They repair a few of the skips in a life that deserves far more attention.Īshby was born Dorothy Jeanne Thompson in 1930. 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. 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. Only recently has it begun to rise from the depths. 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.
“The challenge was so much greater.”Īshby 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. “I always had the hangup on jazz,” she once said. Luckily, she had something to prove, a new sound to pluck from the thorny garden of unheard vibrations. Ashby could have stuck with the piano, which she’d studied, or kept her strings in the orchestra where they belonged. 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. 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. When the sublime is in fashion, quiet beauty struggles to be heard.
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