Habana

Roy HargroveRoy Hargroveロイ・ハーグローブ played horns on D'Angelo's Voodoo (2000), reaching listeners far outside jazz. That experience directly inspired the RH Factor, linking hard bop to hip-hop and funk in a single grammar. His conversations with Chucho Valdés in Havana were another axis. He died in 2018 at 49.

Roy Hargrove made his name in the early-1990s hard-bop revival as one of jazz's 'Young Lions,' with no real background in Latin music. Yet in 1997 it was Habana, a session with Cuban musicians, that won him a Grammy for Best Latin Jazz Performance.

Alto saxophonist Gary Bartz made his name on the 1971 electric fusion session Live-Evil and on 1966 hard bop dates. In 1997 he turned up somewhere unexpected: Roy Hargrove's Afro-Cuban band, cutting the Grammy-winning album Habana alongside Chucho Valdés while Hargrove was still in his twenties. Bartz was still releasing albums under his own name in 2025.