Mary Lattimore made her public harp debut in the parking lot of an Arby.
Her mother, Lelia Hall Lattimore, thought they might be late for their teenage daughter’s concert when they left their small North Carolina town to move to the largest city in the state, Charlotte. When a tire burst, she knew they were doomed. As they fished the harp out of the case to get the spare harp, Lelia had an idea: Why wasn’t Mary playing right there?
When Mary started plucking 47 strings in her new floral print dress, customers stopped eating roast beef sandwiches. The tow truck driver Angel was amazed. Most customers had never heard a harp live, let alone in a fast food parking lot.
“I stepped out of my naughty teenage self and did it. I was able to see the comedy because it’s fun to play the harp. ” Lattimore said over the phone from her Los Angeles apartment when her cat Jenny meowed to be allowed into the studio where the harp lives. She announced the last word with a glee that suggested the Renaissance staples are seldom described as such. “I love to play for people who have never seen a harp before, who think it’s a museum piece. I want people to feel that they can address it. “
For the past decade, Lattimore has been at the forefront of the a surprising but steady harp riot, with upstart like Brandee younger revive in jazz and Sissi Rada slip it into techno. She enjoys an unfamiliar audience that initially sees her instrument as a novelty. But Lattimore handles her harp like a solo guitarist, improvising on contemplative melodies with the help of pedals that distort its crystalline tone and seem to bend time.
She has recorded with Kurt Vile, toured with Thurston Moore and taught Kesha to hold the harp. More important, however, are Lattimore’s beguiling solo albums, bittersweet travel chronicles with an instrument that she called “my friend”. Her latest anthology, Collected Pieces II, contains a hymn to an orphaned deer she met while artist residing on a 20,000 acre Wyoming cattle ranch and a hymn to a cluster of Croatian pines by the sea.
“Even when you are just calm in a new place, there is a sense of moving forward. You get addicted to this novelty, ”said Lattimore. “These songs are a memory of these places, a memory of my feelings.”
Lattimore was born into a completely different harp tradition. Her mother played in orchestras and entertained at weddings while she taught two dozen students. Mary insists that the harp’s vibrating body pressed against her pregnant mother’s belly was her first influence.
Lelia said she was a demanding technician because “if the note is wrong, it’s wrong.” When underage Mary switched from piano rehearsals to harp recital, her mother realized that her daughter wasn’t motivated by such limitations. Mary loved The Cure and was a member of the REM fan club. The precision of the instrument was so terrifying that Mary took beta blockers before concerts. To protect their relationship, Lelia drove her daughter to class in nearby towns instead of being Mary’s teacher. “It was an adventure,” said Lelia in a telephone interview, “our time together”.
This connection between movement and music stuck. Although Lattimore received a scholarship to the prestigious Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY, she envied the skateboarders under their rehearsal window for the verve of their antics. She studied abroad in Vienna and Milan, an exception for anyone with access to Eastman’s resources.
When Lattimore moved to Philadelphia after college, she indoctrinated a vibrant network of young experimental musicians into improvisation. She had always struggled to memorize elaborate classical pieces, so the phrase offered an escape route. She couldn’t memorize any more; she replied, her chops were blooming without charts.
“It is very prone to improvising, especially on such a large and rare instrument. You show your courage, ”she said. “But these people taught me to trust my instincts.”
While secretly writing her own material, Lattimore began touring and recording with rock bands. In 2014, she was anonymously nominated for a Pew Fellowship, an annual award of $ 60,000 for a dozen Philadelphia artists. The call to tell her she won remains “the greatest thing in my life”. Lattimore interrupted a number of minimum wage jobs and put half the money in the bank. She turned her battered Volvo west and she and her harp drove to a rental station in Los Angeles.
She stopped in national parks and idiosyncratic cities and wrote her 2016 album “At the Dam”. Lattimore realized that the movement was shaking loose strands of inspiration, moods that she wanted to express with melodies. So she had to keep moving.
In January 2018, Lattimore moved to California and soon ended up at the Headland Center for the Arts west of the Golden Gate Bridge. In a studio built of sequoia trees, where the sea was always audible, she composed her breakthrough in 2018, “Hundreds of Days”, and a duo record with Meg Baird, a songwriter and friend who had left Philadelphia years earlier.
“Mary was really passionate about music, but she didn’t want them to get boring,” Baird said on the phone. “She has always wanted to put the harp in a context in which it is not treated like precious furniture.”
Lattimore’s double volumes of “Collected Pieces” testify to this dynamic. “It was late and we watched the motel burn.” written after doing just that out of a tour van window is dizzying and unsettling, the melody constantly choking up. “For Scott Kelly, returned to earth” Inspired by the astronaut (and composed when Lattimore’s jaw was wired after a fall), is delicate and empathetic, a tender transference between altered realities.
Lattimore tours so much that in seven years she has ransacked three used Volvo XC90s (the model with a harp). After Covid-19 sank her itinerary, she longed for the daily enlivenment of that trip, the surprises that shape her music. She found a temporary solution through cooperation.
Guitarist Steve Gunn remembered her jamming desperation while recording his new album “Other You” during the Los Angeles lockdown. She hesitated to visit them. When she finally got there on the last day, they cut the instrumental “Sugar Kiss.” It sounds like a group hug during a disaster. “I don’t think she left her house and we all had problems,” said Gunn from Belgium. “You just want to be around Mary, so it was a nice way to hang out.”
Lattimore then recorded an album of discursive duets with her neighbor in Los Angeles, Philadelphia-born Paul Sukeena, and two glowing drones with the instrumental duo Growing. Their baptisms by band had once lured them to experimental music; Doing it now helped her survive the isolation. “I got lost during Covid, just dead inside,” she said. “Those were the sparks I found.”
Lattimore is slowly starting to move again. In September she visited Croatia for her birthday. Instead of lugging her harp around, she picked up a keyboard and enjoyed the view of the Adriatic Sea while composing her first film score. A week after returning to Los Angeles, she went to an artist residency in Marfa, Texas.
The scores, the residences, the keyboards: they are concessions to old age, as she can’t keep what she called “my huge 85-pound sculpture” around the world forever. Her parents both suffered hip replacements after playing harps for decades. But during the 14-hour drive from Marfa to California, she realized how much she had longed for the peripatetic thrill of touring – she and the harp sought the joys of the open road along the way.
“The moon is shining on the desert. There are no cars. You’re just listening, ”Lattimore said, his tone increasing. “I missed that so much, even gas station toilets. I like who I am when I travel. You drink something you need. “
