The release of a new Roy Hargrove album adds another promising chapter to the carefully managed legacy of the late Dallas jazz legend.
Bern — out digitally on April 24 — marks the fourth posthumous release approved by the trumpeter’s widow, Aida Brandes-Hargrove. Recorded live in 2000 at a jazz festival in Switzerland, the album captures Hargrove in one of his most fertile periods, when he was collaborating with R&B singer D’Angelo and Erykah Badu, his old pal from Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts.
The album shifts from hushed ballads to more propulsive tracks, like his early bebop tune “Depth” and 1992’s funky “Caryisms.” Recorded with an airtight band — sax player Sherman Irby, pianist Larry Willis, bassist Gerald Cannon and drummer Willie Jones III — Bern includes extensive liner notes by former New York Times jazz critic Nate Chinen.
Wynton Marsalis, a mentor who met the trumpeter in 1986 at Booker T., was one of several friends who expressed regrets over Hargrove’s struggles. “I should have been more proactive,” Marsalis says in the film, which is now available on several platforms, including the free streamer Tubi.