VMP Magazine

From an early age, it was clear that Dorothy Ashby, born Dorothy Jeanne Thompson in Detroit in 1932, would cut a path all her own. As the young daughter of self-taught jazz guitarist Wiley Thompson, she relished sitting in on her father’s combo’s rehearsals in their home, chording along on piano. Instilling in her an understanding of jazz as not only a musical style but a way of life, these jam sessions amounted to an invaluable education. “[My father] taught me more about harmony and melodic construction than I learned in all my years of high school, college, and private study,” Ashby reflected to Sally Placksin for her book American Women in Jazz. “[He] sacrificed more time and money than the family could afford for my musical training and instruments.”

As a student at Cass Technical High School, her repertoire expanded to include violin, upright bass and saxophone — she rubbed shoulders with a teenage Donald Byrd in the marching band — but it was through the school’s pioneering harp program that she became transfixed by the elegant, towering instrument. Hands-on time with one of the school’s five harps was precious; if she was lucky, Ashby could vie for an hour’s worth of playing a day. “It took a little time, but I spent all my time wanting to do it my way,” she recalled. “There were some girls who had harps of their own, but they were very few, and none of the Black girls, of course, had harps. We hadn't even seen a harp before we got there."

Musical cinematography — the evocation of a place in time, of time in a place. Ernest Hood made good on the vivid label that he’d designated to the searching, surveying sounds of his pioneering 1975 album Neighborhoods. Loping synthesizers and moony-eyed zithers sauntered its boulevards, mingling with the sublimely ordinary field recordings of cans kicked and errands ran to unfurl as suburban sepia tone poems. Hood’s private-press prize was statedly nostalgic, his strums and stipples knowingly foxing the auditory documents of daily life, implying a warm return to an ambered yesteryear.

The photo above is of Bruce Botnick with the band from Poppi Studios, February 10, 1971, during mix sessions for ‘L.A. Woman.’

For over a half-century, dropping the needle on The Doors’ monolithic self-titled debut has almost universally been followed by John Densmore’s bossa nova beat and Ray Manzarek’s piano bass bursting from the left channel, Robby Krieger’s skidding blues riff falling in from the right and Jim Morrison’s cocksure growl coming in front-and-center as the band invited curious minds to “Break On Through.” Though The Doors was originally released in both mono and stereo in the dawning of 1967, the album’s stereo mix came to be the definitive version as the songs settled into their vaunted place in the American musical canon. Despite the beloved album’s numerous reissues and reiterations through the years, vinyl releases of the mono mix have remained largely elusive, giving it a kind of shadowy, quasi-mythic status among fans and collectors.