In 1999 at Electric Lady Studios, the horn player laying down the grittiest lines on D’Angelo’s Voodoo was not a hip-hop insider but a bespoke-suited jazz purist. This episode traces Roy Hargrove from his boyhood in Waco and Dallas, where a school visit from saxophonist David Fathead Newman and a junior high teacher named Dean Hill taught him to improvise, through Wynton Marsalis hearing him at Booker T. Washington High School, Berklee, the New School, and late nights at Greenwich Village clubs like Bradley’s.

We follow his 1990 debut Diamond in the Rough, the Young Lions movement, his Grammy-winning Afro-Cuban band Crisol, his role in the Soulquarians, the RH Factor’s Hard Groove, and sessions with John Mayer, all while he privately endured 14 years of kidney dialysis. We also unpack why he stopped recording as a leader after 2010, his death at 49 in 2018, and the posthumous releases his family’s Roy Hargrove Legacy LLC has brought to light.

• Why returning to acoustic hard bop was a rebellious move for young musicians in the early 1990s
• How Habana (1997) and Directions in Music (2002) earned his two Grammy Awards
• How he unlearned polished jazz phrasing to play behind the beat for neo-soul
• The slow, wide flugelhorn vibrato that made his ballads sound fragile and human
• Archival releases including In Harmony, Grande-Terre, and the announced Live at KNKX and Burn