Sunken Treasure: Dorothy Ashby’s 1968 album ‘Afro-Harping’

Post-war Detroit was fertile ground for music. One of the effects of the war had been the mass migration of mostly black folk up the Mississippi River to work in the war plants there and in Chicago. With the people came their music. The jazz and blues fires that raged in those cities in the 1950s and 1960s were all started by stray sparks from the deep south.

Dorothy Ashby’s father was a jazz guitarist whose house was a meeting point for all the hip cats of the Detroit scene. Her teenage years were spent jamming with him and his friends on the piano. Later she turned her hand to both saxophone and string bass before settling on the harp while studying at Wayne State University.

As a harpist, Ashby faced an uphill struggle to convince fellow jazz musicians that her chosen instrument was more than just a novelty. Her first album, The Jazz Harpist, from 1957, was a portent of things to come. She utilised the range of skills in her arsenal to good effect. Her strident playing was closer in tone to a lead guitarist than a classical accompanist. She could use the instrument's tremendous range to conjure mellifluous washes of sound and snap out chords that communicated directly with dancing feet.

She continued for 10 years and another five records, pushing the envelope without ever copping a break. The stars finally aligned in 1968 when Richard Evans caught her playing in a Detroit hotel. Evans was a bass player and the arranger extraordinaire at the Cadet label. He was the man entrusted by the Chess brothers to make their subsidiary label the grooviest in funky town.

Ashby and Evans' working relationship was a match made in heaven. There's a trilogy of records that testify to its magnificence. Afro- Harping is the first. With consummate ease he accentuates the sophistication of her playing by making it swing. It's a colourful and deeply soulful transformation.