Dorothy Ashby: Afro-Harping Deluxe Edition

There are certain instruments that struggled for attention in the years when the jazz ecology was an overwhelmingly male preserve—or rather, when many men perceived jazz to be a male preserve, and a heterosexual, alpha male one at that. Exhibit A, the flute, was described by one leading male alto saxophonist, a near contemporary of Charlie Parker who passed in the 2010s, as "a faggot instrument." He was not alone in his opinion. Exhibit B, the harp, was, and continues to be, ignored by male musicians even more comprehensively than the flute ever was. All jazz harpists of note have been women and their work has, generally speaking, been sidelined rather than celebrated.

The exception to this rule, Alice Coltrane, was feted by the public and the media, at least in part, because of her marriage to John Coltrane (and even then, misogyny could often be detected just off camera). Dorothy Ashby deserved to be an exception, too, but her following remains strictly niche. One prominent modern-day NYC harpist, speaking to AAJ in 2022 for an as yet unpublished interview, seethed with exasperation as she argued that Alice Coltrane's starry profile had overshadowed the musical achievements of Ashby, who she regarded as the more historically significant player, her horn-like single-note runs extending the harp's palette beyond block chords and glissandos.

Ashby released a dozen albums between 1957 and 1984 (she passed in 1986, aged only 53). The ambitiously conceived, part orchestral Afro-Harping (originally released in 1968) was the eighth of these and the first of three that Ashby made for Chicago-based blues label Chess' subsidiary Cadet with producer Richard Evans. Long before it became fashionable to do so, Cadet liked to mash up the boundaries between musical genres. Sometimes the venture was successful, as with psychedelic-soul ensemble Rotary Connection's eponymous 1968 album. Sometimes it over-reached itself, as with Howlin' Wolf's acid-dipped The Howlin' Wolf Album (1969), which Wolf himself described as "dog shit." Sometimes it swung between success and failure, as with Muddy Waters' Electric Mud (1968), made with members of Rotary Connection.

Afro-Harping, another cross-genre disc, presented Ashby on some tracks in front of a sizeable strings, brass and reeds ensemble arranged and conducted by Evans and with infusions of funk throughout (and throw in a theremin or two for good measure). It was an artistic success but, until it was discovered by rappers and samplers in the 1990s, a commercial flop. On release it was rejected by much of Ashby's existing audience, built up through her earlier small-group albums on Prestige and Atlantic and as a sidewoman with leaders such as Stanley Turrentine, Sonny Criss and Freddie Hubbard. The wider jazz audience of the late 1960s and 1970s ignored it, just as it had ignored Ashby's earlier work.

The album takes daring artistic leaps and mostly lands on its feet. Opening track "Soul Vibrations" is a harbinger of the sort of cinematic funk which only fully took shape two decades later, making it fitting that Ashby was subsequently heard on Bobby Womack's strings-laden The Poet II (Beverly Glen, 1984). Ashby and Phil Upchurch's "Afro-Harping" (check the YouTube below) and other tracks are heavily funk-infused. "Theme From Valley Of The Dolls" and the bossa-tinged "Lonely Girl" are more poppy. But wherever Evans takes the tunes—four of them Ashby originals, others by Hubbard, Burt Bacharach, Neil Hefti, and André and Dory Previn—Ashby's soloing remains solidly within the jazz tradition.

Verve's Deluxe Edition includes eight alternate takes, including extended versions of "Afro-Harping" and Hubbard's "Little Sunflower." These will delight Ashby's followers, as will the assiduously researched liner booklet. Hopefully the release will trigger interest in the wider spectrum of Ashby's legacy. Recommended further listening includes The Jazz Harpist (Regent, 1957) and Hip Harp (Prestige, 1958), both made with A-list quartets including flautist Frank Wess, and at the other end of Ashby's career, the blissful Concierto de Aranjuez (Philips, 1984), which contains a version of Joseph Kosma's "Autumn Leaves" which is among the loveliest ever recorded.

Trainspotters' postscript: Personnel and instrumentation on Afro-Harping is unknown, but what sounds very much like a Wurlitzer organ takes a brief solo 1:40 into the title track. A year or so later, Alice Coltrane adopted the Wurlitzer organ, which became a centrepiece of her music from 1971. Just saying.

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