Impulse Vinilo y CD

Review: Continuing to affirm the harp's place within the annals of jazz, Brandee Younger returns with her second album and pays tribute to one of her forebears, the mighty Dorothy Ashby. Mixing her own original pieces with reinterpretations of Ashby's work, Younger infuses her playing with the cultural context of a life raised on hip-hop, rock and pop. It's a subtle amalgamation which guides the rhythm and intonation of her playing, but the results are exquisite and highly individual, placing Younger in the upper echelons of harpists from any era you care to mention.

Review: Spring has sprung into something resembling summer, and perhaps the best record through which to celebrate this transition is Brandee Younger's latest, Gadabout Season. The title - sparked by a word-of-the-day email on tour with longtime collaborators Rashaan Carter and Allan Mednard (gadabout meaning "someone who roves about aimlessly seeking amusemnt") - came to represent the Younger trio's mission to seek spontaneous lightness through movement and music. Writing from a cabin in upstate New York, and later recorded in her Harlem apartment, Younger embraced a slow, intentional process, fine-planing a canny compositional set informed by ancestral, influential sottos of jazz, hip-hop, classical and soul; all are heard to whisper in Younger's ear as she rides each song. It's the first major body of work made almost entirely on her own, and crucially, contains pieces crafted using Alice Coltrane's restored harp, now appropriately left in her care.