Roy Anthony Hargrove was born in Waco, Texas, on October 16, 1969, and moved with his family to Dallas at nine. He started on a cornet his father brought home from a pawnshop, and his junior high band director, Dean Hill, whom Hargrove later called his musical father, taught him how to build a solo. A visit to that school by saxophonist David "Fathead" Newman, then touring with Ray Charles, gave him his first look at a working professional. He went on to the Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, the Dallas arts magnet, and can be heard on the school's own recordings from the period: Milestones (1985), Dallas "Arts" Jazz 1986, whose sleeve already flags him as a future star, and Dallas "Arts" Jazz 1988, where he plays lead trumpet, writes and arranges. In 1987, while Hargrove was in eleventh grade, Wynton Marsalis ran a clinic at the school, heard him, and invited him to sit in with his band at the Caravan of Dreams in Fort Worth. Over the following months the same room put the teenager on stage with Dizzy Gillespie, Herbie Hancock, Freddie Hubbard and Bobby Hutcherson.

His first studio date came on April 26, 1988, at Rudy Van Gelder's Englewood Cliffs studio, with the Blue Note repertory group Superblue. Five days later, on May 1, he recorded Bobby Watson and Horizon's No Question About It, also for Blue Note. He enrolled at Berklee College of Music in Boston but transferred to the New School in New York, which put him inside the Greenwich Village session economy, above all the Monday jam sessions at Bradley's. Novus, the RCA jazz imprint, signed him, and Diamond in the Rough arrived in 1990 with Antonio Hart on alto and Al Foster and Ralph Peterson splitting the drum chair. Public Eye followed in 1991 with Christian McBride and Billy Higgins, then The Vibe (1992), which put Brother Jack McDuff's organ and Branford Marsalis and David "Fathead" Newman's tenors behind him and reached number two on Billboard's jazz albums chart; The Tokyo Sessions (1992), cut direct to two-track in Tokyo with Antonio Hart; and Of Kindred Souls (1993). DownBeat's critics voted him Rising Star on trumpet three years running, 1991 through 1993. In 1993 Jazz at Lincoln Center commissioned a long-form work from him, The Love Suite: In Mahogany, premiered at Alice Tully Hall that year and not released on record for another thirty.

Verve took over his contract in 1994 and gave him a decade of increasingly ambitious projects. With the Tenors of Our Time (recorded January 16 and 17, 1994) framed his quintet against five guest saxophonists across four generations: Johnny Griffin, Joe Henderson, Branford Marsalis, Joshua Redman and Stanley Turrentine. Family (recorded live to two-track over four days in January 1995) and Parker's Mood (April 1995), a trumpet, bass and piano trio with Christian McBride and Stephen Scott built entirely from Charlie Parker material, followed within the year. The same year he opened the Jazz Gallery in New York with Dale Fitzgerald and Lezlie Harrison, a nonprofit room that became the city's main proving ground for emerging players, and he formed the Roy Hargrove Big Band. The decisive record was Habana (Verve, June 3, 1997), made with Crisol, the Cuban and American band he assembled around Chucho Valdes, Gary Bartz, David Sanchez, Russell Malone, Frank Lacy and the percussionists Miguel "Anga" Diaz, Jose Luis "Changuito" Quintana and Horacio "El Negro" Hernandez. It won the Grammy for Best Latin Jazz Performance at the 40th ceremony, in February 1998.

By the late 1990s Hargrove had become the horn player of choice for a circle of musicians remaking soul and hip-hop at Electric Lady Studios, the loose collective known as the Soulquarians. He wrote and played the horn parts on D'Angelo's Voodoo (Virgin, January 25, 2000) and toured behind it in the Soultronics, alongside Questlove and Pino Palladino. He is on Common's Like Water for Chocolate (MCA, March 28, 2000), on Erykah Badu's Mama's Gun (Motown, November 2000) and Worldwide Underground (2003), and later on John Mayer's Continuum (2006). None of it displaced the jazz work. Directions in Music: Live at Massey Hall, recorded in Toronto on October 25, 2001 with Herbie Hancock, Michael Brecker, John Patitucci and Brian Blade as a joint tribute to Miles Davis and John Coltrane, won the 2003 Grammy for Best Jazz Instrumental Album and gave him his second.

He then made the crossover explicit under his own name. The RH Factor's Hard Groove (Verve, May 20, 2003) is a funk and soul record with a jazz horn section at its center, and its guest list reads like a roll call of the Electric Lady circle: D'Angelo sings on "I'll Stay," Common raps on "Common Free Style," Q-Tip and Erykah Badu share "Poetry" over Me'Shell NdegeOcello's bass, and Steve Coleman turns up on "Out of Town." Two more RH Factor records followed, the Strength EP (2004) and Distractions (2006), the latter with David "Fathead" Newman on saxophone and flute, closing a circle that had opened in a Dallas junior high. A straight-ahead quintet date, Nothing Serious, appeared the same year with Justin Robinson, Ronnie Mathews, Dwayne Burno and Willie Jones III.

Two albums for EmArcy defined the last stretch of his recording career. Earfood (2008) carried "Strasbourg St. Denis," the tune that became his best-known composition and a standard for younger bands, and Emergence (recorded at Capitol Studios on June 16 and 17, 2008, engineered by Al Schmitt) documented the Roy Hargrove Big Band with Ambrose Akinmusire and Gerald Clayton in the ranks and Roberta Gambarini singing. He kept working as a guest to the end, on Sonny Rollins's Road Shows, Vol. 2 (2011), on the Jimmy Heath Big Band's Togetherness, recorded live at the Blue Note in October 2011, on D'Angelo and the Vanguard's Black Messiah (2014), where he is credited with the brass and horn arrangements, and on records by the Israeli guitarist Yotam Silberstein and the Italian trumpeter Luca Aquino. Chronic kidney disease had him on dialysis for the last thirteen years of his life, a schedule he worked around rather than slowed down for. He suffered cardiac arrest brought on by the kidney disease and passed away at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan on November 2, 2018, at 49. DownBeat's readers voted him top trumpeter the following year, and the magazine elected him to its Jazz Hall of Fame in 2021. Three archival releases have appeared since: In Harmony (Resonance, 2021), duets with pianist Mulgrew Miller taped in 2006 and 2007; The Love Suite: In Mahogany (Blue Engine, 2023), the 1993 Alice Tully Hall premiere; and Grande-Terre (Verve, 2024), a Crisol session cut in Guadeloupe in April 1998 and shelved for twenty-six years.

Hargrove played with a wide, burnished tone that critics reached for Clifford Brown and Freddie Hubbard to describe, and at fast tempos he cut through with a clarity and rhythmic snap that made him instantly identifiable on a crowded bandstand. What separated him from the rest of the Young Lions generation he was lumped in with was that he never treated the tradition as a museum: the same player who could build a ballad on flugelhorn behind Shirley Horn wrote the horn charts for D'Angelo's Voodoo, and he moved between hard bop, Afro-Cuban rhythm sections, big band writing and hip-hop sessions without changing his sound to suit any of them. Antonio Hart, his front-line partner from the Novus years, described the connection between them as something they never had to discuss. Questlove, who worked with him throughout the Soulquarians period, called him the one-man horn section he heard in his head. His originals "Strasbourg St. Denis," "Roy Allan" and "Trust" have entered the working repertoire of bands who never met him.