Multifaceted Harpist Ashley Jackson Signs To Decca Records, US Announces Label Debut Album Take Me To The Water - Set For Release On March 21

 First Songs Off The Emotionally Stirring Collection “Deep River Pt. 1” and “Deep River Pt. 2”

Decca Records, US is honored to announce the signing of award-winning harpist, Ashley Jackson, whose evocative artistry fuses traditional classical music with the rich heritage of Black spirituality.  Ashley’s label debut album, Take Me To The Water, will launch globally on March 21, with the first two tracks, “Deep River Pt. 1” and “Deep River Pt. 2” available now across all digital service providers. Pre-order the album and listen to the tracks here.

Take Me to the Water is a masterful exploration of the transformative and spiritual power of water, featuring Jackson’s unique interpretations of iconic works by Margaret Bonds, Alice Coltrane, Claude Debussy, and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. Through this deeply personal and creative project, Jackson takes listeners on a musical journey that connects cultural heritage, spiritual reflection, and universal themes of renewal and freedom.

“Water is celebrated in lots of different cultures, but, despite that, you find recurring themes in those celebrations,” Jackson shares. “So I wanted to hone in on those ideas—ideals—such as love and rebirth and hope.”

In “Deep River,” originally adapted by composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor in 1905 - through her harp’s fluid, celestial tones, Jackson breathes new life into this iconic spiritual. “In playing ‘Deep River,’ I’m transported to a place where I can access that kind of cultural memory,” Jackson explains. “Just imagining my ancestors singing that, and what the words would have meant.  So as to tell their oppressors that they're singing about one thing, but really, they're communicating something else. Tapping into that ingenuity is so humbling.” 

Take Me to the Water not only celebrates music’s ability to connect cultures and histories but also raises awareness of global water inequities, with 2.2 billion people still lacking access to safe water today. This dual focus amplifies Jackson’s belief in music’s power to inspire and heal. 

 With Take Me to the Water, Ashley Jackson establishes herself as a bold and visionary voice in and beyond classical music, elevating the harp as an instrument of deep emotional resonance and limitless possibilities. The album promises to be a replenishing and immersive experience, creating a sonic experience that is both grounded in history and forward-looking. 

Vital and sacred, water is the essence of all life on Earth; an elemental force spiritually intertwined with freedom, transformation, purification, and renewal. For her second album Take Me to the Water, award-winning harpist Ashley Jackson distills her instrument into a fluid sonic language that meditates on these themes and metaphors, drawing from African mythology and the antebellum spiritual tradition while recognizing the 2.2 billion people who are still denied safe access to clean water today.

“Water is something that is celebrated in lots of different cultures, but, despite that, you find recurring themes in those celebrations. So I kind of wanted to hone in on those ideas—ideals, perhaps—such as love and rebirth and hope,” she explains of the follow-up to her 2023 debut Ennanga, which garnered acclaim for its consideration of American music and its roots in Black spirituality. “I really wanted the album to speak to those ideals that we all experience or strive for. And music is a beautiful way to remind us of those things.”

From the start of Take Me to the Water, we are guided towards a place of warmth. Arranged for harp and strings by Jackson, the soul-nourishing opener puts a fresh spin on Alice Coltrane’s 1977 Transcendence standout, “Radhe-Shyam.” Jackson first began digging deeper into Coltrane’s work while she was pregnant with her daughter in 2018, later finding common ground in their experience of motherhood. On “Radhe-Shyam,” she leans into the song’s central messages of love and devotion while introducing her new vantage point, carved from significant personal milestones such as parenthood, which allowed her to re-frame several “seasoned” pieces in a new light.

Accordingly, Debussy’s “Danse Sacrée” has formed part of Jackson’s repertoire since her days as a high school harpist. Here, it is woven into the album’s thoughtful narrative with a chant-like melody in thrall to the West African goddess Yemaya, and by virtue of its influences; Debussy was rumoured to have been inspired by a watercolour painting about water. Adding to these strands, on “Yemaya” (pts 1 & 2), Jackson works like a collagist, applying a “snippet” of a 2020 harp concerto by her colleague João Luiz Rezende to a piece that ushers in another of the album’s throughlines: the honouring of Yemaya, who is celebrated across the diaspora and often depicted as the goddess of the ocean.

Take Me to the Water consistently demonstrates Jackson’s commitment to reinvention. One of the album’s standout moments, “Troubled Water”—based on the baptism spiritual “Wade in the Water”—finds her honoring an iconic piano piece by pioneering Black composer and pianist Margaret Bonds, blazing a trail with her own groundbreaking harp transcription. Awash with deep lows and cascading highs, “Troubled Water” is an expressive and virtuosic creation that deftly mimics the dynamism of water, transposed for the harp using a novel technique which aided the recording process; weaving a pair of socks through the lower strings to dampen the resonance. “I always like the extra sound because that's what makes the harp the harp. But that's what popped into my mind in that recording session. Oh, we can try this to make it clearer,” Jackson explains.

Similarly, Jackson orients her strings to do the talking on “Deep River,” wringing every drop of emotion from every note on a canonical African American spiritual adapted and composed in 1905 by the famed Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. “Deep River” evokes freedom and hope, the words rich with multiple layers of meaning (“Deep river, my home is over Jordan / Deep river, Lord, I want to cross over into campground”) while the song unfolds with a gentle nostalgic melody that gradually crescendos like a rising tide in a storm, rolled chords and arpeggios gushing with celestial energy.

“The way Coleridge-Taylor begins it, I’m transported to a place where I can access that kind of cultural memory. It's very easy for me to close my eyes and imagine, because I wasn't there,” she says of “Deep River.” “But just imagining my ancestors singing that, and what the words would have meant… So many spirituals are encoded with multiple layers of meaning. So as to tell their oppressors that they're singing about one thing, but really they're communicating something else. Tapping into that ingenuity is so humbling.” 

Jackson’s harp undeniably wields great solitary power, yet when fleshed out with vocals or percussive flourishes, as heard on the blues-inspired interlude “River Jordan” or transcendent closing track, “Take Me to the Water,” it opens a portal to an intimate new dimension. The backup strings from Jackson’s long-standing collaborators the Harlem Chamber Players—with whom she first began playing a few years after finishing her doctorate at the Juilliard School in 2014— showcase her collaboration while her rendition of the Brandee Younger’s politically potent 2022 track “Unrest” reminds again of her desire to forge connection through music.

Many of Jackson’s earliest musical experiences were shaped by her Nana’s Baptist church in Newark, New Jersey, and she draws on these for Take Me to the Water, most pertinently in the album’s fluctuating emotions and underlying journey towards a higher, holistic state of consciousness. “The continuous seamless weaving of music to take you to those different emotional states is very much part of my concept for the album,” she says, adding: “Because I would love for my audience to be able to stay in something and then to be pulled somewhere else but the music doesn't stop.”

The album finds its triumphant conclusion in “Take Me to the Water” (pts 1 & 2), an open-hearted epic built around heavenly glissandi and soaring voices that carry a profound sense of communion. Thematically, the song embodies a full-circle moment. “It's a theme and variations,” explains Jackson. “‘Take Me to the Water’ very consciously builds in complexity, to sort of evoke that sense of subversion during baptism. And then coming out, feeling ready to walk a new walk.”

These enduring sentiments are at the heart of Ashley Jackson’s new album. Replenishing and immersive, Take Me to the Water embraces the transportive heft of the harp, conjuring a radiant vision of a world anchored by hope and brighter days, thereby imbuing an ancient instrument with vivid new meaning.

Ashley Jackson website click here

Thank you to Crossover Media for sharing with us