Ashby, Dorothy - Dorothy Ashby (2025 Reissue)

Considered one of the most unjustly underrated jazz greats of the 1950s, and certainly the most accomplished modern jazz harpist ever, Dorothy Ashby (1932-1986) established by herself the harp as an improvising jazz instrument.

While, until then, the instrument had just been used as a novelty mixed with the sound of a string orchestra (as on Charlie Parker with Strings in 1950), Ashby proved the harp could play bebop as adeptly as any other instrument. Despite being titled just with her name, the 1961 LP presented here wasn’t her debut album (she had previously issued three other starting with Jazz Harpist in 1954), but her fourth.