News & Updates — harp

Happy birthday to Hugo Blanco, one of the greats of Venezuelan music and the South American harp. The author of "Moliendo Café", written in 1958 and now a "world music" standard, Blanco was born in Caracas and learned to play the cuatro at 15. He fused Venezuelan folk music such as gaita and joropo with influences from Cuba and beyond. In the '60s he also introduced ska to Venezuela with his group Las Cuatro Monedas. Other notable songs of his include "La Vecina", which was featured in the Miami Vice TV show, and "La Rosa Blanca", which I first heard...

One of my very favorites is the pianist/harpist/composer and cosmic music traveler Alice McLeod, known later as Alice Coltrane. Another great jazz artist from Detroit, she is possibly best known for being the wife and collaborator of John Coltrane, but Alice is an amazing artist in her own right. She brought celestial concepts into the music and fused free jazz, Indian, European classical, new age, bebop and avant-garde into a gorgeously spiritual, intense experience. Her music has gained much more currency in the last twenty years but I have always been a fan. I remember thinking "why are her records...

The queen of break-beat harp-jazz, Dorothy Ashby grew up in Detroit. Her father was a jazz guitarist and she went to high school with Donald Byrd and Kenny Burrell. After college she gigged around as a pianist in the early '50s while also dedicating time to mastering the harp. By the mid-'50s she was playing bop as a harpist and recorded several albums for Prestige, Atlantic and the Chess family of labels from the late '50s into the '70s. Her classic 1970 album The Rubaiyat of Dorothy Ashby featured her on the Japanese koto. Her tunes have been sampled by hiphop...