One night, when Jeff Majors was fifteen, he dreamed that he was being pursued by evil spirits. All he had to defend himself with was a harp, an instrument that he had never seen in real life. But, as he played it, the notes turned into arrows, and his tormentors, convinced that he was an angel, left him alone. Majors, who was living in Washington, D.C., shared his dream with a local cabinetmaker who ran a small music shop. The man seemed puzzled and told Majors not to come back until he called him. A couple of months later, the man presented Majors with a miniature harp he had built. He said, “Whatever you wanna do with it, do with it what needs to be done, and enjoy yourself.”
In the mid-seventies, Majors began studying with the visionary jazz harpist Alice Coltrane, who viewed music as a pathway to divine transcendence. Coltrane taught him to approach the harp from a spiritual perspective, which wasn’t difficult, given the circumstances that had brought him under the instrument’s spell. Her training involved months in which Majors was not allowed to touch his harp at all. She wanted him, instead, to listen to everything that was going on around him. In 1986, after years of playing in jazz ensembles, Majors released “For Us All (Yoka Boka),” a smooth, if at times unpredictable, fusion of soul, jazz, and New Age. There are even moments when it sounds like a post-punk band covering old jazz standards. In the first few seconds of the opener, “Yasmeen,” you can hear the fads of the time—tinny, anxious drum machines, virtuoso squiggles of synthesizer. But then Majors’s harp enters with a glistening sweep, and a song that felt uptight, hectic, and, in a dated way, “modern,” melts into something delicate and almost naïvely uplifting.
The harp dates back to antiquity; versions of the instrument were played throughout Africa, Asia, and Europe. It is rooted in deep history, and serves as an audio cue that you’ve passed through the gates of heaven, or at least discovered a measure of serenity. Majors, influenced by Coltrane, believed that there was something unique, perhaps even healing, about the harp’s tonal range. After “For Us All,” he went on to a successful career as a gospel musician, where his talents served a more traditional kind of transcendence. But “For Us All,” which was recently reissued by the Canadian label Invisible City Editions, is bewitching and strange, because it often feels as if he hadn’t got there yet. Instead, Majors sounds as though he’s searching—for conclusions to tumultuous journeys, for a musical language capable of expressing his dreams of peace and harmony. His harp seems to pacify and tame all the over-the-top synths, starry-eyed jazz vocals, and cumbersome, programmed drums. There’s a sense of enchantment that feels at odds with the rhythms of the world, let alone with the rest of pop music.
Like many people who grew up uninterested in classical music or in an angel’s embrace, I always found the harp to be a fairly ridiculous instrument. Not just because of its conspicuous size and weight but because it seemed like a signifier for visions of tranquillity from bygone times. It was too pretty. I started to hear it differently about twenty years ago, owing to Brandy and Monica’s duet “The Boy Is Mine,” in which the two teen-age singers tussle over the same guy. The song opens with a twinkling yet stormy harp line—actually the harp setting of a keyboard—that foreshadows all the lyrical drama to come. The vocals braid around this gorgeous harp line, suggesting a bliss far beyond teen love, a glory that no boy deserves. I began looking for harps in unexpected places. The instrument lent an expansive splendor to spiritual jazz, from pioneers like Coltrane and Dorothy Ashby, in the sixties and seventies, to Brandee Younger, whose work features prominently on the drummer and bandleader Makaya McCraven’s excellent new album, “Universal Beings.” It provided a luscious, elegant counter to the boxy rhythms of U.K. garage. I grew fascinated with other, relatively non-angelic approaches to the harp, like the avant-garde compositions of Zeena Parkins, which are jagged and chaotic.
In the past few years, Mary Lattimore, a classically trained harpist who lives in Los Angeles, has brought the instrument to a range of new spaces. She has released albums on the experimental rock label Thrill Jockey and on the dance label Ghostly International, and has collaborated with such rock musicians as Kurt Vile, Steve Gunn, and Thurston Moore. Her own albums tend toward a spooky formlessness; listening to them feels like falling into a long trance.
“Ghost Forests” is an enthralling new album featuring Lattimore and Meg Baird, the prolific singer and multi-instrumentalist known for her work in Heron Oblivion, a psychedelic-rock band that alternates between walloping and soothing the listener. The harp traditionally suggests transcendence and purity, but “Ghost Forests” feels mortal and vulnerable. These songs are patient and spare, often built around the gorgeous textures that Lattimore conjures. But a feeling of tension hovers on the edges: the flicker and purr of Baird’s electric guitar, the light anguish of her quiet, dreamy singing. Lattimore leads for the first half of the song “Between Two Worlds,” her gentle, tentative plucks searching for something resolute and calm. Baird fills in the spaces, her notes growing increasingly strident, with a glacial guitar solo eventually taking over. On “In Cedars,” Lattimore plays a crisp, bright melody, which Baird shadows with brooding, smudged guitar sounds.
What makes the harp so beautiful is the way it radiates through open space, ethereal and unhurried. It connotes timelessness. But every so often on “Ghost Forests” Baird seems to bring Lattimore’s harp back toward the limitations of our world—the sting and feedback of electric guitar, lyrical references to war and fallen towers. The album ends with “Fair Annie,” a British folk ballad about a cruel man, his betrothed, and his mistress. The boy is theirs, yet neither of them wants him. Baird sounds both sprightly and weary, anchoring us in this world even as Lattimore’s pristine harp tries to take us somewhere else.
In music, as in life, aggression often seems like the easiest way to get someone’s attention. The self-titled début album by the U.K. rapper Manonmars is almost daringly casual, with a quiet, unassuming presence. Manonmars is a member of Young Echo, a Bristol-based collective of eleven producers and vocalists who make music that is dreary and flamboyantly slow, washed out in a haze, and clearly indebted to the late DJ Screw.
Manonmars’s voice is somewhere between a whisper and a mutter. At times, it’s as if he were trying to seep into the lumbering, warped street sounds and haunting reverberations around him. “Live from a moment in time,” he announces over the plodding pianos of “Luv,” stretching the moment out for as long as his oozing vocal style allows. It’s deliriously unnerving to hear his half-asleep fantasies about adventures in Las Vegas and Croatia, music-industry riches, plots against rival rappers. “I fuck around and leave the planet tryin’ to find my peace,” he raps on “Milk.” “All I wanted was to resonate, until somebody told me I should leave it on the résumé,” he raps, with a bit more vigor, on “Getaway.” “Life gave me nothing so there’s syrup and the lemonade.”
The slowness is intoxicating, as Manonmars’s deadpan grumbles give these abstract soundscapes shape. You have to listen differently. I first heard the album at 2 Bridges Music Arts, a record-and-book store tucked under a busy overpass in Manhattan’s Chinatown. Initially, it sounded as if someone were murmuring in the corner. Trucks rattled and purred above, and the shop’s windows and walls shook. I leaned closer to hear his voice, all gravel and bass, and the room trembled anew, and I couldn’t tell whether I was listening to music or to the world outside. ♦
