Performer: Ashley Jackson
Format: FLAC (tracks)
Label: Decca
Catalogue: 7572822
Release: 2025
Size: 660 MB
Recovery: +3%
Scan: yes
01. A. Coltrane: Radhye-Shyam
02. A. Jackson: River Jordan
03. Coleridge-Taylor: Deep River I
04. Coleridge-Taylor: Deep River II
05. Younger: Unrest
06. Debussy: Danse sacrée et danse profane, L. 103
07. Rezende: Yemaya I
08. Thomas: Yemaya II
09. Bonds: Troubled Water
10. trad.: Amen
11. trad.: Take Me To The Water I
12. trad.: Take Me To The Water II
With her first album for Decca (and overall second full-length), the boundary-pushing and award-winning harpist Ashley Jackson just might become a household name. Jackson fuses music and storytelling in Take Me to the Water with a style that’s already strong enough to call her own, based on this and 2023’s Ennanga, as well as her 2020 “musical documentary” In Song and Spirit (based on Harriet Jacobs’s memoir Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl).
Jackson, currently an Assistant Professor and the Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Music Department at Hunter College, is part of a tradition of visionary Black women who play and compose on the harp (Alice Coltrane, Dorothy Ashby, Angelica Hairston). As a soloist, she’s performed around the world and has also worked with the New York Philharmonic, the Qatar Philharmonic, Metropolis Ensemble, and is the principal harpist of NOVUS NY, the contemporary music orchestra led by the Grammy-nominated Julian Wachner.
