America’s most famous harpist is Harpo Marx: he of the curly mop of hair, sealed lips, and an overcoat full of props. When he sat down before the concert harp in the Marx Brothers movies, he usually played classical pieces, but he often improvised comic variations on the tunes. In the process, he liberated the instrument from its staid, stodgy reputation. And his anarchic spirit lives on in a new wave of harpists who are staking out a space for the instrument in modern jazz.
Most prominent of these is Brandee Younger, whose new album Somewhere Different came out in August. But she’s just the tip of the spear in a movement that includes Edmar Castaneda, Jacqueline Kerrod, Zeena Parkins, Park Stickney, and Carol Robbins. They all point to Dorothy Ashby and Alice Coltrane—both students of Velma Fraude, the legendary harp teacher at Detroit’s Cass Technical High School—as primary musical influences.
But Harpo looms large in the popular imagination. He wasn’t a virtuoso by any means—he didn’t even start playing till he was in his twenties—but he did get better as he aged and even made a respectable jazz album in 1957, Harpo in Hi-Fi, with one former and one current member of the Chico Hamilton Quintet: saxophonist Buddy Collette and cellist Fred Katz. The follow-up, 1958’s Harpo at Work! was a jazz-with-strings project arranged by Harpo’s son Bill Marx, a jazz pianist and film composer.
“Harpo comes from that era of true entertainers,” Younger says. “Today we’re like, ‘Just do one thing,’ but he did everything. He’d go to folks for lessons and end up teaching them, because what he was doing was so cool. He absolutely shook the stuffy image off the harp and showed you could do different things with it. If it wasn’t for Harpo, we would never have progressed.”
No one seized those opportunities more effectively than Ashby. Her debut album, , was also released in 1957 as the first of three collaborations with Count Basie’s flutist Frank Wess. As the daughter of jazz guitarist Wiley Thompson, Ashby began on piano at
