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Spiritual Jazz with Brandee Younger, A Partner’s Anxiety, and Sentimental Items

September 24, 2025·27 min·2 clips

Brandee Younger reveals how a fictional cancer storyline on 'The Chi' helped a real chef through his own diagnosis.

1. Just Between Us hosts Alison Raskin and Gabe Dunn interview harpist Brandee Younger about jazz, music education, and the mechanics of the harp. 2. Brandee Younger is a harpist, composer, and bandleader whose work connects spiritual jazz and classical training with R&B and hip-hop influences; she grew up on Long Island and is based in New York City. 3. The episode's core question is what makes jazz 'spiritual' and whether that label is meaningful, ultimately resolved by Younger's argument that all jazz shares the same emotional and improvisational source. 4. Younger's path to the harp began when a woman at her father's job played harp as a hobby; her parents arranged duet sessions, and a teacher suggested the instrument could earn a scholarship, which became the family's primary motivation. 5. She initially signed up for clarinet in public school but wrote 'flute' on the form by accident, was too embarrassed to correct the mistake, and stayed with flute before transitioning to harp. 6. Younger contrasts her public school experience — which included a pool, synchronized swimming, and a $30 instrument rental — with her sister's private school, where the same rental would have cost $250. 7. She argues that public school arts programs are being dismantled at exactly the moment when their accessibility was their defining value, citing New York City schools as an example where such programs have largely disappeared. 8. On the connection between music and spirituality, Younger states the emotional response to live music — whether at church, a Grateful Dead show, or a jazz concert — is identical; the venue and genre are just different delivery mechanisms. 9. She explains 'spiritual jazz' as a genre label coined around John Coltrane, Alice Coltrane, and Pharoah Sanders in the 1960s because their music incorporated meditative qualities, but insists 'all jazz is spiritual' and the term is a redundant subset. 10. Jazz improvisation, she clarifies, is not random: it is 'spontaneous composition' built on years of studying the language of harmonic structure, comparable to fluent speech — you are not making noises, you are drawing on internalized grammar. 11. She uses a family barbecue analogy to explain ensemble communication: band members who have studied the same music have a shared 'language' and can communicate through glances and musical cues the way siblings read each other's looks. 12. Younger reveals that harp strings correspond only to white piano keys; seven foot pedals shift each string between natural, flat, and sharp to achieve the full chromatic scale, which is what makes the harp unusually difficult. 13. The harp is classified as an 'endangered instrument' alongside the bassoon and oboe, a designation that creates a separate scholarship pool — Younger notes she would not have pursued the instrument without that financial path. 14. Marvin Gaye is cited as a pioneer who 'spearheaded' the concept of layering background vocals in one's own voice, audible on What's Going On, a technique later adopted widely in pop-punk and other genres. 15. Younger describes her marching band background in a historically Black college-modeled program where the director required students to dress formally because 'they see you before they play you.' 16. She connects marching band discipline directly to orchestral etiquette: if a conductor's downbeat is at 5 p.m., players must be seated and ready before 5 p.m. — not arriving at 5. 17. The hosts and Younger discuss music films: Whiplash is described as accurate in capturing the culture of music school though 'a little much' in its violence; Tar is described as 'spot on' in portraying the behavior of its characters; Maestro is referenced briefly. 18. The tone is conversational and enthusiastic, with Gabe and Alison frequently expressing surprise at music fundamentals they had not understood before, and Younger patiently reframing technical concepts using pop-culture touchstones. 19. Music educators, jazz fans curious about the spiritual jazz canon, and people interested in the economics of classical instrument careers will find this episode most engaging. 20. Listeners expecting a performance showcase or deep music theory discussion may find the level of explanation too introductory.

As heard by us

A loose chat that moves from overnight shifts to the emotional force of music.

The piece starts in a messy, human place, then settles into a conversation about the harp, music, and spirituality. Its strength is the plain way it treats performance as something that can reach people when life is already hard, including illness.

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Why you'd press play

You want a warm, wandering interview that treats music as something spiritually charged.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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