Brandee Younger

Brandee Younger is an American jazz harpist, composer, and bandleader. She has brought the harp from its traditional classical and chamber-music settings into contemporary jazz, where spiritual jazz, R&B, soul, and hip-hop rhythms meet on a single instrument. Her playing balances the tactile attack of plucked strings and a grounded low end with flowing arpeggios that create a spacious, meditative sound.

Raised on Long Island, Younger sang gospel as a child and received classical harp training, while hip-hop and vintage soul also shaped her listening. Her father introduced her to Alice Coltrane as a teenager, a turning point in her exploration of the jazz harp. She has also followed the work of Dorothy Ashby. These two predecessors showed that the harp could be more than accompaniment or ornament: it could become the center of jazz improvisation and personal storytelling.

Younger builds on that tradition while engaging with contemporary beats, sampling culture, and popular music. Her collaborators have included Pharoah Sanders, Christian McBride, Common, Lauryn Hill, and John Legend. She records and performs with artists and bands across styles, and her own group explores the harp’s flexible rhythmic relationship with bass and drums. As an educator, she teaches at New York University and The New School, encouraging young musicians to discover the harp’s possibilities in improvised music.

Somewhere Different (2021), her first album for Impulse!, includes “Beautiful Is Black,” which received a Grammy nomination for Best Instrumental Composition. Brand New Life (2023) pays tribute to Dorothy Ashby, reimagining her work alongside Younger’s own compositions; it won the 2024 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Jazz Album. Gadabout Season (2025) focuses more closely on Younger’s original music, drawing on personal experience and travel as it extends her exploration of the jazz harp’s timbre and rhythmic boundaries.

Photo: Erin Patrice O’Brien / The Kurland Agency