I am so happy to announce my first playlist collab is with Dario Miranda! Dario is a jazz and indie musician buff and staple of the music scene here in Phoenix. I can’t think him enough for being my guinea pig. We combined our mutual interests and landed on a playlist of harp, ambient, and jazz vibes. There is a robust wold of experimental harpists out there and this is only a toe in the door. I hope you enjoy our mutual efforts with this week’s playlist.

To make sure these playlists delivered to your inbox every week, sign up for my newsletter.

I give this playlist a Difficult Listening Hour rating of 3/10. 

Continuum 2 by Nala Sinephro. Album: Endlessness. Nala is an experimental jazz/amient musician and trained harpist. “Endlessness is a deep dive into the cycle of existence. The 45-minute album delicately spans 10 tracks with a continuous arpeggio playing throughout, creating an expansive, mesmerizing celebration of life cycles and rebirth. Following Nala Sinephro’s critically acclaimed debut album Space 1.8, Endlessness further elevates Sinephro as a transcendent and multi-dimensional composer, beautifully morphing jazz, orchestral, and electronic music.’

2. Wawa by the Ocean by Mary Lattimore. Album: Collected Pieces. From Pitchfork, ““Wawa by the Ocean,” a 10-minute composition from her upcoming compilation Collected Pieces, is an excellent demonstration of Lattimore’s strange and evocative playing. In the last few years, she helped the harp break free from classic conventions, deploying echo, delay, and looping effects. She extracts sounds from the instrument that are futuristic but also feel nostalgic and intuitive. On “Wawa by the Ocean,” she conjures up the meditative, breezy scene of an ideal beach day. Each of her individual plucks articulates a different sense of longing, subtly stretching and multiplying in hypnotizing ways, making them feel languorous at one moment and sad the next. Overall, there is a pervasive sense of relaxation to “Wawa by the Ocean” that makes it an unlikely but perfect song for a day spent watching the waves.”

3. Blue by Elori Saxl. Album: The Blue of Distance. About the album, “Combining digitally-processed recordings of wind and water with analog synthesizers and chamber orchestra, Elori Saxl’s The Blue of Distance begins as a meditation on the effect of technology on our relationship with land/nature/place but ultimately evolves to be more of a reflection on longing and memory. The phrase “the Blue of Distance” was coined by Rebecca Solnit in A Field Guide to Getting Lost and refers to the phenomenon of faraway mountains appearing blue due to light particles getting lost over distance.”

4. Isis And Osiris by Alice Coltrane. Album: Journey in Satchidananda. From Verve, “JOURNEY IN SATCHIDANANDA, recorded in the fall of 1970, is a serene, composed meditation on the lessons of the 1960’s, a mystical work of enduring sweetness and spiritual longing. The concluding cut “Isis And Osiris” (recorded earlier that summer at the Village Gate), is a global village of texture and song, animated by Pharaoh Sanders’ gently wafting soprano and Rashied Ali’s quicksilver brushwork, as Vishnu Wood’s feathery oud, Charlie Haden’s woody bass and Coltrane’s sweeping harp combine to create a dreamy vortex of sound. The title cut and “Shiva-Loka”-centered around Cecil McBee’s sonorous, lyric bass vamps and Tulsi’s droning tambourine-are gorgeous evocations of modal jazz and Indian ragas, again exploiting the contrast between Sanders’ reedy chants and Coltrane’s blissful arpeggios. And then there’s “Stopover Bombay” and “Something About John Coltrane, ” which reveal the melodious symmetry of Alice Coltrane’s piano playing, a singular style deeply imbued in the old time testimonies of the spirituals and the blues.”

5. i can only understand in snippets and snapshots by Grace Scheele. Album : OTHER ROOMS. From the composer’s website, “Grace Scheele is an unconventional artist noted for her innovative take on experimental and ambient forms.​​ She masterfully interweaves harp rumblings, cinematic drones, textural loops, and candid tape confessions into music that celebrates that liminal ‘in-between’; a place of question, blank existence, or wonder. An interdisciplinary artist, electroacoustic harpist, and composer, she works across a wide range of disciplines.”

6. In a Landscape by John Cage performed by Yolanda Kondonassis. Album: American Harp. Program notes: The rhythmic structure of this supremely lyrical work is 15 x 15 measures (5-7-3), following the structure of the Lippold dance for which it was written. The piece is similar to Cage’s Dream, but the fixed gamut of tones is more extensive. Resonances are sustained throughout the composition by using both pedals. The sound of the composition is soft and meditative, reminiscent of the music of Erik Satie.

7. Unrest I & Unrest II by Brandee Younger. Album: Unrest. From New Music Box, “How Younger has transformed the harp, which is typically associated with salons or angels, into such a malleable and yet still distinctive instrument seems without precedent. But she had two very significant role models in Alice Coltrane and Dorothy Ashby. Her love for Alice Coltrane, whose cascading harp sonorities matched the intensity of the free jazz improvisers with whom she performed, began in high school when her father gave her a Priceless Jazz compilation of her recordings. She was immediately captivated by “Blue Nile” and soon thereafter asked every jazz musician she encountered if they knew her. Brandee never actually met Alice Coltrane but she was invited to play at her memorial at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in 2007. Dorothy Ashby, whom Brandee also never met (she was only two years old when Ashby died), has had an even more significant influence on her career trajectory. Ashby also led her own ensembles starting in her 20s and quickly leaped from jazz to a much wider stylistic palette that embraced a spectrum of pop and world music traditions.”

8. Find Me feat. J Hoard by Kassa Overall. Album: I THINK I’M GOOD. From the liner notes, “I THINK I’M GOOD is a window into the real life of Overall, a Bushwick-based artist wrestling with the abhorrent American prison system, the ebbs and flows of romantic relationships, and perils of trust, all seen through the kaleidoscopic lens of a brilliant 21st century composer. The backdrop to these varied themes is Overall confronting his experience with mental illness, which included a manic episode and subsequent hospitalisation when he was a student. Themes of incarceration and claustrophobia weave through the record, but never drown out the feeling of a fragile but vital hope.”

9+. Tournesols (Album name) by Emily Hopkins and Courtney Swain. Because all tracks are loaded onto one video on YouTube, I originally thought this was a single-track album. Since it is presented without breaks, I wanted to keep the whole work together. This collab album is for harp, voice, and live processing.