Paul McCandless

New age is a largely instrumental, mood-driven genre that emphasizes calm, spacious textures and a sense of spiritual or contemplative uplift. It blends gentle electronic timbres, acoustic instruments, and global/folk influences to create immersive soundscapes intended for relaxation, meditation, and introspection. Hallmarks include slow tempos or free time, long sustaining pads, modal and consonant harmonies, nature field recordings, and unobtrusive rhythms. The music often avoids dramatic tension in favor of openness and continuity, conveying themes of inner peace, nature, and the transcendent.

Jazz harp is a subgenre and instrumental practice that brings the concert harp (and, increasingly, amplified and electric harps) into jazz idioms—swing, bebop, cool, Latin, post‑bop, and contemporary jazz. Pioneers demonstrated that the harp can comp, solo, and drive rhythm sections much like a piano or guitar while exploiting uniquely idiomatic textures: glissandi, harmonics, pedal bends, and lush rolled voicings. Its sound world blends jazz harmony and improvisation with techniques native to the harp—selective damping, resonant pedal shifts, and percussive effects—producing timbres that can be crystalline and airy or surprisingly punchy and groove‑forward. Modern players range from straight‑ahead and Latin approaches to boundary‑pushing fusion and chamber‑jazz settings, often using amplification and effects to expand the instrument’s palette.