Brandee Younger

Jazz harpist Brandee Younger has breathed new life into the ancient instrument with her elegant technique and eclectic outlook, embracing elements of funk, hip-hop and classical music as she plucks out rhapsodic phrasings and luminous harmonies. Younger was born in 1983 and grew up on Long Island in New York. As a teenager she became enamoured with the concert harp after stumbling across recordings of jazz luminaries Dorothy Ashby and Alice Coltrane. Although she studied classical music as an undergrad at the Hartt School conservatory in Connecticut, she later fully embraced improvisation and Black musical traditions while getting a graduate degree at New York University—where in 2007 she performed at a memorial for Coltrane alongside her son, saxophonist Ravi Coltrane. Younger released her debut EP in 2011, and since then she has savvily traversed styles and scenes: performing with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra one moment, sitting in on sessions with Common and Drake the next. Her own albums (including 2016’s Wax & Wane and 2021’s Somewhere Different), find her and her group fusing mesmeric jazz phrasings with post-J Dilla groove—an approach that earned her a Grammy nomination in 2022.