernard Wright’s Hammond B3 punctuation and the glorious
guitar work of Spanky (Chalmers Alford), D’Angelo pushes
this performance into the realm of greatness. Hargrove adds
some depth with his trumpet pronouncements, and the whole
thing makes you realize that something major is going on here.
After “Pastor ‘T’,” a composition
that features the core RH Factor group of Keith Anderson (Sax),
Bernard Wright (keyboards), Bobby Sparks (Fender-Rhodes),
Spanky (guitar), Reggie Washington (acoustic bass), and Jason
Thomas (drums), the guests return, in the persons of rapper
Q-Tip, singer Erykah Badu, and bassist Meshell Ndegeocello,
for “Poetry.” Q-Tip’s rap here is good,
much more clever than that heard previously by Common, and
it also doesn’t overstay its welcome as the second half
of the track shifts gears into a swirling piece of neo-soul
featuring the welcome vocal stylings of Badu. This is the
kind of uplifting music that can change a lousy day into a
great one.
The album continues this way, with instrumental tracks that
run the gamut from funk to soul, fusion, R&B, and even
some smooth sounds alternating with R&B/soul tracks which
feature guests (some of which include Stephanie McKay, Anthony
Hamilton, Marc Cary, Shelby Johnson, Renee Neufville, and
Karl Denson) and sound like something you could easily hear
on the radio. Hargrove is going to get (or has already gotten)
a lot of flak from jazzbos about this release, but the fact
is there is nothing here to suggest that Hargrove considers
this a jazz release. Though there is some excellent playing
on Hard Groove (such as Anderson’s alto sax
work on “Pastor ‘T’”) this isn’t
an album that focuses on improvisation or instrumental prowess.
Nonetheless, it does provide something of a blueprint for
ways that music of different genres and periods can be seamlessly
combined to make a new, and sonically pleasing, statement.
I applaud Hargrove’s efforts to do so, especially since
so much of the Hard Groove makes for such interesting
listening.
