Melissa Harris-Perry: Welcome back to The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. It's time for the final installment of our series Music In Their Own Words.
This series was the brainchild of producer Mary Stephan Hagan. We're going to hear now from a musician who highlights Black history and culture and pays homage to Black composers with her arrangements for the classical harp.
[music]
Ashley Jackson: The first movement is a nod to West African rhythms and improvisation. The second movement for me is spiritual, and the third sounds like it's coming from 1920s, 1930s Harlem and all in the name of what we call classical music. My name is Ashley Jackson. I'm a professional harpist. I'm also the Assistant Professor of Music at Hunter College, where I'm also the Director of Undergraduate Studies. My upcoming album is titled Ennanga and it will be released on June 16th, 2023.
Melissa Harris-Perry: Ashley recently performed at Lincoln Center in New York City with an original program titled, Take Me to the Water. She joined The Takeaway to talk about this performance and her upcoming album.
Ashley Jackson: The title of my album, Ennanga comes from a piece that William Grant Still, the American composer, it comes from one of his pieces that he wrote for Harp, String Quintet and Piano.
[music]
The word Ennanga is a type of Ugandan harp. The Harp is one of the oldest instruments in the world and many cultures have their versions of it, including West African music. What I had a lot of fun with in Ennanga, and especially the first movement, is investigating those polyrhythms. That is such a prominent feature in so many different genres and sub-genres of African music, but also the sense of improvisation, very light texture, fast-moving notes.
[music]
In the album as well as Take Me to the Water, the show that I recently had at Lincoln Center, I was listening to a lot of kora music. Kora is an African harp that's popularly played in pop music and folk music. I was listening to those sounds and just thinking about ways I can incorporate those textures and just the way that the harp in many West African cultures is a vehicle for storytelling. Harp just happens to be the vehicle for which I can investigate those histories, my lineage, and really American history. When we're talking about African American history, we are talking about African history and that's where the harp really comes in.
[music]
For me, the most important part when beginning an arrangement is, yes, what are the salient musical features of the original, why do I love it, and then can the harp not only bring out those melodies or those rhythms as we hear them in the original sense, but then also thinking about what can the harp add to it that we didn't have in the original?
[music]
For example, in Prema by Alice Coltrane, which is originally for a solo piano, I can't quite get the rhythmic power that the piano gives. I have a way of resonating that the piano doesn't. I take a lot more time so that the instrument after I've plucked it, still has a chance to speak. I used some moments where she was really improvising to insert some more harp-like features such as arpeggios and glissandos, so that way I give a moment for the harp to shine.
[music]
On the album, I feature two of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's arrangements of spirituals I'm Troubled in Mind and The Angels Changed my Name. I was looking at the lyrics of African American spirituals and seeing that water continues to pop up as a metaphor for freedom or rebirth. That's really part of the ingenuity that we find in African American spirituals, just the way that words might mean one thing on one level, but they really signified another.
[music]
I investigate water as a symbol for freedom and hope in African American history. I also wanted to go further back and look at West African practices, Yoruba religions and some of the most prominent Orishas are Yemaya and Oshun. They are female deities who represent freshwater and saltwater. With that, they represent love and they have all these other amazing qualities that are associated with them. That's something else I wanted to investigate, just water, not only as a symbol for freedom but for love, for union, for bringing people together.
[music]
When I think about the composers on Ennanga, the way that they individually have redefined the American landscape, Alice Coltrane, her music has such a strong spiritual presence and she really opened up the world of jazz to harpists, playing in such a free way that there really is nothing else in the soundscape that sounds like her. I will admit that it took me years to feel like I'm comprehending where she might be coming from. I also have to highlight Brandee Younger, I'm playing her Essence of Ruby on the album. Brandee also as a harpist and composer has done so much to bring not only jazz but R&B and groove-based tunes and making them available to harpists in ways that we really haven't had before.
William Grant Still's Ennanga has only been professionally recorded twice, so it's been some time for such a celebrated American composer that we don't have more recordings of this fantastic chamber piece. It feels like music that's also been long overdue.
Melissa Harris-Perry: That's Ashley Jackson. Her album in Ennanga is out on June 16th.
[music]
Copyright © 2023 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.
New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.
