From the start of their 28-year friendship, Eliane Henri knew trumpeter Roy Hargrove was a genius. “I was 17 when I went to see his first show in LA and it was like nothing I’d experienced before,” Henri says. “Jazz was this old music to me and listening to it used to be like eating your vegetables, but here was this 20-year-old guy with a totally fresh, fully formed sound already. It was like having Miles Davis walk among us.”
In the years since that debut show in the early 90s, Hargrove’s star ascended. Winning two Grammys in 1998 and 2002 – the latter with Davis collaborator Herbie Hancock – Hargrove went on to apply his hard-swinging sound and ear for intricate arrangements to the spectrum of Black American music. He was a founding member of the experimental music group the Soulquarians, alongside drummer Questlove, singer D’Angelo and rapper Common, while his RH Factor group interweaved R&B, funk and hip-hop with jazz improvisation, earning a Grammy nomination in 2004. His 2008 album Earfood displays the perfect synthesis of his sound, playing as a mix of big-band swing and funk swagger across its 14 tracks and ultimately producing a much-covered, modern jazz standard in the track Strasbourg/St Denis.
His relationship with Henri also deepened. Whenever he came to LA for a show, he would stop by her family home for a Sunday lunch, or she would take him to jams once his set was finished. By the early 2000s, Henri was working in event management, hiring Hargrove to perform at exclusive gigs such as Stevie Wonder’s surprise birthday party. Yet he had also begun to suffer from kidney disease during that time. “He became one of my best friends,” Henri says over a video call from her LA home. “We really connected over the music and we got closer once he became ill. As the years went on, I saw first-hand how he took jazz from being a purist art form to breaking down barriers by embracing hip-hop. You can’t have Black music history now without including Roy. He’s one of our greats.”
By 2016, Henri had decided to take the plunge into documentary film-making and Hargrove was her natural subject. “His story needed to be told but no one was taking it on,” she says. “Since I was so close to him, it increasingly felt like I would have to.” She asked Hargrove’s permission and was given a tentative yes, before spending the next 18 months convincing him to allow her full access to his life of late-night jams and endless touring.
He relented, and in the summer of 2018 Henri travelled with him to Europe to film a set of dates through France and Italy. She shot gorgeous footage of Hargrove: sitting on his hotel balcony in Sète, serenading the empty night with ballads from his horn; or shuffling through the streets of Perugia, smoking and searching for gelato, before playing a sweaty, soulful set in a tiny club at midnight.
By late October that same year, the tour was over and Henri planned a homecoming with Hargrove to his childhood home of Dallas, revisiting the high school where he studied with singer Erykah Badu. But on his return to New York he fell into a coma. On 2 November he died.
“He was such a private man and even though he had been suffering from kidney disease for the last two decades of his life, he did it with quiet grace,” Henri says. “If I had asked him 10 years before to let me film him, he never would have allowed it, but he knew this was his time to tell his story. We captured lightning in that final year – he was so real and unguarded.”
The resulting film, Hargrove, is a beautiful and often heart-wrenching meditation on the trumpeter’s creative genius and the ways in which artists are exploited by the music industry. Henri centres intimate, off-the-cuff interviews with Hargrove between impressionistic details of his performances. Since filming was cut short by his sudden death, this footage is spliced with testimony from his collaborators, such as Hancock, Questlove and saxophonist Sonny Rollins, to build a detailed picture of his hectic lifestyle.
“Nothing was planned with Roy – everything was organic,” Henri says. “I didn’t want it to be a talking heads piece so it was all about following him. I had to find out from other musicians where he would jam until 4am and when we shot him in Sète, my crew had to wait in the lobby for six hours before he finally showed up. But he let us in and what we got was raw.”
Another unvarnished, unplanned element of the shoot was dealing with Roy’s longtime manager, Larry Clothier, whom Henri captures looming darkly in the background, denying the filming of certain sets and exploding in arguments with her and Hargrove about the presence of the film crew. Ultimately, Clothier blocked any use of Hargrove’s original compositions in the final film.
“I had no idea that Roy’s manager was going to be part of the story but he made himself a character,” Henri says. “At one point I thought he might have the ability to stop me. It was only Roy who kept us filming.” Henri paints a complex picture of Hargrove and Clothier’s relationship. While collaborators such as trombonist Frank Lacy claim Clothier was exploitative of his charge, Hargrove refers to his manager as a “father figure”.
At the end of the tour, Hargove is clearly exhausted from juggling dates and kidney dialysis when Henri asks him why he hasn’t had a kidney transplant yet. Hargrove responds that he wouldn’t be able to afford the six months off work to recover. “I’ll get round to it,” he says softly.
What was it like revisiting that footage after Hargrove’s death? “Making this entire film was a grieving process,” Henri says, tearing up and placing her head in her hands. “We’re all still heartbroken. For so long, I couldn’t look at the raw footage, and even now it’s hard for me to listen to Roy’s music.”
And yet Henri says she was spurred on to finish the film, as it felt like Hargrove’s final stand. “This is him telling his own story, in his own words.”
Despite the lack of his own compositions in the final cut, the film is filled with footage of Roy playing with fluidity and feeling, promising decades of music to come had his life not been cut short. “He spoke about what he was going to do next – he wanted to break the barriers of music and be all encompassing,” Henri says. “The next generation will have to continue that story now and he will be the bridge to them. He won’t be a footnote – he will have his rightful place among the constellations.”
• Hargrove screens on 6 November at the Barbican, London, as part of the Doc’n’Roll festival, with a full release date still to be announced.
