Biography

Dorothy Ashby was born on August 6, 1932 in Detroit, Michigan, USA. She is known for Ocean's Eight (2018), Human Highway (1982) and Deerskin (2019). She was married to John Ashby. She died on April 13, 1986 in Santa Monica, California, USA.

Jazz and bop harpist in clubs in Philadelphia, New York, and Detroit, daughter of Wiley Thompson, a jazz guitarist. She studied piano and music education at Wayne State University and performed with Louis Armstrong and Woody Herman. She was a bandleader of trios and quartets which included Frank Wess, Roy Haynes, Jimmy Cobb, and many others between the late 1950s and the mid-1960s. In the early 1960s she was host of a radio program in Detroit, and in the mid-1970s, after moving to California, she played in studio orchestras on albums by Sonny Criss and Stanley Turrentine. She also worked in theater pit orchestras conducted by her husband, John Ashby.