Alina Bzhezhinska interview: “My goal is to make music that no one expects from a harpist”

Alina Bzhezhinska has always loved a mixtape. As a teenager growing up in Lviv, western Ukraine, in the 1990s, she’d make her own: a classical piece by Pierre Boulez, say; Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, cherry-picked from her parents’ vinyl collection; The Beatles. Metallica; Vangelis, soundtracking Blade Runner. Anything, really, that took her fancy.

“So many different sounds and influences,” says Bzhezhinska, sitting in her North London living room flanked by her vintage Lyon & Healy practice pedal harp – the same 90-year-old model played by Dorothy Ashby, an all-time hero - and a Celtic harp that she bought when living in Scotland. Her black electro-acoustic pedal harp, on which she records and plays live, is downstairs by the front door, positioned for a speedy getaway.

“I’m constantly pulling together strands of music I love,” she continues. “What I did as a kid on cassette I now do on platforms like Spotify. Tunes for dancing or meditating, for when I am happy or sad. Free-spirited tunes, all of them, filled with courage, innovation and beauty. When I thought about creating this new album I decided to take the same approach.”

Alina's HipHarp Collective at Ronnie Scott's with guests Tony Kofi and Jay Phelps (photo: Monika S Jakubowska)

Bzhezhinska’s hugely anticipated sophomore album Reflections draws, then, from various sources. Most notably, from Ashby and Alice Coltrane, the artists she calls “the two major pillars of jazz harp.” Other legends are accounted for: John Coltrane is represented by the ever-powerful ‘Alabama’ and Duke Ellington by ‘African Flower’ (‘Petite Fleur Africaine’), a dialogue between harp and sax. Mongo Santamaria’s ‘Afro Blue’ is here, with its lyrics – gorgeously sung by London-based vocallist Vimala Rowe – by Oscar Brown Jr. So too, are a clutch of originals by Bzhezhinska, and one (the flowing, Ashby-inspired ‘Sans End’) by her bassist Michele Montolli.

Rooted in a mixtape’s anything-goes aesthetic, but given an arc, a narrative, by deft sequencing, Reflections is a work that progresses the artist’s blend of jazz and classical harp and layered electronics, folding in the contributions of British jazz stars, including trumpeter Jay Phelps, sax supremo Tony Kofi, double bassist Julie Walkington and the core members of Bzhezhinska’s HipHarpCollective, more of which in a moment. It’s a recording in which, while buoyed by the collective, the harp unequivocally leads; an album that takes in trad jazz, spiritual jazz and free jazz, hip hop, trip hop and rap; which firmly positions Bzhezhinska as a jazz musician with a unique vision.

“Alice Coltrane said the piano was like a sunrise and the harp was like a sunset”

“My debut album (2018’s Inspiration) was much more traditional, with its jazz quartet line up of bass, drums, saxophone and a harp,” says Bzhezhinska (an earlier recording, 2005’s Harp Recital, is pre-jazz, pre-memory). “I went deep into the music of the Coltranes, and included my own compositions inspired by this amazing couple. But I was still searching for my own language, for a new sound, a new territory. My goal is to make music that no one expects from the harpist.”

This time around it is American jazz harpist Ashby, she of 1958’s Hip Harp, 1968’s Afro-Harping and 1970’s The Rubaiyat of Dorothy Ashby, from whom Bzhezhinska takes major cues. Ashby and her fellow Detroit Cass Technical College alma mater Alice Coltrane, five years Dorothy's junior, are her go-tos, as they are for any jazz harpist worth their strings.

“Until you immerse yourself in the style, techniques and ideas of these two women you cannot call yourself a jazz harpist. Only then you can go in any direction you want: minimalist, electronics, traditional jazz. But we have to really know, the source.”

Classically-trained under Dr Carrol McLaughlin at the University of Arizona, Bzhezhinska is an avid researcher, wont to disappear down jazz-history rabbit holes in her quest to discover as much as possible about her touchstones. About Alice Coltrane, whose improvised recordings, first heard, proved epiphanic: “I felt scared; I couldn’t believe somebody could be so free. The challenge for me in jumping from classical to jazz was believing
I could make fast, complex harmonic changes using pedals. To learn the rules, then break them.”

The Coltranes’ story is well documented: Alice was an accomplished pianist (“She said the piano was like a sunrise and the harp was like a sunset”) who channelled her grief at losing her sax-titan husband John in 1967 by teaching herself to play the harp he’d bought for her (and in 1983, under her Sanskrit name Alice Coltrane Turiysanagitananda, founded the Sai Anantam Ashram in California). Who recorded some 40 – forty! - albums as a bandleader before her own death aged 69 in 2007. Her tune ‘Fire’, co-written with tenor player Joe Henderson, features on Reflections, and was recorded in one take with Kofi and Phelps in a way that respects the original while using improvised melodies and rhythmical clusters that speak to Coltrane’s piano stylings and Bzhezhinska and Co’s freedom of expression.

“It’s important to have the right people,” she says. On arriving in London in 2015 Bzhezhinska heard Kofi playing at Dalston’s Brilliant Corners and recognised a kindred soul; their duo began soon after. “The music definitely has to be soulful.”

“I agree with Nina Simone, who said it is the role of the artist to reflect the world. Any difference you can make, however small, is something, and the world needs this now more than ever”

Especially, perhaps, when interpreting Dorothy Ashby – a multi-instrumentalist and composer who worked the clubs of Detroit, collaborating with artists from Motown here, establishing the harp as a prominent instrument there, investing what was formerly a symbol of serenity and celestiality with be-bop energy and releasing 11 solo albums along the way. That Ashby left behind virtually no interviews or archive footage after her death aged 53 in 1986 might have consigned her to the history’s dustbin had not fans – including contemporary harpists Brandee Younger, Zena Parkins and indeed, Bzhezhinska – taken it upon themselves to reverse her reputation as one of the most unjustly under-loved jazz greats of the 1950s.

“Nobody ever spoke to me about Dorothy, or Alice,” says Bzhezhinska, who, taught by her mother, starting learning piano and harp aged five, going on to music school then studying at the F Chopin Academy in Warsaw, just over the Polish/Ukrainian border from Lviv. Who, after a stint living in Glasgow, came to the attention of London and the world in a starry 2017 triple bill at the Barbican featuring Denys Baptiste and Pharoah Sanders, a tribute to the music of the Coltranes.

“My classical education was very strong for 15 years. I studied Boulez, Cage, Lutoslawski, all those composers but even in the West no one seemed to know about Alice or Dorothy, these African-American women playing old instruments in a male-dominated arena, one in the shadow of her husband, the other an activist but without a school or students to follow her.”

Bzhezhinska read that Ashby’s father was a jazz guitarist who encouraged his daughter to play piano with the jazz musicians who visited their home, in between playing harp in Cass Tech’s long respected Harp & Choir class. “You can hear that Ashby studied the harp properly. Even on her duo albums with flutes, her harp is leading, definitely equal. Listen to Alice Coltrane with Pharoah Sanders or Joe Henderson, and while she has her own language it is very different, more open and spiritual.

“The only time you might think ‘Is this Coltrane?’ is on The Rubaiyat of Dorothy Ashby, an album inspired by the writing of Persian poet Omar Khayyám, where Ashby is singing and playing the Japanese koto (plucked half-tube zither).”

It was Ashby’s Hip Harp that literally changed Bzhezhinska’s professional identity. Fed up with having her surname mispronounced – there’s a YouTube video where she phonetically breaks it down into bite-size syllables (Bshair-shn-ska) – she began billing her solo shows with harp and electronics as, simply, Alina HipHarp. “It tells you who I am, and who I’m inspired by. That what I’m doing is hip and edgy. That there’s harp. It suggests hip hop; I’m a huge fan of J Dilla, whose electronic beats and drum programming influenced so many hip-hop producers as well as my new album,” she adds.

HipHarpCollective was created during lockdown, with the intention of bringing the international jazz harp community together online, indirectly furthering Bzhezhinska’s explorations of unusual settings and combinations, as with those early mixtapes.

L-R: Michele Montolli, Alina, Adam Teixeira and Joel Prime (photo: Ed Otchere)

When HipHarpCollective became a live concern, she knew she wanted electric bass as well as both drums and percussion (“Together they make such a strong rhythm section, which no one else has done with the harp”) and beats, loops and effects.

“I was always interested in distorting the harp sound. There was something in me that was hungry, you know? I mean, I love the pure harp sound so I try and be faithful to it. But I also like the idea of going somewhere, having a little detour then coming back to the original harp sound without any amplification.”

What we hear in Reflections, then, is a harp on its own journey, from the Ashby-penned opener ‘Soul Vibrations’ with string quartet-style violin and viola by multi-instrumentalist Ying Xue and a funky psychedelic arrangement by Bzhezhinska, through ‘For Carrol’, an elegiac piece for her late teacher that moves from heart-rending (“The trumpet melody is like a cry of desperation”) to funky and free, to the much covered ‘Afro Blue’ - its contrasting brass parts written by Kofi, the vocals by Rowe a masterclass in range, phrasing and tempo change and every bit as good as those of Erykah Badu in the 2012 Robert Glasper version. Reflections is an album, too, on which the core members of the London-based HipHarpCollective are vital: aforementioned upright/electric bassist Michele Montolli, from Italy. Drummer Adam Texeira from South America via Canada. Joel Prime from Adelaide, Australia on percussion, having previously played kit drums in Bzhezhinska’s quartet.

“I was searching for my own language, for a new sound, a new territory. My goal is to make music that no one expects from a harpist”

“When we were last in Adelaide” – Bzhezhinska played the WOMADelaide festival on the back of Inspiration – “I visited Joel’s parents in the family home; his father Don showed me this whole studio filled with percussion belonging to Joel, told me he won competitions as a child and young man and wanted him to play more. It was my last conversation with Don, who has since passed away, but when I was thinking about this new sound I thought, ‘That’s it. Joel is on percussion’. And he’s awesome.”

All the musicians in HipHarpCollective have palpable rapport, both in the core group and in the wider, more fluid line-up with its invited guests. Among them, on Reflections, Birmingham rapper SANITY and French/English poet Tom theythem [sic], both of whom add prose to ‘Paris Sur Le Toit’ – telling of a goddess at a Paris roof top party that is shut down by police, who then wanders with her heavy harp on her back, ignored, seeking acceptance and love.

Which isn’t so far from the truth (and for Bzhezhinska, as for Ashby and Coltrane, truth in music is everything). Bzhezhinska has previously spoken about the travails of a) being a female bandleader, carting her harp unaided from her car into venues; and b) the stereotypes that follow a female harpist (among them, “god’s messenger on earth”), obscuring the diversity of an instrument that can imitate sounds of nature or, strings bent, scream and shriek, or, with pedal slides, play jazz.

Like its parallel instrumental version, ‘Paris Sue Le Toit’ ft. SANITY and Tom theythem is based on a real life event that saw Bzhezhinska playing with beatsman Kamaal Williams in a roof top car park in Pigalle during Paris Fashion Week, an illegal happening that was halted moments after starting.

“On the train back I thought, ‘What just happened?’ I was already thinking about electronics and remixes” - American hip hop/deep house producer DJ Spinna and her BBE label mate, Paris-based Sly Johnson, have remixed both ‘Paris Sur Le Toit’ tracks, wildly increasing Bzhezhinska’s Spotify traffic - “but this crazy experience kickstarted my experiments.”

And so Bzhezhinska’s harp continues its sojourn on Reflections, making a detour back into the original harp sound on closing track 'Meditation', an improvisation that borrows from Middle Eastern melodies and features Julie Walkington on double bass. The last piece Bzhezhinska wrote for the album, the lovely, lilting title track, again featuring Walkington, comes early: “I’d created a narrative in how I’d placed the tracks, a theme that connected one to another but I needed a final piece of the puzzle.

“I was sitting right here on a late summer afternoon like this one,” she says, waving an arm toward the open window and the large verdant trees outside. “There was a warm breeze, and the colours of the leaves were turning. I’d been listening to Undercurrent by Bill Evans and guitarist Jim Hall, which is very tranquil and spacious, with this gentle comping that I was trying to do with the harp when I started playing on this afternoon.

“Suddenly this tune came out.” She pauses and smiles. “I thought, ‘This is my tune’. It felt like I was looking around and reflecting on my life, on everything I’d done. My personal life had undergone some huge changes and I finally felt strong, like the world was my oyster. So this is a tribute to traditional jazz, as well as a catharsis after everything I touch on in the album, from grieving for my teacher, to being banished from the Paris roof top, from getting into the spiritual sound of Alice Coltrane to studying the life and work of Dorothy Ashby. It’s all that.”

But since its creation preceded the 24 February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, what it is not, is a direct response to the crisis inflicted on Bzhezhinska’s homeland by what she calls “the Russian monster machine.” Bzhezhinska has so far been involved in over two dozen fundraisers for Ukraine since the invasion, overseeing the purchase and delivery of goods and vehicles, driving one of the vehicles in convoy to the country. With the conflict showing no signs of abating, she is worried about compassion fatigue (“Ukraine is not front page news anymore”), and feels a responsibility to try and maintain awareness.

“I don’t call myself an activist,” she says. “But I agree with Nina Simone, who said it is the role of the artist to reflect the world. Any difference you can make, however small, is something, and the world needs this now more than ever. We can’t just quietly mind our own business.”

As Bzhezhinska prepares to tour the colourful, nuanced, oh-so-emotional work that is Reflections, she’s hoping that the exposure it brings – for Ukraine, for multi-cultural London, for Ashby and Coltrane – will have a ripple effect. Raising awareness. Fostering appreciation. Getting us to think while we groove, swoon, or chill.

“For me the biggest compliment I can receive as a musician is when people recognise where my traditions are coming from but can also acknowledge that I haven’t stopped developing. Creating my own language.”

Another smile. “Still making my own mixtape.”

This interview originally appeared in the October 2022 issue of Jazzwise. Never miss an issue – subscribe today