Motown was among the places my husband and I enjoyed visiting during a summer weekend in Detroit. Days after we got back to Denver, we were reminded of Detroit’s rich musical history when we went to hear a jazz harpist named Brandee Younger at Dazzle, our favorite local spot for live music.
Are you like me and nerdily enthusiastic about jazz musicians who also are music scholars?
Younger’s set had us bopping in our seats. It included several pieces by Dorothy Ashby, a renowned jazz harpist and composer from Detroit who once wrote a music column for Detroit’s Free Press. Younger filled the audience in with comments from the stage on Ashby, who died of cancer in 1986, much too young at 54.
It's Ashby playing on Motown great Stevie Wonder's "If It's Magic" on the album "Songs In The Key of Life." Wonder once said: "When we finally got 'If It's Magic' to work, it was because of the greatness of Dorothy Ashby, who was from Detroit. She just did something incredible. She let the harp sing."
The harp does indeed have a vivacious voice under Ashby’s fingers. She and Younger defy the cliché of harp music as soothing, angelic. They are angels who can soar with the authority of Coltrane on sax or groove with the dexterity of Ron Carter on bass.
Younger said she first heard a recording of Ashby playing a solo version of "If It's Magic" at the Detroit Institute of Arts – another magical place my husband and I had visited during our Detroit weekend. Younger performed Ashby’s solo version at Dazzle and it's on her album, "Brand New Life." Other songs on “Brand New Life” are from scores Ashby wrote for shows by the Ashby Players, a Black theater troupe she and her husband John founded that made art in Detroit and Canada in the 1960s.
Are you like me and impatiently acquisitive?
I usually go home and order albums from Amazon after hearing about them at a show. But after Younger’s set at Dazzle I stood in line with her fans to buy music from the source, and chatted with Younger a bit as I made my purchase. I mentioned to her that I had recently been in Detroit, and she said she had just played there! I wish we had known. I bet the audience in Detroit had included people who knew Ashby.
I left the club with CDs of "Brand New Life" and another Younger album, "Somewhere Different".
Are you like me and got rid of your turntable before they re-emerged as trendy, and are too grumpily unhip to have purchased a new one?
Younger is not the only one who thinks the world should know about Ashby. A few weeks after hearing her at Dazzle, I read a New Yorker profile of Ashby with the sub headline: “Her virtuosity won the instrument a place in jazz, but her achievements have long been overlooked.” The profile’s news peg is the release of “With Strings Attached”, a boxed set of Ashby’s first six albums that comes with a book for which Younger wrote the foreword
“With Strings Attached” is vinyl only. Amazon also has CDs of some of the Ashby albums lauded by The New Yorker. And you can find plenty of cuts by both Younger and Ashby on YouTube that will have you bopping at your monitor.