The harpist Dorothy Ashby could navigate even the tightest rhythms with her instrument, crafting a distinctive idiom that mixed the drama of Romanticism with the irony of the blues.
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 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’sran 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.
Ashby’s first three albums were a lively conversation between her and Wess—an “Aeolian Groove,” as she called one of her own compositions, alluding to harps strummed by the wind. Their interplay was deft and frolicsome, with a guitar-like swing to Ashby’s solos, reminiscent of Wes Montgomery. “The Jazz Harpist” and “Hip Harp” brought her instant celebrity, proving to many listeners that their titles weren’t oxymorons.
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