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Arts Guide | 11/22

Harp Attack

Deborah Henson-Conant takes Festival of the Harps over the top

By David Templeton

"Have you ever had one of those relationships," asks Cambridge jazz musician Deborah Henson-Conant, "where you really hate the person the first time you meet them? You don't understand them. You don't get them at all. And then something happens and you learn to appreciate them. You really appreciate them." Yes. And then you fall head over heels in love with them. "Exactly! Exactly," she adds. "That's been my relationship with the harp."

Henson-Conant's love-hate affair with the harp is an inspiration to all aspiring musicians with an occasional yen to chuck their trumpet, guitar, flute, lute, or oboe into the bay.

When one considers that Henson-Conant is today praised as one of the most innovative, ground-breaking, boundary-pushing, and flat-out brilliant harpist-composers in the world (and that she now sees the harp as being "kind of cool"), one wonders if a less rocky start to this relationship might have produced a musician with less intensity, less drive to attack the perceived limits of her craft.

"Probably," she agrees.

This week, Henson-Conant will demonstrate what a harp can really do in the right hands, as part of the sixth annual Festival of Harps at Spreckels Performing Arts Center, a two-day whoop-de-do celebrating this most unwieldy yet undeniably celestial of instruments. A distinguished lineup of harpists from around the world will be performing at the festival, among them Celtic and African harpist Rudiger Oppermann; classical harpist Cynthia Mowrey; New Age harpist Georgia Kelley; and the Sonoma-based duo Chaskinakuy performing the music of Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Chile.

While in the Bay Area, Henson-Conant will also be performing one solo show Friday, Nov. 24, at the Dance Palace in Pt. Reyes Station, not far from the tiny coastal town of Marshall, where Henson-Conant once lived in a stilted house on Tomales Bay. That was over 20 years ago, and, says Henson-Conant, it was there that she realized she would spend her life making music.

"What I didn't know," she says, laughing, "was that I would make my music on the harp."

It is part of Henson-Conant's appeal, both in concert and on her seven remarkable recordings (her eighth, a Christmas album entitled The Gift, is due out in December), that one does not expect to hear jazz-funk riffs coming off a harp, or to see the archetypally angelic instrument played by a flamboyantly sexy, body-suited woman in a leather mini, her traditional concert attire.

If it is a surprise to her audiences, it is nothing short of miraculous to the artist herself.

As a 12-year-old, Henson-Conant had a knack for improvising wild piano pieces, much to the chagrin of her parents, who foisted a harp upon her in the hope that it would settle her down. "I promptly unfoisted it," she laughs, "but before I did I had a few lessons." Among her objections was the notion that harps were the choice of "nice ladies with blond hair who sit in the back playing pretty music."

Many years later, while studying orchestral music at the College of Marin, she and the harp were unexpectedly reunited. "They needed a harpist, and someone said, 'OK, who's ever touched a harp? Who knows how to tune one?' And I said, 'Me.' And they said, 'Good. You're our harp player.'"

Her first explorations of the instrument were of a classical nature, with little hint of the powerful, full-bodied jazz, funk, and rock 'n' roll sounds she would one day coax from the 80-pound, 47-string contraption. She wasn't satisfied.

"For years I dragged it around, thinking, 'God! What am I doing with this thing!" she explains. "I finally went to a music teacher with it and he said, 'You really hate that instrument, don't you?' And, yes, I did! I said, 'It's like a prison. It's so limiting. I can't play loud. I can't do anything!

"What he made me see," she continues, "was that those limitations were mine, not the instrument's. As soon as I broke my misperceptions, I found an amazing spectrum of what the harp can do. It was thoroughly liberating."

As a liberated harpist, she has performed with the Boston Pops Orchestra, leads her own jazz band, tours extensively around the world, records as often as she can, and was even invited to perform at a private party for the heavy-metal band Aerosmith. Women attend her concerts dressed like her, small girls come up to say they are going to be composers some day, and she wins awards around the globe.

Aside from the personal rewards of her success, Henson-Conant feels she is doing important work.

"There is a sense of empowerment to what I do," she says, explaining her love for live performance. "Pushing against the limitations is an empowering thing, for musicians, for women, for everyone."

She is looking forward, she admits, to sharing that power with the Bay Area, the place it all started.

"Sometimes, when an artist is there on stage," she says, "playing along, sometimes that artist will break through to a new level. She forgets that she is playing a harp or a banjo or whatever, and she goes somewhere she's never been. When that happens, the audience actually breaks through with her. We all go somewhere new together.

"That's exactly what it feels like," she laughs. "And it is so wonderful!"

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