Recording of the Week, Alina Bzhezhinska & HipHarpCollective, 'Reflections'

(Photo credit: Eddie Otchere)

Lviv-born, London-based harpist Alina Bzhezhinska is on a mission to make the harp hip. The well-travelled musician originally studied classical harp at the F. Chopin Academy of Music in Warsaw, Poland, and later relocated to the US to study jazz at the University of Arizona, but she's been living in the UK since 2002, working as the resident harp tutor at the Royal Conservatory of Scotland for several years before moving down to London where she’s currently based. It wasn’t until 2017, though, that Bzhezhinska’s jazz career really started kicking off after appearing with her quartet at the London Jazz Festival alongside Pharoah Sanders, earning a nomination for Best Live Experience of the Year at the Jazz FM Awards. Beginning the HipHarpCollective was also part of Bzhezhinska’s initiative to increase the presence of the harp in modern jazz music, with this ‘digital collective’ of musicians and producers helping to organise concerts among other initiatives, and is also the name of the harpist’s backing band on Reflections, her sophomore record following up her 2018 debut Inspiration.

The HipHarpCollective lineup is quite the impressive roll-call; Bzhezhinska’s fellow soloists this time around are the indomitable saxophonist Tony Kofi – a favourite of the Presto camp and also appearing on 2018’s Inspiration – and Jay Phelps, the Canadian trumpeter who has ingratiated himself in the London jazz scene just as Bzhezhinska herself has. Both Julie Walkington and Mikele Montolli work bass duties – providing acoustic and electric respectively – while Joel Prime (another member of the Inspiration quartet) and Adam Teixeira provide percussion and drums, and the occasional vocal features are handled by Vimala Rowe. Finally, the violins and violas you’ll hear on these tracks are the work of Ying Xue, an indispensable texture in Bzhezhinska’s palette.

(Photo credit: Tatiana Gorilovsky)

A composer herself, Reflections is packed both with Bzhezhinska originals and reworkings of tunes by harp royalty like Alice Coltrane’s ‘Fire’ or Dorothy Ashby’s ‘Action Line’, two names that often seem to be the go-to when referencing jazz harp. There’s a wide selection of sounds at play here; while more spiritual-leaning tones definitely make their way in via John Coltrane’s ‘Alabama’, which features Bzhezhinska and Kofi improvising over a low, droning chord, elsewhere the opener ‘Soul Vibrations’ (originally recorded by Dorothy Ashby) is perhaps the first time I’ve heard harp played alongside slapped bass guitar, kicking off the record with a groovy hip-hop-influenced beat.

Bzhezhinska herself remarked that Reflections consciously draws from many places, and besides the ‘Afro-harp’ of Ashby and free jazz odysseys from Alice Coltrane & Joe Henderson there’s also an evident love of 90s trip-hop – the slow, atmospheric style of electronic music originating from Bristol – as well as Afrobeat. That more downtempo vibe comes through on the sombre tune ‘For Carrol’, whereas the aforementioned Coltrane tune ‘Fire’ carries more of that rhythmic flavour synonymous with Afrobeat. The title track, another Bzhezhinska original, has all the makings of a great jazz standard with its rich melody, while she chooses to cap the album off with the comparatively more free-composed ‘Meditation’, a soft and jubilant farewell.

Alina Bzhezhinska’s sophomore album pools not only her personal influences in trip-hop, spiritual jazz and more straight-ahead sounds, but also the many flavours of the London jazz scene and her collaborators. Reflections is anything but one-note, and in Bzhezhinska’s own words; “what you hear is my own choice of sounds and influences, taken from the many mixtapes I’ve been making since I was a teenager. I put together the music I like to listen to when I am happy or sad, when I feel like dancing or meditating.”