Roy Hargrove's Hard Groove album features a wide array of genres - funk, jazz workouts, ballads and rap - so his nine-piece live band have a lot of music to get through. They begin with an even-quaver groove tapped out by the two drummers, a lightly pulsing bass from Reggie Washington and some Zawinul-ish Rhodes piano from Bobby Sparks. Hargrove saunters on, unsmiling, lifts his trumpet to his lips and plays a perfect phrase. This heralds a slow-building, scorching solo over what we eventually realise is It's About That Time (from Miles Davis's influential album In a Silent Way). It's an impressive start: Hargrove is at the top of his game, ceaselessly inventive, with impeccable sound, timing and chops.
He has good written material, too: the signature Hardgroove, with its sneaky guitar lick and smart lead lines; the uptempo, shouting Pastor "T", by saxophonist Keith Anderson; and Forget Regret by Jacques Schwarz-Bart, the other sax player in the band, in which Renée Neufville's chiming vocals intertwine beautifully with the horn chart.
Yet there's a lack of ignition, the vital spark between players and listeners you get at a great music event - like Hargrove's gig at the Jazz Cafe last summer, for example. Maybe it's because the hall is only two-thirds full. Or maybe Hargrove's studied detachment is infectious, making everyone too cool to connect.
As the set progresses, they move further into old-school R&B territory. Hargrove sings and scats attractively on the soul-funk ballad I'll Stay. The impressive Neufville gives Juicy a jazz-reggae twist. She's under-used: it would have been nice to hear a little more of her vocals. Regrettably nearly every solo - whether sax, trumpet, guitar or keyboard, and whatever the style of song - follows the pattern of Hargrove's first trumpet outing: a sparse, quiet opening that develops slowly as the rhythm section moves up a gear, and then another - a gruelling, ferocious ascent to a screeching climax with both drummers at full tilt. They were all talented players, but after half a dozen of these increasingly predictable "dynamic" solos, I was dying to go home and listen to the Necks.
