Brandee Younger: A Hip-Hop Baby Transforms the Harp
Brandee Younger has carved out a very unlikely music career for herself. A classically-trained harpist but also a self-confessed “hip-hop baby” who loves popular music, Younger deeply immersed herself in jazz as an undergrad at the Hartt School and by the time she entered grad school at NYU was already established in that scene. Then shortly after forming her own quartet over a decade ago, Younger soon became a go-to collaborator not only for jazz artists such as Ravi Coltrane and Marcus Strickland, but also for creative artists across a very wide array of genres, including multiple Grammy winners rapper Common, singer-songwriter Lauryn Hill, and R&B producer Salaam Remi.
“I wanted my instrument to fit into my personality; I didn’t want it to be limited,” Younger explained during our recent conversation. “I knew I didn’t want an orchestral career, but even as a kid I wanted to play other styles of music … Over time I finally became comfortable with blending those worlds together, but it took a long time to confidently try and put them together.”
How Younger has transformed the harp, which is typically associated with salons or angels, into such a malleable and yet still distinctive instrument seems without precedent. But she had two very significant role models in Alice Coltrane and Dorothy Ashby. Her love for Alice Coltrane, whose cascading harp sonorities matched the intensity of the free jazz improvisers with whom she performed, began in high school when her father gave her a Priceless Jazz compilation of her recordings. She was immediately captivated by “Blue Nile” and soon thereafter asked every jazz musician she encountered if they knew her. Brandee never actually met Alice Coltrane but she was invited to play at her memorial at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in 2007. Dorothy Ashby, whom Brandee also never met (she was only two years old when Ashby died), has had an even more significant influence on her career trajectory. Ashby also led her own ensembles starting in her 20s and quickly leaped from jazz to a much wider stylistic palette that embraced a spectrum of pop and world music traditions. She even made a guest appearance on Stevie Wonder’s legendary Songs in the Key of Life and, as Brandee pointed out, has been heavily sampled in hip-hop, which is how she first became aware of her.
“The one huge HUGE thing for me in Dorothy Ashby’s music, you listen to what she was recording, she was doing music of the time,” said Younger. “She was playing whatever she wanted. She was not jazz-specific. She was playing traditional Jewish melodies. She was playing the pop tune that came out. She was playing the soundtrack of the most popular movie that came out. And to think back as a kid and what I wanted to do, I wanted to play the pop music that I heard on the radio. I wanted to play these familiar tunes for my friends and family.”
So it makes sense that Brandee Younger would want to record an album acknowledging Dorothy Ashby. But that album, Brand New Life, which was just released in April, is a far-cry from an ossified compendium of covers.
“It was really important for me to make it 2023,” Younger explained. “It wasn’t to be a tribute album, you know, it was to really celebrate her legacy but like moving along. … It was really important for me to collaborate with folks that shared a special kinship with her. And the first person to pop up was of course Pete Rock who was the first person I know of to sample her.”
Brand New Life also features a memorable contribution from Meshell Ndegeocello, who is featured on a reggae-infused version of “Dust,” an Ashby original which was originally released on her 1970 LP The Rubaiyat of Dorothy Ashby. And Mumu Fresh, who is mostly known as a rapper, adds extremely soulful vocals to Younger’s original “Brand New Life,” the title track.
Brandee is currently on tour, her first time traveling to different cities to perform since the pandemic shut down everything three years ago. It’s been a long wait, but she won’t only be playing material from Brand New Life. She’ll also be performing her extraordinary original Unrest, a turbulent composition created during lockdown.
“We’ll be doing new music and some of the stuff from the last album,” she explained. “I also will throw in an Ashby or Coltrane tune because that’s my thing, what I’ve been doing forever. And the tour is mostly going to be trio–Rashaan Carter on bass, Alan Menard on drums. So yeah, harp trio baby.”
If you’re on tour and you’re going from state to state to state, the detuning and retuning and detuning and retuning, it’s not healthy for the instrument either. So I don’t think I would want to ship my harp so frequently. I just shipped it back from Chicago and I’m like, "Oh, poor baby, are you okay?"
Brandee Younger
I wanted my instrument to fit into my personality. I didn’t want it to be limited.
Brandee Younger
My dad gave me Priceless Jazz: Alice Coltrane. It’s a compilation series. So this particular record, the first track on it was "Blue Nile," and I was like, "What is this? Oh my gosh, because, whatever this harp is doing, it sounds really cool, it sounds really soulful, what the heck is going on and I wanna do this!" So that was my introduction to: "Okay the harp can sound different; it can do something different and it can sound really cool."
Brandee Younger
When I record something and I sit on it, I start to think, "I have to do this, I have to change that" And I start picking it apart. Some people wait for that moment. They wait for the pick apart so they can make it as perfect as they can. If I do that, I’ll never get anything done.
Brandee Younger
The one huge HUGE thing for me in Dorothy Ashby’s music, you listen to what she was recording, she was doing music of the time. She was playing whatever she wanted. She was not jazz-specific. She was playing traditional Jewish melodies. She was playing the pop tune that came out. She was playing the soundtrack of the most popular movie that came out. And to think back as a kid and what I wanted to do, I wanted to play the pop music that I heard on the radio. I wanted to play these familiar tunes for my friends and family.
Brandee Younger
You’re a woman in jazz. That’s a strike. You’re black on the harp. That’s a strike. And then you’re putting the harp into jazz. That’s like a trifecta! Things are hard now, but then? Forget about it.
Brandee Younger
Even though this is her music, this needs to come across through my eyes, with my voice.
Brandee Younger
It was really important for me to make it 2023.
Brandee Younger
In keeping my mind on Dorothy Ashby and her legacy, and me just being a New Yorker hip-hop baby, just how celebrated she is in hip hop because she’s sampled so heavily--it was really important for me to collaborate with folks that shared a special kinship with her.
Brandee Younger
To have these people that share this love for Dorothy Ashby who don’t know me agree to work with me on this, it was really an honor.
Brandee Younger
That’s why I appreciate it when there’s like 2 measures of 1 chord; I like lean into it. Because you know, we can do the chromatics, but depending on how fast they are, you can hear the footwork. I call it the tap dancing with so many pedals.
Brandee Younger
If you’re a harpist or even just a harp listener, there is one area you don’t wanna hear and that is the lower register with notes close together. ... And that is how I started Unrest. ... It’s uncomfortable to play and it’s uncomfortable to listen to and that was my intention.
Brandee Younger
That was the one great thing about lockdown, being able to just play and really play and become more familiar with my instrument and to newer harps. When you’re traveling around, you don’t even get to break in your own instrument.
Brandee Younger
- Read the Full Transcript
Brandee Younger: A Hip-Hop Baby Transforms the Harp
Brandee Younger in Conversation with Frank J. Oteri
May 18, 2023, 10:00 AM via Zoom
Transcribed by Michelle HrominFrank J. Oteri: Thank you, Brandee, for carving out time to chat with me today. I know that you’re super busy and you’ve been cooped up for so long, as we all have during the pandemic, and you’re actually about to go on tour to promote this amazing new album Brand New Life but that’s the same reason why I thought this was the perfect time to talk to you ’cause so much is going on right now.
Brandee Younger: Thank you so much for having me; I’m really excited!
FJO: I want to start this in a kind of silly, but practical place. You might find this amusing. There are a bunch of classic photos I love of Mingus dragging his bass around different cities and I was listening last night to Mingus Dynasty which is, you know, a fabulous record and there are some of those photos in the booklet. I’d known those photos for years and I love them and I couldn’t help but think as I was watching you perform at Wavehill in the Bronx and then with your quartet in The Hamptons and now that you’re about to go on tour–how do you lug that harp around?
BY: I know; that’s a good question. Sort of like piano players and bassists today, it is the harp de jour, you know, we get local rentals.
FJO: So you don’t have a specific instrument that’s like, “This is my instrument, this is what I play on.”
BY: Only at home.
FJO: I never realized that. Pianists always have to play another piano, except Chick Corea who only played this one piano that he had shipped everywhere he performed. So you don’t have to worry about airplanes. I was wondering, how do you check it on an airplane; you must have a heart failure every time you do that.
BY: Yeah [laughs] well shipping harps is an ordeal; it’s almost like a casket, really.
FJO: Well, it’s as big as the inside of a grand piano so it’s giant.
BY: It is and it’s a lot. Back in the day, and they still do this now, they’ll ship in these harp trunks that are huge and now they’re using shipping crates which are essentially very, very large cardboard boxes with strategically placed styrofoam inside.
FJO: Wow, and it wouldn’t knock tons of strings out of tune in the process hopefully.
BY: Right, and they detune before shipping, so that’s another thing. If you’re on tour and you’re going from state to state to state, the detuning and retuning and detuning and retuning, it’s not healthy for the instrument either. So I don’t think I would want to ship my harp so frequently. I just shipped it back from Chicago and I’m like, “Oh, poor baby, are you okay?”
FJO: [laughs] Playing new instruments all the time is something that pianists have to deal with, but a harp is an even more intimate instrument because you are actually touching the strings rather than keys that hammer the strings so there’s an intimacy you have with that instrument, it must be strange playing new instruments all the time.
BY: You’re right. It really is such a more personal instrument. It’s leaning against you, it’s vibrating through you. We play on gut strings and gut strings are porous so we always tell our students, “Wash your hands before you play!” because whatever you were touching or doing, you’re now pressing into the strings. It is personal and it can be really gross *laughs* Your hands are dirty. In the pandemic there was a whole thing about how we can clean our gut strings without killing them, you know? You know, do we put the alcohol sanitizer on the gut strings? It was a whole thing.
FJO: I wasn’t expecting us to go there, this is fascinating.
BY: [Laughs]
FJO: I was expecting, you know, a horror story about this airport one time, you know? [laughs] But once again I guess it’s because this is yet another example of all the preconceptions that people, myself included not being a harpist, have about the harp. Probably there are more preconceptions about this instrument than any other instrument because of paintings and old movies and cartoons, you always see a harp being played by angels, right, and if there’s any earthly music that people associate with the harp it’s usually classical music and it’s usually some big orchestra piece and suddenly you hear one or two harp notes in it, it’s some kind of punctuation, and that’s what you get. But you’ve completely redefined this instrument. You’ve made it into something much more malleable that can play in so many different styles. So I’m very curious how you came that.
BY: This was my instrument. And I wanted my instrument to fit into my personality; I didn’t want it to be limited to just doing exactly what you just explained, which is so accurate. It’s like “Count, count, count…” I knew I didn’t want an orchestral career, but even as a kid I wanted to play other styles of music. So I did at home especially because my parents were like, “Could you play something that someone knows?” Or if there was a concert or a recital, my mom would say, “Go ahead and play whatever you’ve been practicing all these months, but then also play something that people recognize.” And it was always sort of both that I wanted to do. Then over time I finally became comfortable with blending those worlds together, but it took a long time to confidently try and put them together instead of living like–I felt like I was living a double life.
FJO: Wow. But, okay, so you say “I wanted my instrument to reflect me” but how did you wind up choosing the harp? How did that happen?
BY: There was a woman at my dad’s job [who played the harp] as a hobby and my parents were like: “Our daughter’s musical, can we get her into the harp,” I played the flute, so we did some little flute and harp duets and she mentioned to my folks I know a teacher that works well with kids and if she could study the instrument and do well with it, she could probably get a scholarship, and that’s the only word that the parents need to hear.
FJO: Right, but you took to it instantly it seems or were you like, I’d rather play the flute, how did you make that transition?
BY: I was happy to take it, to study it. I didn’t do it in school, so I still had my flute life which turned into a trombone life, by the way. I still had my school music life which was very fulfilling because I was in marching band and marching band was my life. We had a wonderful band director who modeled our marching band after historically black colleges out there. That’s what I was really invested in, in school. I wasn’t in orchestra. I was in band and then, in off-marching band season, we had jazz band, we had symphonic band. So that’s what I did at school. And then at home I had my harp lessons. So I was studying my traditional French repertoire, and then I was also playing pop tunes or whatever I wanted to play that was on the radio and my teacher was so sweet as long as I did whatever was assigned to me. She would write out a lead sheet of whatever pop tune I brought in. She was really really cool about that and, I don’t remember this, but I know it to be true, my parents used to fight me to practice when I was little, and they tried things like moving the harp. I didn’t practice if it was in my bedroom and I REALLY didn’t practice when it was in the basement, and I do remember that because it was freezing down there. Putting it in the living room made me practice more. But my mom said that when my teacher said that I could make money doing it that I all of a sudden started to practice, but I think that’s a lie.
FJO: [Laughs] Now in marching band you were playing flute or trombone, you weren’t playing both.
BY: Correct.
FJO: Although there is harp in band music, which I find really wacky.
BY: I know! I know, it’s funny. There are a lot of harp parts even in military bands; they all have a harp.
FJO: Very, very peculiar. So, the whole jazz thing – Hartt, where one of your early mentors was the great Jackie McLean. As far as I know he never performed with a harp. But, as part of his Institute of Jazz at The Hartt School, there were opportunities for harpists to play jazz. I wonder if it’s because he co-led a session with Kenny Dorham and Kenny Dorham featured harp on one of his records.
BY: Betty Glamman.
FJO: Funny story, I bought that record when I was in my early 20s because of the cover. The cover is these two shots of Kenny, one of him holding a trumpet and he’s on a stool in both of them and in the other is this harp and I thought, “Oh, is he playing harp?” and then it said underneath it, Sonny Rollins guest….is Sonny Rollins playing harp? *Laughs* and I was instantly sold. And then it was this other person I had never heard of and I thought it was just wonderful, but it was something totally different from what I thought it would be and that was the very first time I had ever heard harp in a jazz context. That was before I knew about Dorothy Ashby. I knew about Alice Coltrane as a pianist in the last version of John Coltrane’s group. It was a very unusual thing to me, so I’m curious how that connection happened to that world.
BY: Remember, that off-marching band season was jazz band and also concert band, but marching band was playing George Benson, it was playing Earth Wind and Fire, it was playing Michael Jackson. So that’s happening all in marching band. Our jazz band director, our instrumental teacher, actually went to college and was roommates with Tim Warfield. He would go to Jazzmobile every weekend and come to school and talk to us about what he learned. But he would really talk to us about playing games in here. “Y’all gotta practice!” [laughs] and he would just talk about his experiences each week and for us, you know, we’re kids, we’re like, “Oh my gosh, Jazzmobile, what’d you do, what’d you learn?” We were really excited. Hearing those stories was really captivating for us, so the interest was there. That said, the interest was there but probably late high school was when I got—do you remember those Priceless Jazz compilations?
FJO: Priceless? No.
BY: I don’t remember. I was in high school, but it was Priceless Jazz “said artist”. My dad gave me Priceless Jazz: Alice Coltrane. It’s a compilation series. So this particular record, the first track on it was “Blue Nile,” and I was like, “What is this? Oh my gosh, because, whatever this harp is doing, it sounds really cool, it sounds really soulful, what the heck is going on and I wanna do this!” So that was my introduction to: “Okay the harp can sound different; it can do something different and it can sound really cool.” So then I went on this whole Alice Coltrane quest, because she was still living, but–this is when I start to sound old–the internet existed, it wasn’t quite what it is today and so the search situation was not very easy. So I remember, this is so embarrassing but here we are, 2023, our jazz band, we were doing a competition somewhere in like Virginia, I don’t know, and Clark Terry was there and we all got an opportunity to quickly meet Clark Terry, all standing in single file. Everyone’s like, “Oh my gosh, it’s an honor to meet you” I go, “Hi, Mr. Terry, do you know how I can get in touch with Alice Coltrane?” I feel so stupid because that’s what I walked up to him and said. And he was so sweet and was like, “Oh honey, local 802” and I was like, “Okay, I have to go home and figure out what the local 802 is!” But when I got to college and actually I remember when I auditioned for college, the first person I saw was Nat Reeves in the hallway and I was with my mom and Nat Reeves was like, “Oh my gosh, hello, are you auditioning?” It was just so welcoming. That was actually my first experience with harp, so I already felt comfortable because the first person I see in the hallway is like “Hey!” It was the familiarity. Once I started school, I would bump into Jackie McClean in the hallway and I had such a funny college roommate who was not a music student but she would come into the music school with us and kind of stand outside of Jackie McClean’s door and wait for him to open the door. It was so cute. I of course, “Hey, you guys know Alice Coltrane?” that was 17 or 18 year old me, and he was like, “Oh, you play harp, come to any class whenever you want to. Come to the artists collective.” That whole welcoming vibe made me feel so comfortable and I did, I spent a lot of time sitting in mostly Steve Davis’s repertoire building class. It was a three-hour long class that was masterclass style. I would never bring my harp because I was not trying to play myself. I was a classical major studying my classical repertoire; [I] wasn’t going to embarrass myself. But what it enabled me to do, to sit in all those classes, sit in ensembles, was to just listen and absorb. The playing happened in private, grabbing a school mate and like, “Let’s play through this standard” or asking a teacher on their lunch break. I realize now as an adult, they were so sweet; they didn’t have to do that.
FJO: So, the road to Alice. Did you finally connect to her?
BY: I never met Alice Coltrane. Isn’t that crazy?
FJO: Wow, but you did perform with her amazing son Ravi on [your album] Soul Awakening and those are some of my favorite ensemble performances of yours.
BY: Oh, thank you so much.
BY: She passed away in ’07 and Ravi called me to play for her memorial and for me that was like, “What?!” I was at this time in grad school here in New York. I always credit Antoine Roney and Ravi Coltrane as being two of my biggest mentors. Don’t ask me how 2 tenor saxophonists ended up being a harpist’s mentor, but such is life. He would always talk to me about Alice Coltrane and Alice Coltrane’s music and just, you know, you should be doing this, you should be doing that, you should be listening to McCoy Tyner. So when Ravi called for the memorial, I was completely floored because I knew that he could’ve asked anybody in the country to come play in this memorial. This memorial was at St John the Divine. It was Charlie Haden, Geri Allen, Rashied Ali, Jack DeJohnette, Jeff “Tain” Watts, Cecil McBee, Reggie Workman, Steve Wilson. I remember it like yesterday. And it was the Ashram Choir, so that moment for me was really, really huge and what’s actually quite funny is that all these years of me listening to Alice Coltrane, I had actually never played her music before that memorial.
FJO: Wow.
BY: Yeah, I knew it, I could sing it! [laughs] but I hadn’t actually played it.
FJO: So, Soul Awakening, one of the things that blows my mind about it is why did it take six years for it to get released publicly? It’s so good!
BY: Frank, stop judging me!
FJO: [laughs]
BY: What happened was, the first recording I put out was like a little EP that I never intended to put out, I thought it would maybe be a, what do you call it, a demo, you know? And I remember talking to Kacey Benjamin at the time and I was like, “Hey, I just recorded this demo, could you just listen to this right now?” And he said something like “André 3000 said don’t release demos, just make records.” It’s funny, and I was like, “Okay.” And that’s when Bandcamp really started. So I put it out on Bandcamp. And through Bandcamp I think I sold everything I produced, you know? Sold all of the CDs, lots of downloads. And I was like, “Oh wow this is interesting; I didn’t expect that.” We recorded that in an analog studio, mind you. This was no punches, no edits, and oh boy. After that, as I started to work more as a leader, I knew that I needed recordings to sell. I’m trying to think of the timeline here, Frank. I knew that I needed recordings to sell, but I didn’t want to just haphazardly throw music out, and, you know, I was talking to my dear friend Megan Seville, bless her, she said, “Well you know, Brandee, these things take time; you don’t want to just bust ’em out, bust ’em out, bust ’em out.” Somewhere along the line we signed a producer agreement with Blue Note and we did that record Supreme Sonacy. And we did one track for this compilation on Blue Note. Anne Drummond was the flute player on it and she said, “I really like this concept, the sound that we have.” Kacey Benjamin produced it, and it had a really cool sound: electric bass, drums, tenor sax, harp, and flute. She said, “Brandee, let’s do a project like this together.” So I was like, “Bet this sounds like a great idea.” But I had already recorded Soul Awakening, Frank. I had recorded it, but I hadn’t released it. So once Supreme Sonacy came out and then Anne said oh let’s do this, I’ll do this with you, let’s do this together, we’re gonna get it done, I jumped on that. So I think that in between as I needed some kind of merch, I said I have to do something, so then we did the live record. We did the live gig, we recorded it, and that was my merch. And that to this day is my mom’s favorite recording by the way.
FJO: That’s a really great recording, too.
BY: My mom is like, “I like the live record.” but that was what I did as a hold-me-over.
BY: So at this time, Soul Awakening existed. Supreme Sonacy maybe came out after this. But then we’re in the studio recording what became Wax and Wane, so because I had help from Anne to get Wax and Wane done, we put Wax and Wane out. So that is literally why Soul Awakening came last, okay. Everything was kind of done at once, but Soul Awakening became last, because I did not want to waste it.
FJO: Gotcha, you don’t want it to be like the 3rd thing you put out and people ignore it because they already got the other 2, no I get it. It totally makes sense. I’m actually glad to hear that because I didn’t want it to be something like, “Oh, at first I didn’t think it was so good and then I came around to it,” because it’s amazing! [Laughs]
BY: Well, you know, Frank, that’s a part of it. What happens when, for me at least, when I record something and I sit on it, I start to think, “I have to do this, I have to change that” And I start picking it apart. Some people wait for that moment. They wait for the pick apart so they can make it as perfect as they can. If I do that, I’ll never get anything done. I know myself so I think I gotta just play it, listen back, make necessary corrections, and put it out because otherwise you just keep changing stuff and that’s why to Soul Awakening I ended up adding trombones and things and you know it was like, alright, enough’s enough, let’s get it out. So that’s a part of it, too.
FJO: And then of course the thing is the picking apart and, and overthinking you know this music has to breathe, it has to be alive. It makes sense that your mother thinks the live album is her favorite thing because it’s in the moment, it’s real, there isn’t like some studio thing where everybody’s second-guessing.
BY: Right, right.
FJO: You’re making real music in real time. Recording has become this very elaborate art and people make records and they’re like the audio equivalent of movies–you know, the level of detail, the level of production. This latest album Brand New Life has so much production going on and so many different kinds of music are in this thing. And we didn’t really talk about Dorothy Ashby yet. We must because we mentioned Betty Glamann, we mentioned Alice Coltrane. The other legendary predecessor of recontextualizing the harp was Dorothy Ashby.
BY: Right, and the one huge HUGE thing for me in Dorothy Ashby’s music, you listen to what she was recording, she was doing music of the time. She was playing whatever she wanted. She was not jazz-specific. She was playing traditional Jewish melodies. She was playing the pop tune that came out. She was playing the soundtrack of the most popular movie that came out. And to think back as a kid and what I wanted to do, I wanted to play the pop music that I heard on the radio. I wanted to play these familiar tunes for my friends and family. Meanwhile I had my double orchestral life for everyone else. So she was doing in essence what I wanted to do. What’s “The Little Sunflower”? It’s new to us. It was like an old standard, but that was new at the time. She really kept everything so fresh and that was really daring at the time. One thing that I think about constantly is that when she was active, and Alice Coltrane was active, there’s these things that were working against them. You’re a woman in jazz. That’s a strike. You’re black on the harp. That’s a strike. And then you’re putting the harp into jazz. That’s like a trifecta! Things are hard now, but then? Forget about it. So I don’t take for granted for one moment what they were able to do despite roadblocks, you know? In the archives there are these album proposals that Dorothy Ashby would write to the labels, and she would write these concepts out and would say, “This is what I have in mind.” Some of them were really forward thinking. You can tell that some labels were just like not willing to take a chance on her. Her output: 11 albums. That’s crazy. She did not live for very long.
FJO: I was listening last night to Hip Harp, which is her second LP, her second quartet session with Frank Wess. It’s a great album: 3 very famous standards and then 3 original compositions of hers. She was 25 when she put that record out.
BY: Wow!
FJO: And, you know, it’s 1958. This is extraordinary. I was thinking about the stuff you said: a woman in jazz; a black person on the harp. But aside from that, a woman who is a leader in a session doing her own compositions with a group.
BY: That’s what I’m SAYING!
FJO: Really top people and they respected her and they delivered her music. That session is really good. It really gels. And her own compositions are fantastic; she was a composer.
BY: Absolutely. Another thing, she was a composer and had a theater company in Detroit where she would compose the music for the plays and sometimes she would recycle some of that music. So what we recorded on Brand New Life includes some of that theater music that she wrote for these plays. To my knowledge, a lot of these have not been previously recorded, which was the coolest thing on Earth. I was thinking when I recorded this, I knew that these tunes were from the ’50s for sure, but I had in my mind, the albums that resonated with me at the time, which makes perfect sense as a hip-hop baby, are those late Cadet records, late ’60s. Richard Evans. Real funky. She recorded this in Chicago; it would be really cool if we recorded this in Chicago. “Hey Makaya, we’re coming over.” So we actually recorded this in Makaya [McCraven]’s house, in his home studio. He and Rashaan Carter; he played bass. They recorded downstairs, I recorded upstairs in the living room, because, you know, the harp and stairs, not cute. And the core of the record is the 3 of us. I didn’t want too many sounds getting in the way. And it was funny just talking to Makaya about wanting to add this and add that and I’m like, “Don’t add too much!” We really want the harp to stand out for this one and the harp to really shine through. However, at this point in my life and career, it’s really important that this be my voice. So even though this is her music, this needs to come across through my eyes, with my voice. So choosing how to nod to her in playing some of her other composed music was to add elements. Joel Ross was a very intentional addition of vibraphone. Because if you listen to that album of hers, Soft Winds, Terry Pollard on vibraphone, that sound is something that she embraced. Having strings, that’s something that she embraced. Flute, something she embraced. So we did add these elements that she had on her recordings, however stylistically it’s very much like Brandee and Makaya in the studio [laughs] you know, and Rashaan, like very natural, very organic.
FJO: Well what I kept thinking about each time that I listen to this album, in a way it’s more impressive than a regular tribute album It’s exactly what she would have done had she lived.
BY: Had she lived, yeah.
FJO: You know, you’re not ossifying it and turning it into this museum piece. I think it makes sense that you gave it the title Brand New Life, you’re giving a new life to her legacy.
BY: Totally and thank you for recognizing that because it was really important for me to make it 2023. One of the tunes, “You’re a Girl for One Man Only” It was one of the first tracks. It read through just like a really, really traditional standard. And we’re like, okay, we can’t make this the read-down, you know, and in just playing through it I was like, “Okay, just repeat the first 2 bars and then repeat the first 4 bars and then repeat that.” So it was as if what Makaya would be doing in post-production but we would be doing it in real time so it was almost like him making this track but we were playing the track. I really loved that he did that with this. It was just enough to not kill the song but to make it our own.
FJO: Well you’ve definitely, you’ve definitely made it your own and I’m listening to this and I’m like not sure where Dorothy Ashby ends and Brandee Younger begins and that’s kind of the point.
BY: That was the point. It wasn’t to be a tribute album, you know, it was to really celebrate her legacy but like moving along, as my old harp teacher used to say, “Moving right along.”
FJO: And what I love, just in the real smartness of how you marketed this, you released singles before the whole album comes out which is unheard of in how jazz albums are normally promoted. But this is not just a jazz album; it’s many, many different things.
BY: So that part–in keeping my mind on Dorothy Ashby and her legacy, and me just being a New Yorker hip-hop baby, just how celebrated she is in hip hop because she’s sampled so heavily–it was really important for me to collaborate with folks that shared a special kinship with her. And the first person to pop up was of course Pete Rock who was the first person I know of to sample her. And when he said yes I was like, oh my gosh, and it took some arm twisting. But I’m like, “I’m gonna send you these tracks, and these have not been out there, you have not heard them before!” You know, so it was really an honor for him to work on this track also. He did “Living and Loving in My Own Way” and “9th Wonder,” worked on “The Windmills.” That was one of the most covered tunes at the time and is one of her most sampled recordings.
FJO: You’ve turned it into something totally different from her version.
BY: Right, that was the goal. I knew Meshell [Ndegeocello] was a big Dorothy Ashby fan. So I got this cover of hers, “Dust” from Dorothy Ashby. That’s the original, but we’ve made a reggae track. Could you sing on this please? Do whatever speaks to you. She said she sang to the bass line [laughs].
BY: Literally everything was so special about what’s on the record. I mean, from my relationship with Rashaan and with Makaya, whom I’ve known for so long and been working with for so long one way or another. And then to have these people that share this love for Dorothy Ashby who don’t know me agree to work with me on this, it was really an honor. The one wild card on this record is “Brand New Life,” the title track. We recorded the track and this was the one track that just played itself. It was an original and we just played it; we didn’t talk about it. It was one of those things that just happened. The mind reading that I love just happened and I said, “Oh my gosh, I need someone that is a really soulful singer, but that also has really smooth background. Who could do this?” I reached out to the producer Salaam Remi, and I said, “I have this track and we recorded it; we did a fast version and a slow version.” And I sent them to him and said, “Who can do soulful and smooth?” And he said Mumu Fresh. And I said, “Oh Mumu Fresh, oh she’s great; I know her more as a rapper.” And he goes, “Trust me.” And when she sent it over, I think there may have been a tear, Frank. I was like, this is so beautiful. And then we briefly texted and her little brother had recently passed away and she said, “I wrote these words with my brother in mind.” And I was just like, “Oh my god. Yeah, it’s really about nothing ever dies.”
FJO: Beautiful. It’s the ultimate tribute in a way.
FJO: So, a few silly harp related questions for you because I have to say, the harp is an instrument I’ve always been somewhat scared of, I don’t completely understand how you navigate through the pedals. I’m curious in terms of all the music you do, since the pedal position kind of locks you into being able to play 7 of the 12 notes at the time, you can move around, you can move the pedals and do all this stuff but I wonder how fast can you change positions, and in so much of this music, certainly the jazz end of the things is all about subtle chromatic alterations, you can’t really do that on a harp.
BY: Frank, it is HARD, I mean, that’s why I appreciate it when there’s like 2 measures of 1 chord; I like lean into it. Because, you know, we can do the chromatics, but depending on how fast they are, you can hear the footwork. I call it the tap dancing with so many pedals. And in terms of when you’re improvising and you maybe don’t have everything premeditated that you’re gonna play, you have to play and then think about the pedals necessary to move to play what you want to play. So it’s a lot of thinking.
FJO: Another silly harp question. I was thinking of this because I was very curious and I’ve now listened to many different recordings online and you have a recording you released of your composition, Unrest and I was thinking, “Okay, this is going to be angry.” But a harp can’t sound angry. And, of course, it doesn’t sound happy. It sounds like something else. I wonder howyou convey some of these more turbulent emotions. I think Alice did it by just playing crazy, crazy fast.
BY: Hahahaha, well for Unrest specifically, if you’re a harpist or even just a harp listener, there is one area you don’t wanna hear and that is the lower register with notes close together. I mean it may be similar on piano, too; it just gets really muddy down there. And that is how I started Unrest – in the lower register, it’s uncomfortable to play and it’s uncomfortable to listen to and that was my intention. And I know it opens up into this more of a reflective section that accidentally may sound beautiful. But it’s reflective and it’s just a moment to sit literally and reflect on what’s happening. But then it goes right back into that uncomfortable section, where it’s down in the lower register. So there are things that we can do that don’t sound pleasant, especially when it comes to extended techniques, where you know boing and sheeeuhh and all those noises that make you feel uncomfortable; we do have some extended techniques that we can do.
FJO: Well, I love Unrest. I think it totally works and I couldn’t figure out why it works and now I understand that a little a more. I have it looping in my head as we’re talking right now, the opening of that; it’s great.
BY: Thank you.
FJO: A final area I want to get into with you, I really enjoyed seeing your quartet perform that live performance in the Hamptons. It was the first gig that you did live after being in lockdown for so long. You talked about how important it was to be performing in front of a live audience again and how much energy you get from people being there. You’re about to embark on this tour and play in front of lots of audiences, so it’s gonna sound ironic for me to say this, but I think my absolute favorite recording of yours is Force Majeure which is this incredible duo album you recorded with your husband, double bassist Dezron Douglas in lockdown, you were trapped in your home doing this but it’s magical and I think it’s like a beacon of hope during these really horrible times we all lived through.
BY: [pause] Could you say organic?
FJO: Yes. [laughs] Yes, very much so.
BY: Completely unplanned, literally just reacting to the moment–in every way.
FJO: There’s such chemistry; there’s such energy in that recording
BY: Pure honesty. Raw. That’s the word: raw.
FJO: I absolutely love it.
BY: Thank you.
FJO: It was done in lockdown, and you weren’t going outside. But the other thing I’m thinking of is you’re playing your own instrument.
BY: That’s hilarious, so that was the one great thing about lockdown, being able to just play and really play and become more familiar with my instrument and to newer harps. When you’re traveling around, you don’t even get to break in your own instrument. When you’re in college, you’re really bang bang bang bang pounding your instrument out, but now I’m not. So that was really an opportunity to start to break the instrument in, but that Hamptons gig, I can’t forget that, because it was like a big exhale for I think all of us. The weather was perfect; do you remember the weather?
FJO: And it was like suddenly re-emerging after being cocooned.
BY: Shoutout to Duck Creek.
FJO: Yeah, well hopefully, it seems like everything is starting up again. People are acting like it’s completely over, which we know it’s not completely over, but hopefully we’re past the worst of this thing.
BY: Hopefully, I feel as such. I hope.
FJO: So, you’re about to embark on this multi-city tour, traveling, are you just playing things from the new album, or combination of things, what’s the plan?
BY: Yeah, so we’ll be doing new music and some of the stuff from the last album. I also will throw in an Ashby or Coltrane tune because that’s my thing, what I’ve doing forever. The tour is mostly going to be trio–Rashaan Carter on bass, Alan Menard on drums. So yeah, harp trio baby.
FJO: Nice. Are you going to play Unrest?
BY: Yup, sure am.
FJO: I want to hear it as a trio!
BY: Yeah. We recorded that on the Somewhere Different session but decided to release it separately on its own.
FJO: Interesting. Well, good luck with all of that. Thank you so much for taking time with me this morning. I know you’ve got a busy schedule ahead and keep doing it.
BY: Thank you so much for having me. You’re the best. This is a lot of fun, really a lot of fun. It’s not always a lot of fun; you know what I’m saying? [laughs]