SHOCKING THE CONSCIOUSNESS

The New Age sounds of Laraaji.

- AMANDA PETRUSICH

In 1969, Edward Larry Gordon—a standup comedian, part-time jazz pianist, and aspiring actor—walked into a New York City pawnshop, hoping to hock his guitar for rent money. Instead, Gordon found himself preternaturally drawn to an Autoharp, a type of zither popularized in the nineteen-forties by Mother Maybelle, of the Carter Family, and prominent in the folk revival then going on in Greenwich Village. He lugged it back to his apartment in Harlem and started tinkering, eventually prying off the chord bars (which allowed him to more easily experiment with pentatonic, modal, and minor tunings) and adding a contact pickup (which electrified the instrument). Soon, Gordon was playing the Autoharp through effects pedals, and cramming various odds and ends, including chopsticks, mallets, and pedalsteel slides, underneath the strings— a technique popularized, for piano, in the nineteen-thirties, by the experimental composer John Cage. Gordon’s Autoharp no longer sounded dainty or sweet. It was now fierce, glimmery, and extraterrestrial.