Vault Search: Jazz Harp

Look up harpists in a jazz discography, and you’ll mostly find them buried in the casts of studio orchestras, when they don’t turn out to be misidentified mouth harpists. We’re talking about players of the concert harp, the big gizmo that looks like a piano frame balanced on one end, the thing that Harpo used for inserting a short intermission into every madcap Marx Brothers feature.

From the ways harp is usually deployed — to suggest the angelic or ethereal, or deliver a sweeping arpeggio before some bloated pop tune’s out-chorus — you wouldn’t think it had much jazz potential. Still, you can fight those tendencies, exploiting instead the harp’s deep bass notes, buzzing long tones and spiky attack, front-loaded like a jazz guitar’s, for precise beat-placement and maximum swing. (Yes, the strings will drone on, unless you stop them with your palm.)

Not that playing jazz harp is easy. The strings in normal position will sound a major scale; ratcheting up any of seven pedals (one for each note in the scale) a notch or two will raise a string’s pitch by a half or whole step. That brings all notes within reach, and even allows for some clunking Monkish clusters, but it’s exhausting, levering pedals in and out of position. The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz sniffs that the harp is “poorly suited to the loud dynamics and precise rhythms of much jazz, and its cumbersome system of strings and pedals makes the playing of rapid jazz chord progressions nearly impossible.”

Still, some players managed to make it fit, beginning with Casper Reardon in 1934 with trombonist Jack Teagarden. (They were bandmates in Paul Whiteman’s whale-ish ork.) Reardon got it right away: the clipped piano-like chords, arpeggios cut short, swing rhythm and even swerving blue notes (achieved by pedaling an already-ringing string).

Reardon and Harpo aside, harp has largely been the domain of female musicians; would-be jazz women were typically shunted toward “feminine” instruments and away from horns with their troubling phallic implications. Save for Gene Bianco, the harpists on umpteen studio dates are apt to be women: Margaret Ross, Janet Putnam, Gloria Agostini, Corky Hale, Lois Colin... Harp was acceptably genteel — and harpists often have appropriately euphonious names: April Aoki, Blanche Birdsong, Tryphena Partridge.

Casper Reardon’s replacement in the Teagarden live band was Adele Girard, who paid a then-astronomical $2500 for a new harp in the mid '30s. That led to a long tenure in clarinetist (and husband) Joe Marsala’s dixieish band; she was billed as playing “swing harp,” and had a fleet beat to back it up. Their sides are rare, but you can hear her ballad style with singer Barbara Lea in the '50s, on “A Straw Hat Full of Lilacs” and “True Love.”

The '50s saw a flurry of activity; Betty Glamman co-led a quintet, played at Birdland with bassist Oscar Pettiford, and recorded with Ellington (A Drum Is a Woman) and with Kenny Dorham: specifically three numbers on the trumpeter’s Jazz Contrasts (with Pettiford, Sonny Rollins, Hank Jones and Max Roach — fast company). Not content just to feature a jazz french horn player (co-leader Julius Watkins), Les Jazz Modes tapped Janet Putnam to pluck up their version of “You Are Too Beautiful” and an Yma-Sumac-bizarre “When the Blues Comes On.”

John Coltrane loved the sound of the harp, having a weakness for sweeping multi-octave arpeggios himself. He tried to get his wife Naima to take it up; he had better luck with her successor, Alice Coltrane, a pianist who’d studied harp. She became the best-known jazz harpist, albeit one who leaned into swirly, heavenly stereotypes — as on Joe Henderson’s cosmic The Elements from 1973. (Footnote: in a similar style, Lois Colin gets the swirlies on Coltrane disciple Pharoah Sanders’ “Ntjilo Ntjilo/Bird Song.”)

The boss bop-wise, and arguably the greatest jazz harpist, was Dorothy Ashby, whose 1958 compendium In a Minor Groove is as good a jazz harp album as you’ll find. Many harpists shy away from quick tempos; not Ashby. Hear her blues “Back Talk,” in call-and-response with Frank Wess (a good match throughout on flute — another “feminine” instrument), or romping through “Dancing in the Dark” and “Bohemia After Dark,” to savor her nuanced articulation, crisp piano- or guitar-like chords, parallel-octave runs, bent notes, playful quotes and high swing. (Roy Haynes or Art Taylor keeps time.) She’s one virtuoso who won’t overplay: the anti-swirly.

Working modern harpists have to be diverse and don’t get to flex their jazz chops much, what with all those pop-sweetening, wedding-reception and lounge gigs to play. (Look at Wales’s Rhodri Davies: free improviser, classical musician, new music interpreter… and Charlotte Church sideman.) But give these players a chance and their inner Ashby may surface. In trio on Round the Corner, Deborah Henson-Conant sounds fine when she avoids typical harp moves. On the title tune and “Take Five,” her attention to dynamics is admirable, and her minimal chording behind her improvised melodies spot-on. She practically whispers “Swingin’ Shepherd Blues” and makes it work, and caresses Hoagy Carmichael’s lovely harmonies on “Georgia.” But “Over the Rainbow” (an Oz medley, actually) dives head-first into the schmaltz. Similarly, harpman Park Stickney sounds better making those strings snap, pop and buzz on Miles Davis’ “All Blues” than covering an early King Crimson ballad.

From the late '70s, Anne LeBaron found a role for harp in open, itchy/scratchy improvised music, her often spare approach suggesting kinship with a sometime collaborator, guitarist Derek Bailey. Starting in the '80s Zeena Parkins put harp on an equal footing with electric guitars and keyboards in exuberantly noisy settings, using her homemade electric harp, which resembles an open-faced zither mounted with a whammy bar. Subjecting it to the usual electronic treatments, she mixes it up with, say, art-rock drummer Chris Cutler (Shark!) or guitarist Nels Cline (The Inkling). But she’s no slouch on the acoustic angel-box either: hear “Solo for Neil.”

As a Lower East Side regular, Parkins has worked often with John Zorn. He’s also frequently employed Carol Emanuel, who comes from a family of harpists. Zorn used Emanuel sparingly but well on his first film score in 1986, on many soundtracks since (including some delightful cartoon music), on his cut-up genre-mash-terwork, the pulp-homage Spillane and elsewhere. The pretty melodies and arpeggios Zorn writes her are all the more affecting, surrounded by louder ruder thrashy stuff. When making a music of sharp contrasts, it helps to have one player on the side of the angels.