Collection: Dorothy Ashby

Dorothy Ashby was born Dorothy Jeanne Thompson in Detroit in 1932 and grew up in the Paradise Valley and Black Bottom neighbourhood. Her father, Wiley Thompson, was a self-taught jazz guitarist who often brought other musicians home. She studied piano and music education at Wayne State University and began on piano in the Detroit scene, but by 1952 the harp was her main instrument. That was a hard sell. Even in Detroit, listeners tended to treat the harp as a novelty or an orchestral colour, and Ashby is widely credited with proving it could improvise and swing. Her first full jazz LP, The Jazz Harpist (Regent, 1957), featured Frank Wess on flute, and Hip Harp (Prestige, 1958) kept him in the band. She moved through Atlantic and then Cadet, where Afro-Harping (1968), Dorothy’s Harp (1969) and The Rubaiyat of Dorothy Ashby (1970) pushed into soul, African and Middle Eastern ground. On The Rubaiyat she also played the thirteen-string Japanese koto, with arranger Richard Evans adding flutes, vibraphone, oboe, kalimba and her own vocals. It was somewhat maligned on release and is now valued as a mix of soul, world music and free jazz. She also wrote scores for the Ashby Players, a Detroit theatre company run with her husband, drummer John Ashby, making plays relevant to the city’s Black community. Later studio work included Bill Withers’s +’Justments (1974). She died of cancer in Santa Monica on 13 April 1986, aged 53.