Hip-Hop & Bop

Another vaunted baton-passing at the three-quarter-mile mark this week is the pairing of superstar trumpeter (and sometime Roy Haynes protégé) Roy Hargrove with firmament trombonist Slide Hampton at the Blue Note. It promises audiences a live preview of Nothing Serious, a CD due out this May of mostly new music in the standards tradition.

The question is whether their sessions will prove a summit meeting of their mellifluous horn talents or a showcase of Oedipal conflict; plenty to hope for under either scenario.

Hargrove is the adopted son of every first family of American jazz with an extant line. In addition to Haynes and Hampton, whom Hargrove joined on Dedicated to Diz in 1993, toss in Herbie Hancock, Joe Henderson and Bill Higgins. He's as beholden to Wynton Marsalis as any other talent discovered by that potent taskmaster.

But Hargrove has aggressively sought out other influences.: Crisol, his band anchored by Cuban titans Jesus Valdes (piano) and Horatio Hernandez (drums) and Distractions, the latest product of Hargrove's hip-hop/jazz collective, The RH Factor.

I still insist that hip-hop imports less well to the bop idiom than, say, the Latin commodities generated by Crisol. But both show Hargrove (at 36) asserting a new kind of controlas well as the will to lose it for the right notes.

He demonstrates a complete academic command of the music's mainstream forms, and the ambition to go beyond them. Whether he can blend these two impulses effectively in the presence of one of his many Yodas and Hamptonan accomplished arranger before Hargrove even took his first trumpet lessonwill say much about whether the student has, in fact, become the master.

Or even better: an emissary. Jazz never has too many of those.