Ashley Jackson - Take Me To The Water (2025)

With her first album for Decca (and overall second full-length), the boundary-pushing and award-winning harpist Ashley Jackson just might become a household name. Jackson fuses music and storytelling in Take Me to the Water with a style that's already strong enough to call her own, based on this and 2023's Ennanga, as well as her 2020 "musical documentary" In Song and Spirit (based on Harriet Jacobs's memoir Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl).

Jackson, currently an Assistant Professor and the Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Music Department at Hunter College, is part of a tradition of visionary Black women who play and compose on the harp (Alice Coltrane, Dorothy Ashby, Angelica Hairston). As a soloist, she's performed around the world and has also worked with the New York Philharmonic, the Qatar Philharmonic, Metropolis Ensemble, and is the principal harpist of NOVUS NY, the contemporary music orchestra led by the Grammy-nominated Julian Wachner.

In assembling such a headily genre-sweeping concoction of material, this themed collection has the power of an original work in itself. Take Me to the Water begins with a transporting and meditative interpretation of an Alice Coltrane work from 1977 ("Radhe-Shyam") and ends with a two-park exploration of the titular African-American spiritual stretched into choral bliss. We are also treated to further spirituals, notably "Deep River," which was originally adapted by composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor in 1905. The treatment of Debussy's "Danse sacrée et danse profane, L. 103" is whipsmart and resplendent. There is reverence but also new life in the sparse but soulful arrangements.

TRACKLIST

1. Ashley Jackson - Radhe-Shyam
2. Ashley Jackson - River Jordan
3. Ashley Jackson - Deep River I
4. Ashley Jackson - Deep River II
5. Ashley Jackson - Unrest
6. Ashley Jackson - Danse sacrée et danse profane, L. 103
7. Ashley Jackson - Yemaya
8. Ashley Jackson - Yemaya II
9. Ashley Jackson - Troubled Water
10. Ashley Jackson - Amen
11. Ashley Jackson - Take Me To The Water
12. Ashley Jackson - Take Me To The Water II