Ashley Jackson: 'There's a harp in just about every culture'

Ashley Jackson is a highly sought-after musician and collaborator.

As a soloist, she has performed at Lincoln Center, Celebrate Brooklyn! and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

She has also performed with the New York Philharmonic, Metropolis Ensemble, the Qatar Philharmonic, and is the principal harpist of NOVUS NY, the contemporary music orchestra of Trinity Wall Street led by Grammy-nominated conductor Julian Wachner.

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Her latest album is Take me to the water.

Speaking from her home in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Jackson told RNZ’s Three to Seven, the album is recognition not only of the spiritual importance water plays in African American life, but of how it unifies all cultures.

“We can either let water be something that divides us, or we can think about it as something that connects us.”

The theme of water on the album explores a “painful part” of African American history, she says.

“The Middle Passage of being forced from Africa, our home. But here part of our resilience and really ingenuity is our ability to use coded language.

“And so, in African American spirituals, water becomes a metaphor for freedom, for hope, for seeing something better than the current situation. And as we know, water played an important role in the attempted and sometimes successful escape of the enslaved from the South to the North.

“So, water comes up a lot in our culture.”

The album was inspired, in part, by her maternal grandmother, she says.

“I talked about as being part of that great migration, leaving Florida by herself and coming to the north. She went to Beauty School. She studied hair but never worked a day in her life in a hair salon.

“I remember her most fondly for her faith. She was not artistically trained. My grandfather apparently had a wonderful ear and could play anything on the piano that he heard on the radio. But you know the sense of perseverance and faith is something that I still carry with me today.”

She loves many genres of music, she says.

"Music is for everybody and we all feel emotions and we, we've all had sort of shared experiences; love, loss, joy and sadness.

“And so, these are artificial boundaries that have been created. Classical music moves me just as much as jazz or soul music, and I really wanted my listeners to feel that, to feel that there is something for everybody in all kinds of music. We just happen to call it different things.”

On Take me to the Water she performs everything from spirituals to jazz to Debussy on an instrument that goes back through history, she says.

“The harp is one of the oldest instruments in the world. There are references to the harp in the Bible with King David. And you know, the roots really go back to Africa.

"And the amazing thing is that there's a harp in just about every culture. So, when you think about the global history of the instrument and just the many different forms that it takes, it allows me to draw inspiration from all those different types of sounds, and also the roles that harpists play in those different cultures.”