“How Dorothy Ashby Made the Harp Swing,”
The New Yorker, June 9, 2023:
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.