Each time I’ve heard harpist Brandee Younger in Portland since 2016, she glows brighter as a musician and more sure-footed as a performer. Whether playing her beloved fellow harpist the late Alice Coltrane’s tunes or her own compositions, she is an innovative guide of the harp’s journey, history and music. She’s a master player of the huge awkward beautiful instrument.

The harp is one of the most difficult musical instruments to play after the violin, piano, French horn and oboe, my AI chat bot claims. (The organ follows the harp in difficulty.) The harp features a complex pedal system that changes pitch on 47 strings, and each hand plays a different pattern from the other, visually coded by Younger’s outfit during her Oct. 29 two-hour concert at Portland’s The Old Church. Her “black and white cookie dress,” as she called it, was designed with one white sleeve and the other black.

With all its assets, the harp is a bear to transport and tune. She didn’t carry it onstage Oct. 29 – that was the stage crew’s job – but I imagine Younger has lugged a harp around many times to reach her original genre-blending style and mastery (she teaches at New York University and at The New School in New York CIty). Whichever harp she’s plucking, she rides a current of notes that flow, shimmer, undulate and shine, allowing the harp’s dreamy, sometimes metallic, tones to emerge from its ancient roots to speak to today’s audiences.

She typically plays in such intimate venues as TOC or Classic Pianos while in Portland, though at the 2025 Biamp PDX Jazz “Translinear Light” concert, named for Alice Coltrane’s 2004 album produced by saxophonist son Ravi Coltrane, she performed at the 880-seat Newmark Theatre. The size of the performance space doesn’t appear to matter in Portland for a Younger concert; she is almost always a sell-out, though it didn’t hurt in 2025 to have her name coupled with jazz royalty Ravi Coltrane, son of Alice and John Coltrane.

At the recent TOC concert, Younger played with her finely tuned and understated trio that included bass/composer Rashaan Carter and drummer Kweku Sumbry, who attracted almost as much applause as Younger herself, though Younger clearly ran the show. Once again, the concert was sold out; all-age patrons listened shoulder-to-shoulder for two hours in the 300-seat space. PDX Jazz brought her in as it has in the past several concerts.

Younger turned 42 years old this summer, with eight albums and several high-profile awards and recognition behind her. She won the 2025 Doris Duke Artist Award in recognition of her work and a 2021 Grammy nomination in the Best Instrumental Composition category for “Beautiful is Black” from her album Somewhere Different. On her 2023 Brand New Life album, Younger breathed vitality and verve into newly found music by Dorothy Ashby, who brought the jazz harp to life in the mid-century. That Younger LP won the 2024 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Jazz Album.

Younger stretches the harp beyond its more commonplace classical niche too often relegated to the back or side of the stage, even in many classical concerts. It’s rarely played in jazz, though Younger, with her frequent tours and appearances, has lately changed that, and harp predecessors Detroit natives Ashby and Alice Coltrane brought the majestic instrument to the forefront of jazz in mid-century America. In the 1950s, Ashby proved that the harp could hang in there with bebop, and in the ’70s, Alice Coltrane, with her harp, piano and organ, developed a cult-like following, a Hindu-like life, and a spiritual musical language built on African-American roots that embrace Eastern traditions.

Younger has kept all this alive and expanded on it with her original compositions. She played a number of pieces from her playful 2025 Gadabout Season album, including “End Means,” which featured mulit-instrumentalist Shabaka Hutchings on the LP. Much of the album, of which Younger wrote or co-wrote all but three of its 10 songs, conveys a haunting bell-like clarity. Bassist Carter remained quiet and modest throughout, as so many bassists do. He produced Gadabout Season recorded in Younger’s Harlem apartment, as was Force Majeure, the LP she made with husband/bassist Dezron Douglas during Covid. John and Alice Coltrane’s home recording studio was an example for Younger: Alice Coltrane recorded the much celebrated Ptah, the El Daoud in her Long Island Dix Hills home in 1970 with sax players Joe Henderson and Pharoah Sanders, bass Ron Carter and drummer Ben Riley.

After intermission, drummer Sumbry, thoroughly warmed up, shed his cap, jacket and scarf. As I said earlier, the audience gave him plenty of props, or proper respect.

Younger, by the way, doesn’t own Alice Coltrane’s storied custom-made gold-plated Lyon & Healey Style 23 Concert Grand harp that her husband John Coltrane had delivered to their Long Island home, nor did he ever hear her pluck its strings due to his 1967 death at 40 years old from liver cancer. Alice Coltrane’s estate made Younger the harp’s guardian and custodian. Younger has never played it in Portland, but that’s OK. I can only imagine the logistics. On Oct. 29 she stunned the concertgoers with Alice Coltrane’s meditative “Turiya and Ramakrishna” and Stevie Wonder’s soulful poetic “If It’s Magic” without a golden harp. Ashby played the much recorded “If It’s Magic” on Wonder’s 1976 Songs in the Key of Life. The track was recorded in three minutes, 10 years before Ashby died in 1986. Younger often plays the legacy instrument when she’s back East, she told the audience, especially when she’s in meditative moods and lets her flexible fast-moving hands glide like water across its strings.

Younger grew up on Long Island, where she sang gospel, studied the classical harp and fell hard for hip-hop and early soul. Her dad introduced her to Alice Coltrane’s music, which has profoundly influenced her life and musical career. She has been inspired by women, particularly Ashby and Alice Coltrane who gave the harp a distinctive voice in jazz and pop music, but she is thoroughly her own person and artist now.