I turned in a column yesterday, and while writing it I had cause to google the phrase “jazz harp”, and had my mind absolutely blown by an introduction to Dorothy Ashby.
I’m so dazzled by this. I came to harp-playing age (15) on a steady diet of Celtophilia and Loreena McKennitt, was informed by interested parties that Alan Stivell and his Renaissance de la harpe Celtique were responsible for McKennitt’s ascendency, and that the lineage of harp-playing resurgence in the 20th century looked and sounded a certain way. Seeing Ashby’s photographs and listening to her album and reading about her life has me trembling like an instrument under her power.
The first track on that album is fascinating because I keep trying to figure out how they’ve miked the harp — it sounds muffled, uncertain, as if in a distant room, especially next to the piping confidence of flute. But by the second track — oof. It’s all there, all the bluegold depth I associate with this instrument, how its percussive qualities are sharp and catching as a rain of needles.
Do any of you play an instrument? Whether you do or not, tell me about a time your paradigm shifted so thoroughly and suddenly you didn’t even realize it was a paradigm until you’d shed it like a skin.
In my 20s, I participated in a series of Suzuki/Viewpoints acting workshops. It wasn't until later when I was casually painting (I am, to put it politely, an untrained visual artist) with a friend that everything exploded and I realized that those fundamental instincts you train up in one art form transcend to all art forms - that the study of bodies in space and time and in relation to one another has bearing on all creative work. And then, to take it up a notch, that same set of skills is relevant in coding in terms of understanding composition and efficiency.
I do play. I was classically trained on the piano. My last teacher died when I was fourteen--he was also my maternal grandfather and I was very close to him. When he died, I had a hard time sitting at the piano so I picked up the ukulele and then the guitar. High school was spent playing along to Pink Floyd's the Wall and Nirvana's Nevermind on my blue Dean in my basement bedroom with the amp turned all the way up. I came back to piano post-high school and sang, too. I did pageants and talent contests. I fancied myself a Tori Amos/Regina Spektor on the piano and a Joan Baez/Alanis Morissette on the guitar. I got a job at a dueling pianos bar playing covers of Journey and Madonna and songs from Grease and had to quit when I got pregnant and my belly was too big for me to reach the keys. I can still make a karaoke party with only a keyboard. And... now I'm a mom and a writer and piano and guitar are things I do when I have spare moments.
HOWEVER:
I am always shocked when I sit down to play, even if it's been days or weeks since I came to the piano, and my fingers remember. My fingers remember Rachmaninoff and Rondo alla Turca and Fantasie-Impromptu. My hands remember the hops and arpeggios in Malaguena and they remember the softness in Clair de Lune even if I can't find the right notes. Muscle memory is a surprise every time I experience it--"I'm really rusty," I think, and then my fingers touch the keys and they do it all for me. It reminds me of when I was preparing to give birth, learning that women in comas had delivered babies. Our bodies know and remember so much, for better or for worse. When I let my fingers play, when I trust them, they can make beautiful things. Brains are overrated.
I don’t play an instrument so this is a completely different paradigm. I didn’t travel abroad a lot (went to France with school once) so my worldview was very limited. My wife took me to Prague for my 30th and we came to Munich for hers, where we fell in love with city, eventually moving here.
Anyway, on our second visit or so in 2008 we were walking down a side street and a woman in her seventies was leaning out of her window and watched us walk past. I remember looking at her and being overwhelmed by the sense that she almost certainly had no idea where we came from. Though my hometown might be well known in England, outside it was almost completely unknown. This woman had lived a long life and would not be able to point to my birthplace on a map, and I was hit by how anglocentric my worldview had been up until that moment. It changed my perspective on a lot of things.
As a teenager I remember going to a performance (I think of Bach's b minor mass) and reaching a spot where the voices built up harmonies from the bass up to the sopranos and past them into woodwinds so fluidly that it took me a moment to realize the top line wasn't a human voice. I'd been trained in instruments and voice and always heard that the voice was an instrument, and that was the light switch moment where I realized I hadn't quite believed it until then.
I was going to interject that Alice Coltrane, John Coltrane's wife, played jazz harp, along with several other instruments, composing, playing in some of John's recordings as well as a leader of her own ensembles. She's really worth looking up!
I played trumpet all through high school and college--jazz, marching bands, classical. I played a lot of stereotypical ego-driven aim-for-the-rafters jazz, and only moderately successfully. Much later, I was exposed Norwegian trumpeter Arve Henriksen, whose embouchure and technique are very nonstandard, whose whole approach make the trumpet's sound much more like a human voice. It really opened my ears and changed my thinking about the instrument and what is expressible with it. I strongly recommend his album CARTOGRAPHY.
Alan Stivell was only responsible for the resurgence of the *Celtic* harp. It was around in other forms of music (jazz, classical, Mexican, South American, etc) all along.
As a child, I listened to my grandparents' recording of Norma Zimmer singing Summertime. She was the "Champagne Lady" on the Lawrence Welk show if anyone is old enough to remember that. When I got to college, I heard Sarah Vaughan's version of the song and it was like the shutters blew off my mind. It was a whole new world of sound.
This feels like the most fortuitous of synchronicities. I've just discovered the work of Deborah Henson-Conant. She was another one who loved crossing genres with the harp, and when I was in a zoom call with her today, gushed about Dorothy Ashby.
But even more than that, she A. invented a much smaller travel harp, and I found her Ted talk about how and why dynamic and delightfully innovative in a way ted talks don't often achieve:
But also: she has this amazing theatrical performance, done by the Grand Rapids symphony, streaming for only a week. It's all sorts of her pieces--the whole score, for the full symphony, was composed by her--and all sorts of songs and tales to go along with it. I'm utterly and entirely enchanted, and I think! you can still get access to the on-demand streaming for the next five days if you go here:
To answer your actual question, the biggest paradime shift for me came with the two presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders. I had never seen a candidate espousing my shared views actually come within a whisker of the highest office in the land; never imagined it was even possible. It lit a fire for politics and community organizing that burns even hotter today than in 2016. Ted Kennedy was the one who introduced me to the ways that politics--this deeply abstract concept to a poor nobody in the U.S. deep south--affected people's lives. (I'd made a point in a history class debate that mirrored Kennedy's enough that my history teacher was fit to be tied, and damn near got me into an immense vat of trouble for plagiarism until I frantically convinced him that I literally didn't know Ted Kennedy existed! much less want to rattle off his speeches in history class. At which point I then spent two enthralled hours goggling at CSpan videos of Ted with said history teacher.) But Bernie was the one who took: ooo, politics has interesting and relevant things to say and alchemized it into: I! want to influence the things being said.
I can only ply the recorder and that poorly, though I’ve dabbled in clarinet and bowed psaltery and guitar. I’m in ever-rising awe of folks who dedicate their efforts to learning to coax beauty from these tools.
I have a crap memory so my brain tends to shed an old paradigm and then have a lot of trouble recalling any particular moment of epiphany. But a Recurring moment I come to a lot, or that my brain likes to remind me of on occasion, is that sudden shift of perception when myself becomes not the protagonist of the current moment but merely a singular element in an enormous, unknowably complex fluidity of events. When I see that I’m so very very small and the wideness of everyone else’s experiences are simultaneously threading though and against the weave of my own. It’s always a moment my heart rate increases and I get a tinge if vertigo.
This is SO GOOD!! I love jazz, I love harp, but I never in a million years thought of the two together <3
I do not play an instrument. The closest I've come to such a transformative paradigm shift was learning about feminism. It really felt like the curtain fell from my eyes. This journey had led me on many others, equally hard and equally rewarding, as I started thinking more and more about structural inequalities and how they manifest in our very real, very specific lives. But that first time I will never forget -- coming as it was intertwined both with a very happy and a very depressing Fall in my life.
Perhaps the most unusual thing about it was how at peace I felt after the paradigm shift. I am used to, and was expecting, lots of strong emotions, not unlike falling in love. Instead, I felt a combination of empty and ready. Once I got over how unsettling this experience was, it was incredibly rewarding. It's very strange to write about it now -- I don't think I have all the words for it.
I used to play the piano, but this was because my parents forced me to (under the pretense that they wished they knew how to learn the piano when they were young so had all of their chidren learn it) and was horrible with it because I seldom practiced and wasn't motivated to do so (I didn't want to learn piano).
I think the biggest paradigm shift for me was reading the Scions of Shanarra books in my early teens, and one of the magical artifacts there was a sword that showed you truths (especially the uncomfortable ones) when you wielded it. I imagined holding it and began to assess my life, and started peeling away the deceptions I said to myself. For example, while it's true that I was bullied when I was young (taunts and physical injurires), I was also a kind of a bully to others (mostly in the insult department) in some ways. Also that I was arrogant.
Following that, it was easier to be conscious of paradigms I had. For example, I think one I had until college was that I didn't know/believe about systemic racism and sexism. I thought that racism and sexism had to be where you intentionally hated a specific race or sex, but was not aware of the systemic/unconscious factors that contributed to this. I think engaging in the LJ and blogging community (and reading posts and writings like yours, Amal) made me learn. I still have an embarassing, erroneous and horrible blog post up which I can barely read but still maintain as a reminder and humbling experience, and so that hopefully others learn from my mistakes.
In my 20s, I participated in a series of Suzuki/Viewpoints acting workshops. It wasn't until later when I was casually painting (I am, to put it politely, an untrained visual artist) with a friend that everything exploded and I realized that those fundamental instincts you train up in one art form transcend to all art forms - that the study of bodies in space and time and in relation to one another has bearing on all creative work. And then, to take it up a notch, that same set of skills is relevant in coding in terms of understanding composition and efficiency.
I do play. I was classically trained on the piano. My last teacher died when I was fourteen--he was also my maternal grandfather and I was very close to him. When he died, I had a hard time sitting at the piano so I picked up the ukulele and then the guitar. High school was spent playing along to Pink Floyd's the Wall and Nirvana's Nevermind on my blue Dean in my basement bedroom with the amp turned all the way up. I came back to piano post-high school and sang, too. I did pageants and talent contests. I fancied myself a Tori Amos/Regina Spektor on the piano and a Joan Baez/Alanis Morissette on the guitar. I got a job at a dueling pianos bar playing covers of Journey and Madonna and songs from Grease and had to quit when I got pregnant and my belly was too big for me to reach the keys. I can still make a karaoke party with only a keyboard. And... now I'm a mom and a writer and piano and guitar are things I do when I have spare moments.
HOWEVER:
I am always shocked when I sit down to play, even if it's been days or weeks since I came to the piano, and my fingers remember. My fingers remember Rachmaninoff and Rondo alla Turca and Fantasie-Impromptu. My hands remember the hops and arpeggios in Malaguena and they remember the softness in Clair de Lune even if I can't find the right notes. Muscle memory is a surprise every time I experience it--"I'm really rusty," I think, and then my fingers touch the keys and they do it all for me. It reminds me of when I was preparing to give birth, learning that women in comas had delivered babies. Our bodies know and remember so much, for better or for worse. When I let my fingers play, when I trust them, they can make beautiful things. Brains are overrated.
I don’t play an instrument so this is a completely different paradigm. I didn’t travel abroad a lot (went to France with school once) so my worldview was very limited. My wife took me to Prague for my 30th and we came to Munich for hers, where we fell in love with city, eventually moving here.
Anyway, on our second visit or so in 2008 we were walking down a side street and a woman in her seventies was leaning out of her window and watched us walk past. I remember looking at her and being overwhelmed by the sense that she almost certainly had no idea where we came from. Though my hometown might be well known in England, outside it was almost completely unknown. This woman had lived a long life and would not be able to point to my birthplace on a map, and I was hit by how anglocentric my worldview had been up until that moment. It changed my perspective on a lot of things.
As a teenager I remember going to a performance (I think of Bach's b minor mass) and reaching a spot where the voices built up harmonies from the bass up to the sopranos and past them into woodwinds so fluidly that it took me a moment to realize the top line wasn't a human voice. I'd been trained in instruments and voice and always heard that the voice was an instrument, and that was the light switch moment where I realized I hadn't quite believed it until then.
I was going to interject that Alice Coltrane, John Coltrane's wife, played jazz harp, along with several other instruments, composing, playing in some of John's recordings as well as a leader of her own ensembles. She's really worth looking up!
I played trumpet all through high school and college--jazz, marching bands, classical. I played a lot of stereotypical ego-driven aim-for-the-rafters jazz, and only moderately successfully. Much later, I was exposed Norwegian trumpeter Arve Henriksen, whose embouchure and technique are very nonstandard, whose whole approach make the trumpet's sound much more like a human voice. It really opened my ears and changed my thinking about the instrument and what is expressible with it. I strongly recommend his album CARTOGRAPHY.
Alan Stivell was only responsible for the resurgence of the *Celtic* harp. It was around in other forms of music (jazz, classical, Mexican, South American, etc) all along.
As a child, I listened to my grandparents' recording of Norma Zimmer singing Summertime. She was the "Champagne Lady" on the Lawrence Welk show if anyone is old enough to remember that. When I got to college, I heard Sarah Vaughan's version of the song and it was like the shutters blew off my mind. It was a whole new world of sound.
This feels like the most fortuitous of synchronicities. I've just discovered the work of Deborah Henson-Conant. She was another one who loved crossing genres with the harp, and when I was in a zoom call with her today, gushed about Dorothy Ashby.
But even more than that, she A. invented a much smaller travel harp, and I found her Ted talk about how and why dynamic and delightfully innovative in a way ted talks don't often achieve:
https://tinyurl.com/ybf6gjq3
But also: she has this amazing theatrical performance, done by the Grand Rapids symphony, streaming for only a week. It's all sorts of her pieces--the whole score, for the full symphony, was composed by her--and all sorts of songs and tales to go along with it. I'm utterly and entirely enchanted, and I think! you can still get access to the on-demand streaming for the next five days if you go here:
https://tinyurl.com/y8ck3zcn
To answer your actual question, the biggest paradime shift for me came with the two presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders. I had never seen a candidate espousing my shared views actually come within a whisker of the highest office in the land; never imagined it was even possible. It lit a fire for politics and community organizing that burns even hotter today than in 2016. Ted Kennedy was the one who introduced me to the ways that politics--this deeply abstract concept to a poor nobody in the U.S. deep south--affected people's lives. (I'd made a point in a history class debate that mirrored Kennedy's enough that my history teacher was fit to be tied, and damn near got me into an immense vat of trouble for plagiarism until I frantically convinced him that I literally didn't know Ted Kennedy existed! much less want to rattle off his speeches in history class. At which point I then spent two enthralled hours goggling at CSpan videos of Ted with said history teacher.) But Bernie was the one who took: ooo, politics has interesting and relevant things to say and alchemized it into: I! want to influence the things being said.
I can only ply the recorder and that poorly, though I’ve dabbled in clarinet and bowed psaltery and guitar. I’m in ever-rising awe of folks who dedicate their efforts to learning to coax beauty from these tools.
I have a crap memory so my brain tends to shed an old paradigm and then have a lot of trouble recalling any particular moment of epiphany. But a Recurring moment I come to a lot, or that my brain likes to remind me of on occasion, is that sudden shift of perception when myself becomes not the protagonist of the current moment but merely a singular element in an enormous, unknowably complex fluidity of events. When I see that I’m so very very small and the wideness of everyone else’s experiences are simultaneously threading though and against the weave of my own. It’s always a moment my heart rate increases and I get a tinge if vertigo.
This is SO GOOD!! I love jazz, I love harp, but I never in a million years thought of the two together <3
I do not play an instrument. The closest I've come to such a transformative paradigm shift was learning about feminism. It really felt like the curtain fell from my eyes. This journey had led me on many others, equally hard and equally rewarding, as I started thinking more and more about structural inequalities and how they manifest in our very real, very specific lives. But that first time I will never forget -- coming as it was intertwined both with a very happy and a very depressing Fall in my life.
Perhaps the most unusual thing about it was how at peace I felt after the paradigm shift. I am used to, and was expecting, lots of strong emotions, not unlike falling in love. Instead, I felt a combination of empty and ready. Once I got over how unsettling this experience was, it was incredibly rewarding. It's very strange to write about it now -- I don't think I have all the words for it.
I used to play the piano, but this was because my parents forced me to (under the pretense that they wished they knew how to learn the piano when they were young so had all of their chidren learn it) and was horrible with it because I seldom practiced and wasn't motivated to do so (I didn't want to learn piano).
I think the biggest paradigm shift for me was reading the Scions of Shanarra books in my early teens, and one of the magical artifacts there was a sword that showed you truths (especially the uncomfortable ones) when you wielded it. I imagined holding it and began to assess my life, and started peeling away the deceptions I said to myself. For example, while it's true that I was bullied when I was young (taunts and physical injurires), I was also a kind of a bully to others (mostly in the insult department) in some ways. Also that I was arrogant.
Following that, it was easier to be conscious of paradigms I had. For example, I think one I had until college was that I didn't know/believe about systemic racism and sexism. I thought that racism and sexism had to be where you intentionally hated a specific race or sex, but was not aware of the systemic/unconscious factors that contributed to this. I think engaging in the LJ and blogging community (and reading posts and writings like yours, Amal) made me learn. I still have an embarassing, erroneous and horrible blog post up which I can barely read but still maintain as a reminder and humbling experience, and so that hopefully others learn from my mistakes.
Came for the jazz harp, stayed for the in-depth musical discussion. :)
https://melanietheconstantreader.substack.com/