Brandee Younger and Dezron Douglas - Force Majeure review | John Lewis's contemporary album of the month

The Guardian 0

(International Anthem)
The couple combine forces on a jazzy chamber album full of harmonic intelligence and symbiosis

Brandee Younger is a classically trained harp player who you may have heard guesting with the likes of Lauryn Hill, Common, Drake and the Roots. Under her own auspices, she has been developing a jazz vocabulary for the harp, building on the achievements of Adele Girard, Dorothy Ashby, Alice Coltrane and Zeena Parkins. As well as being an instrument dominated by women (Younger’s latterday peers include Laura Perrudin, Alina Bzhezhinska, Destiny Muhammad, Rachael Gladwin and Carol Robbins) the harp is notoriously difficult for non-harpists to write for, and its music has developed largely through the experimentation of its practitioners, who are able to exploit its unique melodic characteristics and variable decay times.

Force Majeure is released on 4 December on International Anthem records.