brandee younger & courtney bryan

saturday, september 28

TIME: 3:30pm-4:30pm

VENUE: Wagner Stage. MIDWAY PLAISANCE AT SOUTH WOODLAWN AVE.

Brandee Younger & Courtney Bryan

The sonically innovative harpist, Brandee Younger, is revolutionizing the harp for the digital era. Over the past fifteen years, she has worked relentlessly to stretch boundaries and limitations for harpists. In 2020, she was named Rising Star Harpist in the DownBeat Critics Poll. In 2022, she made history by becoming the first black woman to be nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Composition. That same year, she was also nominated for an NAACP Image Award. 

Her performance schedule is fierce. Ever-expanding as an artist, she has worked with cultural icons including Common, Lauryn Hill, John Legend, and Moses Sumney. As a side-woman, she has played alongside jazz icons including Pharoah Sanders, Ravi Coltrane, Jack DeJohnette, and Reggie Workman, and she has appeared on albums by Lakecia Benjamin, Robert Glasper, Jeremy Pelt, The Baylor Project, and Makaya McCraven, just to name a few. Younger has received a Master of Music degree from New York University’s Steinhardt School and has been guest faculty and lecturer at numerous universities including Berklee College of Music, Princeton University, Howard University, and Tulane. Currently, she serves as teaching artist faculty at New York University and The New School. 

Younger’s newest album, Brand New Life, builds on her already rich oeuvre and cements the harp’s place in pop culture. As its title suggests, Brand New Life is about forging new paths–artistic, personal, political, and spiritual—and is part of Younger’s steadfast efforts to amplify the contributions of black women harpists and to keep their legacies alive. On the album, Younger salutes her musical foremother, the trailblazing harpist Dorothy Ashby, whose music led Younger to envision new possibilities for herself as a harpist. 

Courtney Bryan, a native of New Orleans, is a 2023 MacArthur Fellow and current composer-in-residence with Opera Philadelphia. Her work has been presented in a wide range of venues including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Miller Theatre, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, Blue Note Jazz Club, Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, and her compositions have been performed by the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra (Creative Partner, 2020-2023), Jacksonville Symphony (Mary Carr Patton Composer-in-Residence, 2018-2020), London Sinfonietta, Orchestra of St. Luke’s, Chicago Sinfonietta, and elsewhere. Her interest across multiple art forms has led to collaborations with many talented visual artists, directors, writers, and musicians. 

Bryan holds a doctorate in composition from Columbia University, where she studied with George Lewis, and completed postdoctoral studies in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. She has given music workshops at various universities including Princeton University, Columbia University, Harvard University, Berklee College of Music, The California Institute of the Arts, The University of South Carolina, Brown University, University of California San Diego, DePaul University, and Xavier University of Louisiana, and is currently the Albert and Linda Mintz Professor of Music at Newcomb College in the School of Liberal Arts at Tulane University. She has recently been honored with the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts (2018), Samuel Barber Rome Prize in Music Composition (2019-2020), United States Artists Fellowship (2020), and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship (2020-2021).

The musicians:

Brandee Younger — harp
Courtney Bryan — piano
Eric Wheeler - bass
Allan Mednard - drums