Search - Roy Hargrove :: Vibe

My favorite contemporary jazz album

05/29/2003

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I stumbled across Roy Hargrove at the Notre Dame Jazz Festival in 1995 and instantly bought up all of his records. This one is by far my favorite.There truly is something to suit all tastes in jazz on this record. "...Booty Green's" offers a raw, meaty-lip sounding trumpet in perfect accusation phrasings of the blues. "Milestones" and "The Vibe" are solid straight-ahead bop pieces with a nice middle-of-the-road tempo and activity. Milestones, in particular, has a nice juxtaposition of neat-choppy phrasing with long slurred bop lines. In "Caryisms" a smoothe groove is laid down and repeats while Hargrove's trumpet adds the perfect amount of depth and complexity over the top of it.If you like up-tempo bop, then "The Thang" is your thing. But my two favorite tracks are the lyrical ballads "Where Were You" and "Things We Did Last Summer" where Roy's warm, open sound (similar to Wynton Marsalis) perfectly suits the lush, romantic phrasing. In "Where Were You" Hargrove builds the intensity of the ballad to finish with some of my favorite bop lines of all time.If you like trumpet jazz, you should definitely give this CD a try."