Increasingly and with growing momentum, right up until he died at the young age of 55 in 2018, Roy Hargrove was a standard bearer for a new kind of African American jazz. The recipe embraced a variety of styles—jazz, Afro-Cuban music, funk, hip hop and soul—and it influenced a generation of musicians in jazz and beyond.

But Hargrove never abandoned jazz, the foundation stone of his style. Instead he regarded other genres as part of a rainbow of expression. "The spirit and energy that musicians are putting into it is the same," he told the San Jose Mercury News in 2003. "It's just a different way of speaking, a different dialect. I've been around all kinds of musicians, and if a cat can play, a cat can play. If it's gospel, funk, R&B, jazz or hip-hop, if it's something that gets in your ear and it's good, that's what matters." Hargrove shared this inclusive attitude with a contemporaneous, emerging generation of mainly Black jazz musicians in London, who, from around 2000, began revitalising British jazz with a similarly wide-screen approach. Take a bow, synchronicity.

Hargrove's band Crisol—Spanish for melting pot—represents a relatively conservative direction among his pot pourri of departures. It brought together American jazz and Afro-Cuban music and musicians, hardly a new thing in 1997, when the band released its Grammy-winning debut album, Habana (Verve). First-generation hard bop had included a similar strand from the get-go. But Habana was a magnificent album and is still a joy to listen to. And so is the follow-up, Grande-Terre, which was recorded in 1998 and has not previously been released. Check the opening track, "Rumba Roy," on the YouTube below. In all the essential characteristics it is classic hard bop. The Afro-Cuban rhythms and piano guajeos are entirely of a type with those old Blue Note albums, though presented here with more prominence and played with more authenticity. While the band's personnel is almost entirely different from that on the first album—the only holdovers are trombonist