“I think a lot of people took him for granted because he was so ubiquitous,” said Rio Sacari, longtime artistic director of the Jazz Gallery.
Hargrove’s personal manager, Dale Fitzgerald, helped found Jazz Gallery in 1995 with Hargrove and vocalist Leslie Harrison. Part of that inspiration was Hargrove’s big band home. Verve paid the rent and the venue hosted shows almost every week. Things took a turn for the better in 2000 when Sakari, who started as a volunteer ticket taker but quickly began making recommendations on who to book, became artistic director and director of programming. (She recalled saying: “Roy was a handful,” Sakari said with a laugh, “and Dale didn’t have time to manage the gallery with him.”
But Hargrove still had time for the club, lending his celebrity horn to fundraising events and appearing at concerts for promising young players who were still drawing audiences. “We all looked up to him,” trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusia said in 2020. “A few times, when we played at the Jazz Gallery, I’d see Roy’s shadow in the background and we’d get into a trumpet fight. And when we did that, he kicked my ass. Ta.”
Hargrove’s shadow still looms over the Jazz Gallery, now located at 27th Street and nearing its 30th anniversary on Broadway. For the past two years, the reconstituted Roy Hargrove Big Band (managed by Brandes Hargrove and led by alto saxophonist Bruce Williams) has performed on the roof of this location on the first Thursday of most months. and one more performance scheduled for the 2024 residency on November 7th (scheduled to return in 2025)
There will be more Hargrove music coming to New York soon. At the Winter Jazz Festival this January, members of Crisol will reunite to perform the song “Grantaire.” Brandes-Hargrove continues the Hargrove Legacy project, which evaluates unreleased material and mining arrangements for big bands from notes and recordings left behind by Hargrove.
She is also putting together repertoire for the reconstituted Roy Hargrove Quintet, which poses a challenge because, as Jones pointed out, “Roy didn’t use charts.” Songs were prepared at soundcheck, worked out on the bandstand every night, and were rarely written down. The music was inside him, but that doesn’t mean it won’t come out again.
