Dorothy Ashby

A Detroit jazz harpist who made the harp an improvising instrument in the 1950s and 1960s, then a soul-jazz one on Afro-Harping, and whose records were later sampled across hip-hop.

Origin: Detroit, Michigan
Years active: 1952-1984
Genres: jazz, soul jazz, jazz-funk
Labels: Regent, Prestige, Atlantic, Cadet, Philips
Also known as: Dorothy Jeanne Thompson

Detroit and the harp

Dorothy Jeanne Thompson was born on August 6, 1932 in Detroit and grew up in Paradise Valley and Black Bottom. Her father, Wiley Thompson, was a self-taught jazz guitarist who hosted jazz musicians at home, and she accompanied them on piano as a girl. At Cass Technical High School, where schoolmates included Donald Byrd, Gerald Wilson and Kenny Burrell, she tried saxophone and string bass before the harp, trained in the Salzedo-influenced classical style by Velma Froude, who Red Bull Music Academy says also taught Alice Coltrane. Space Age Pop says the school had five harps for fifteen students. At 17 she enrolled at Wayne State University for piano and music education. She bought a harp in 1952, and local musicians resisted a harp in jazz, so she played free shows, dances and weddings with her trio. She married the drummer John Ashby, who played in the trio.

Her first full jazz LP, The Jazz Harpist (1957), was with the flutist Frank Wess, who helped her get a Regent session, engineered by Rudy Van Gelder; Space Age Pop says it was on Savoy. Hip Harp (Prestige) and In a Minor Groove (New Jazz), both with Wess, followed in 1958, Soft Winds (Jazzland) in 1961 and an eponymous Argo record in 1962, which included her composition "John R.". Ira Gitler's liner notes for Soft Winds praised her feeling for time and guitar-like lines, and she won Down Beat awards in 1962.

Atlantic and Cadet

The Fantastic Jazz Harp of Dorothy Ashby, recorded on May 3 and 4, 1965 in New York, was produced by Arif Mardin and Ollie McLaughlin and engineered by Tom Dowd, with Richard Davis on bass, Grady Tate on drums, Willie Bobo on percussion and four trombones on six tracks. DownBeat gave it four stars in February 1966. At Cadet, Richard Evans arranged and conducted Afro-Harping (recorded February 1968 at Ter Mar Studios in Chicago), Dorothy's Harp (March 1969) and The Rubaiyat of Dorothy Ashby (November 1969 to January 1970), the last subtitled original compositions inspired by the words of Omar Khayyam, on which she plays harp, koto and sings. AllMusic's Thom Jurek wrote of it that this may be her greatest moment on record.

In the 1960s she and John Ashby founded the Ashby Players of Detroit, a Black theater company for which he wrote scripts and she wrote scores and played; she hosted a radio show and wrote album reviews for the Detroit Free Press, according to uDiscover. In 1967 Robert H. Klotman, a divisional director of music education, inspired by her, placed 10 Troubadour harps in five inner-city Detroit schools.

California and the sessions

She moved to California around the turn of the 1970s, where Bill Withers brought her into studio work and recommended her to Stevie Wonder. Her session credits include Withers's +'Justments (1974), Minnie Riperton's Adventures in Paradise (1975), Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life (1976), where she is the only accompanist on "If It's Magic", Freddie Hubbard's Bundle of Joy (1977), Billy Preston's Late at Night (1979) and Bobby Womack's The Poet (1981). Her last leader albums, solo harp, were Django/Misty and Concierto de Aranjuez (1984, Philips). She died on April 13, 1986 in Santa Monica, aged 53.

NPR's Tom Moon called her one of the most unjustly under-loved jazz greats of the 1950s in 2006. Her records have been sampled by Pete Rock, Jay-Z, J Dilla, Madlib, Flying Lotus and Drake, and she inspired the harpists Brandee Younger and Alina Bzhezhinska. In a 1983 interview she said the audiences she was trying to reach were not interested in the harp, period.

Records

The Fantastic Jazz Harp of Dorothy Ashby 1965 · Atlantic
Her Atlantic album, with Richard Davis, Grady Tate and Willie Bobo, and her own tunes beside standards.
Afro-Harping 1968 · Cadet
Her Cadet debut, with Richard Evans's orchestra and the break that hip-hop producers kept returning to.

Songs

Essence of Sapphire The Fantastic Jazz Harp of Dorothy Ashby · 1965
Ashby's own composition, the second track of her 1965 Atlantic album.
Soul Vibrations Afro-Harping · 1968
The opening track of Afro-Harping, written by Richard Evans, and a staple of hip-hop sampling.

Minnie Riperton, Billy Preston, Madlib

Where to go next

Reference

Dorothy Ashby on Wikipedia The fullest biography and discography.
Space Age Pop: Dorothy Ashby A biography with catalog numbers.
NTS: Dorothy Ashby A biography and radio data.

Writing and criticism

uDiscover: Dorothy Ashby A career overview.

Sources

Dorothy Ashby, Wikipedia
Dorothy Ashby: pioneering jazz harpist from Detroit, uDiscover Music
Dorothy Ashby, Space Age Pop
The Rubaiyat of Dorothy Ashby, Wikipedia