Brandee Younger has noticed her audience changing lately. The harpist, composer and bandleader, whose elegant, groove-anchored sound has made her a standout presence in and around jazz in recent years, had grown accustomed to seeing a certain type of listener at her shows.
“It’s, like, a Portland, 40s man,” she said with a smile during an interview last month at her East Harlem apartment, referencing demographic data on her fan base — not atypical for a contemporary jazz artist — furnished by her label.
During recent tours, though, she started to notice an influx of “young girls that are, like, so excited.”
It’s been an encouraging sight for Younger, 41, who said that growing up as “this little Black girl playing harp” and devoting herself to classical studies while also keeping close tabs on hip-hop and R&B, she struggled to find role models.
“I want to grab their hands,” she said of these new converts. “I want to nurture these 20-year-old girls, because I wish I had that — something like that — when I was 20.”
Younger’s latest batch of music, out Friday, feels like a nurturing, affirming message too. “Gadabout Season,” her third album for Impulse!, offers the best encapsulation yet of the tasteful, subtly radical sonic hybrid that she has been honing since she picked up the harp at age 11. It’s a persuasive argument for the vast, trans-idiomatic potential of her instrument.
“I almost feel like this record is Brandee’s ‘Rubáiyát’ — like ‘The Rubáiyát of Brandee Younger,’” said Rashaan Carter, the album’s bassist and producer, invoking “The Rubáiyát of Dorothy Ashby,” a defining 1970 release by one of Younger’s key influences, a forebear who carved out new sonic spaces for the harp in jazz and R&B.
The bassist, singer and songwriter Meshell Ndegeocello, Younger’s friend and sometime collaborator, highlighted the way the album “incorporates all these elements: orchestration, improvisation, comping and just the African experience of, you can dance to it.”
“It’s got a super tight flow with it,” she added.
Written in a cottage adjacent to her cousin’s house in upstate New York and recorded in her apartment with a core lineup of Carter and the drummer Allan Mednard, the album coalesced around a theme of holding on to joy amid challenging circumstances. While Younger declined to elaborate on the personal hardships that inspired it, she said that she wanted to tell a “story with no words.”
“I think the focus is less about a specific event,” she explained, “and more about what it means to process.”
The title arrived on tour, after Younger received a word-of-the-day email spotlighting “gadabout” and forwarded it to Carter, suggesting that it evoked his habit of counteracting the stresses of the road with various sorts of intentional fun.
“It became this thing,” Carter recalled. “We’d be somewhere, and it’s just like, ‘Hey, what do you want to do? Do you want to sleep, or rest or something?’ And it was like, ‘Well, it’s gadabout season. We might as well go out and find a good restaurant or a bookstore or a record store.’”
The title also ties into a deeper context that surrounds the album: the pervasive influence of Alice Coltrane, another one of Younger’s guiding lights. Beyond her music, Younger drew inspiration from Coltrane’s perseverance in the wake of the 1967 death of her husband, the saxophone icon John, which left her a single mother to four young children and an artist embarking on a new phase of her career.
“Look, the gadabout, this is about finding joy. What do you think Alice was trying to do when John died? Find joy. Joy doesn’t mean you’re out there in these streets acting a fool,” she said with a laugh. “It’s seeking out joy even in hard times.”
Younger’s apartment, light-filled and well stocked with plants, is adorned with tributes to Coltrane and Ashby. Padding around in gold slippers that matched her “Brandee” necklace, she showed off a trio of portraits of Coltrane, Ashby and herself hanging on a hallway wall, which she called “my holy trinity.” A living room shelf held LP copies of “A Monastic Trio,” “Afro-Harping” and “Brand New Life,” albums by each of them.
Younger’s home also contains an even more precious artifact: Alice Coltrane’s actual harp, a Lyon & Healy style 11 model originally purchased for her by John but only delivered after his death. It was recently refurbished at the Chicago factory of its original manufacturer. Younger, who’s been an associate of the Coltrane family since 2007, when she performed at Alice’s memorial service, now has a close relationship with the instrument. She played it at recent tribute concerts, including one at Carnegie Hall in May — as part of a cast that included two of Coltrane’s children, the saxophonist Ravi and the vocalist Michelle — and she used it on “Gadabout Season,” marking the harp’s first appearance on a record not by Coltrane herself.
Michelle Coltrane said in an interview that Younger’s journey to the family, and her mother’s harp, felt like destiny. “Alice would say there are no coincidences,” she said. “So this is what was meant to be, and it’s the right person.”
Younger has found inspiration in Coltrane’s example since her early years playing harp, when her father brought home a compilation CD featuring “Blue Nile,” Coltrane’s soulful 1970 spiritual-jazz classic. The track allowed her to conceive of the instrument in the context of a swinging rhythm section, much as Ashby’s work on classic records by Earth, Wind & Fire and Stevie Wonder had revealed the instrument’s vital role within pop.
“It was really like a permission slip to do what I wanted, to play what I wanted, and not to worry so much about style, genre,” Younger said.
That sense of an unbounded aesthetic hangs over “Gadabout Season.” And while certain moments — such as the opening track, “Reckoning,” with its meditative bass drone and shimmering glissandi — do hark back to Coltrane, the album is unmistakably a current statement, and an expression of the full breadth of Younger’s artistry. Her intent, she said, was to push beyond the instrument’s clichéd associations.
“People always associate it with, like, ethereal,” she said, adopting a mock-dreamy tone and rolling her eyes. “But no, I think that the harp has much more depth and range than people think.” She cited “Breaking Point,” a track where she plays in an aggressive and fractured mode. “There’s nothing ethereal about that.”
Younger has often honored her heroes explicitly, covering Ashby on her 2023 LP “Brand New Life” and participating in the various Coltrane tributes. On “Gadabout Season,” though, despite playing Coltrane’s harp, she’s privileging her own personality, shifting from, as Carter put it, “literal tribute to conceptual tribute.”
“I had to find my voice on it,” Younger said. She communed with the Coltrane harp, practicing on it daily in preparation to record.
While growing up, she said that the snobbish attitude she encountered in harp circles that “if it’s not classical, it’s not serious” gave her pause. But now she’s simply playing what feels right, and setting what seems like a healthy example for those enthusiastic 20-year-old girls finding their way to her shows.
“I ain’t got those ego issues,” she said of her current mind-set. “I just want you to enjoy it.”
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