About —

It’s Dorothy Ashby’s birthday and we’ll be listening to her gorgeous harp music, along with tangential jazz musicians.

When the sublime is in fashion, quiet beauty struggles to be heard. Dorothy Ashby, America’s first great jazz harpist, came of age amid the clamor of giants—men like Charles Mingus, Cecil Taylor, and John Coltrane, whose fissile innovations endowed the once-’cool’ genre with density and heat. New elements were constantly being discovered, but there wasn’t much room for a woman playing an instrument that wasn’t even on the periodic table. Ashby could have stuck with the piano, which she’d studied, or kept her strings in the orchestra where they belonged. Luckily, she had something to prove, a new sound to pluck from the thorny garden of unheard vibrations. “I always had the hangup on jazz,” she once said. “The challenge was so much greater.”

Ashby was a “bebop angel,” as the journalist Herb Boyd once wrote, cutting eleven albums whose sapphiric elegance belied the extraordinary difficulty of jazz improvisation on a harp. Yet despite the acclaim she achieved—awards, appearances on “The Tonight Show,” a long-running radio show in her native Detroit—her catalogue sank into obscurity after her death in 1986. Only recently has it begun to rise from the depths. Ashby’s music has been sampled by hip-hop artists like J Dilla and Swizz Beatz; Brandee Younger, a contemporary harpist, has devoted two albums to her predecessor. Now we have “With Strings Attached” (New Land Records), a boxed set of Ashby’s first six albums, with a book featuring a foreword by Younger and extensive liner notes by the arts journalist Shannon J. Effinger. They repair a few of the skips in a life that deserves far more attention.

Ashby was born Dorothy Jeanne Thompson in 1930. Her father, who was a travelling jazz guitarist during the Depression, taught her to accompany him on the piano at a young age. She fell in love with the harp at Cass Technical High School, whose music program was legendary, and played it so well that Harlem’s Amsterdam News ran a profile of her when she was seventeen. She rather modestly planned to become a music teacher, and studied for it at Wayne State University. Yet, by twenty-five, she’d leaped into Detroit’s thriving jazz scene, forming a trio after her husband, the drummer John Ashby, returned from the Korean War. He began writing her arrangements, and joined the band as “John Tooley”—because, as one of their friends explained, Dorothy was already so well known in the city that “Ashby meant harp.”

– The New Yorker