Earfood
2008 studio album by The Roy Hargrove Quintet
Earfood is a studio album by the Roy Hargrove Quintet, issued by the EmArcy record label in 2008. It was a return to Hargrove's enduring interest in hard bop, following several albums in which he explored jazz within a hip-hop and R&B context.
The album is notable for the inclusion of the composition, "Strasbourg / St. Denis", which has since emerged as a modern-day jazz standard.
Reception
Critical perspectives of Earfood were largely positive upon its release. Writing for The New York Times, jazz critic Nate Chinen selected Earfood as his critics' choice. Chinen declared the album to "attest to a classic jazz ideal" while "rarely sound[ing] as if [Hargrove] stepped out of a time machine". Chinen attributed this to Hargrove's successful merging of his "hard-bop and groove-orientated sides". Hargrove's success at melding hard-bop with modern jazz was also observed in a positive All About Jazz review, which noted Hargrove's success was "redefining the hard bop of the 1950s and 1960s through the post bop lense of the 1980s and 1990s".
Texas Monthly deemed Earfood to be a "fiery, sonically powerful, spontaneous" session, but simultaneously criticized it for being "too ballad-heavy".
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Earfood” as 2008 studio album by The Roy Hargrove Quintet. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the arts & letters register because the source frames it as 2008 studio album by The Roy Hargrove Quintet. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q125958151. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2008.
Titles can refer to several editions, objects or performances, making precise identification essential before interpretation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Separate the work, its editions or performances, and its later reception. Catalogue records, publication histories and object files often preserve different parts of that story.
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The original object or edition, catalogue raisonné, performance record, rights file and holding institution.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Earfood”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Earfood primary sources, Earfood archive and Earfood research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Earfood” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.