EDMAR

CASTANEDA

QUARTET

Sunday 

September 13

7:00 pm

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

DIANA WORTHAM THEATRE, ASHEVILLE

      

HARPIST INNOVATOR CONNECTS LATIN JAZZ AND BEBOP WITH COLOMBIAN MUSIC

    

    Colombian harpist, band leader, and composer Edmar Castaneda was born in Bogota, where he started playing Colombian harp at the age of 13. Edmar’s virtuosic style combines Latin and bebop jazz with traditional Colombian music. Jazz is American in origin, but it has been international for many decades, reliant on creative input from Africa, the Caribbean, South America and just about everywhere else.

 

     Producing cross rhythms like a drummer, smashing chordal flourishes like a Flamenco guitarist, Edmar is the first to develop a potent, unique jazz vocabulary on the Colombian harp, an instrument previously unknown to the genre. His music is suffused with jazz harmony, Brazilian and Afro-Cuban rhythms and traces of música llanera, the dance and folk vernacular of the Colombian plains.

 

      Standing upright behind the midsized apparatus which he leans against one shoulder, Castaneda summons rippling harmony and melody with his right hand and propulsive basslines with his left. No, he’s not a one-man band. He’s practically a one-man orchestra, the Hendrix—or at least the Charlie Hunter—of the harp, linking a train of complex and richly textured sound to a locomotive of hot Pan-American rhythm.

 

     The harp first inspired Castaneda at age 7, when he began performing the popular joropo dance, which is dominated by the music of the Colombian harp. After he turned 13, he decided to learn how to play the difficult instrument, and enlisted the help of friends and local musicians. In 1994, Castaneda moved to New York, where he started a regular restaurant gig on Long Island that would help shape his original style. "That was my school of harp," he explains. "I played solo interpretations of international music, so I was looking for ways to play all the parts of songs without a band. I figured out that the harp can make two instrument sounds in one.”

     Although the harp is most often played in classical or folk settings, Edmar’s unique style quickly drew acclaim on the international jazz scene. Edmar has been sought by an amazing array of jazz luminaries for performance, including the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, the United Nations Orchestra, Wynton Marsalis, John Scofield, and National Endowment of the Arts Jazz Master Paquito D’Rivera. What do these diverse artists hear in Edmar? A stark reminder that jazz’s possibilities are far from exhausted. Now in his late 20s and based in Queens, New York, Edmar performs busily as a leader, hitting major festivals this past summer in Perugia and Vienna. 

 

     Castaneda’s explosive live show has expanded to a Quartet with trombonist Marshall Gilkes, percussionist David Silliman and, Colombian vocalist Andrea Tierra, Castaneda’s wife. After performing at New York’s Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center and on the European festival circuit, the group embarked on their first tour across Colombia. "The people at home here have received us so well," Castaneda says warmly. "It’s very exciting to finally be playing my own country."

 

     The Jazz Society acknowledges and appreciates the information about Edmar Castenada provided by Paul Dryer in Global Rhythm Review and by David Adler in the Philadelphia Weekly Review.

 

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Edmar Castaneda

Performance

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 Tickets:

$22 for members

$30 for non-members 

$10 for students with ID under age 25

 

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