Park Stickney on living in two different worlds

When he’s not travelling to engagements across the United States, Europe or further afield, the Arizona-born jazz harpist currently spends a lot of time in Brooklyn, due to teaching commitments, but he’s speaking to me from his other home, a former farm in a small village outside Yverdon-les-Bains, on the shores of Lake Neuchâtel in Switzerland.

Dividing his time between the two, he admits, is easier said than done, “but my office here in the former cow barn is a nice contrast with Brooklyn. So when I’m in New York, I fill my sack full of ideas, then come back here and digest them. With all this time and space, it’s easy to focus.”

We’re discussing his current solo album, Surprise Corner, material from which audiences at the forthcoming Edinburgh International Harp Festival can enjoy on 6 April, when he takes the stage at Merchiston Castle School with another formidable player, Colombian virtuoso Edmar Castaneda. On the album, Stickney steers his pedal harp gleefully between genres, although stamping them all with his trademark limber and improvisatory style, from Purcell’s Music for a While to Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody.

It also includes the music we’re discussing, Debussy’s Danses Sacrée et Profane, a landmark in the classical harp repertoire, which he takes to a few places Debussy probably didn’t have in mind. “It’s a homage to it that I can play through it and enjoy it,” says the 44-year-old, “but if I want to stay in one section, I can hang out there and enjoy it before moving on.”

Stickney, who has another album due out soon with his trio with bassist Dino Contenti and drummer Gigi Biolcati (they go by the improbable-sounding name of the Lion, the Wolf and the Donkey), has appeared on several occasions at the Edinburgh Harp Festival, including a notable shared stage a few years ago with the German electric-Celtic harpist Rüdiger Oppermann, which ended with a jam on the Police’s Message in a Bottle as we’d never heard it before. This year, with the equally mercurial Castaneda, who knows?

Other festival highlights include the trio Elisi – Turkish harpists Sirin Pancaroglu and Meriç Dönük with percussionist Jarrod Cagwin, and, from Scotland, the Corrina Hewat Band, including harpist Hewat’s jazz pianist husband, Dave Milligan, and support from Fiere, a poetry-centred collaboration between harpist Esther Swift, fiddler Catriona Price and singer Joy Dunlop.

Harpist and composer Savourna Stevenson also appears, in the company of the Edinburgh Quartet, to perform her acclaimed Harp Quintet (which has found its way, oddly enough, into such American TV series as Sex and the City and Ugly Betty), while the fine young Irish player Michelle Mulcahy shares a bill with the hard-travelling Scots-Irish-Canadian band the Outside Track.

As well as the customary recitals, ceilidhs and courses, the festival goes “off-campus” for events including a pre-festival Storywalk for children at the Scottish Storytelling Centre, and a lecture on Harps and Music-making in Ancient Scotland and Ireland at the Augustine United Church, given by broadcaster and musicologist John Purser, early harp specialist Bill Taylor and Karen Loomis of Edinburgh University.

The lecture is part of a Resonating String strand to the festival, tracing the history of the harp, which also includes a Cameo Concert on 8 April, presented by Purser.

The Outside Track’s Scots harpist, Ailie Robertson, by the way, has had an eventful past few weeks, including one of her compositions, Eternal Recurrence, winning second prize in the International Edvard Grieg Competition – it will be performed in May by the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra’s harpist, Birgitte Volan Håvik, while, inhabiting a rather different soundworld, a BBC Performing Arts Fund grant will install her as composer-in-residence for a year with Haddington Pipe Band. Both of which sound like fruitful material for future harp festivals.

• The Edinburgh International Harp Festival runs at Merchiston Castle School from 5-10 April. For full details, see www.harpfestival.co.uk