Mental Phrasing – Roy Hargrove

This upbeat swing shows off the range of Roy Hargrove's compositional vocabulary. Fusing contemporary and classic vernacular, Roy creates a piece that shows his mastery of modern jazz and hard bop. The interjection of a brief Latin groove at the end of the head adds further intrigue. Choose this piece to get inside Roy Hargrove's writing and explore a variety of styles neatly packaged in one excellent composition.

Roy explains, "Mental Phrasing refers to the way I compose many of my pieces. I like to write tunes in my head, without the piano or my horn, to exercise my ears." When he composed this, in late 1993, Roy's star was rapidly rising. He used his increasing name recognition both to collaborate with living legends (like the title of this release, "Tenors Of Our Time," suggests), but also maintain his quintet as "an ever-improving forum for original music and important young players." The young/old dichotomy of this phase of Roy's musical career is represented audibly in Mental Phrasing: the cheerful melody is never quite singable, the swinging groove suddenly changes, the harmony, once predictable, suddenly shifts into a new direction.