Jim Gilchrist: Harpists sharpen their technique for annual gathering

IT ISN’T every harpist who launches their latest album at one of the world’s most famous jazz clubs, but that was how Colombian harp virtuoso Edmar Castaneda unveiled his latest recording, Double Portion, earlier this month with a double gig at the renowned Blue Note in New York’s Greenwich Village.

Since then, his busy concert schedule has included a performance in Abu Dhabi in a global music gathering that included Greek clarinettist Vasilis Saleas, Iraqi oud player Naseer Shamma and “new flamenco” guitarist Niño Josele. When I speak to Castaneda on the telephone, he has just arrived in Rotterdam, en route to the Dutch Harp Festival in Utrecht, where he appears with trumpeter Eric Vloiemans. Next stop is his Scottish debut, with a solo show next Wednesday at the Edinburgh International Jazz festival.

Castaneda, who turns 34 on Saturday, plays both classical and Colombian harps on the new album (on Arpa Y Vos Records), on which he shares credits with the celebrated Cuban pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Puerto Rican saxophonist Miguel Zenón and mandolin player Hamilton de Holanda. Previous collaborators have included such celebrated names as Cuban saxophonist Paquito D’Ribera, guitarist John Schofield, vibes player Joe Locke and drummer Ari Hoenig. It’s not the usual career trajectory of a musician immersed in his native Colombian llanera harp tradition but, he explains, the joropo music with which he was surrounded as a youngster in Bogotá had its own form of improvisation. “I loved it,” he recalls, “so when I met jazz in New York, it was just the same – improvising, and I connected very well.”

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Listening to Castaneda’s music, his melodic ease, explosive syncopation, stealthy bass work and brittle, staccato fusillades of notes suggesting someone who had grabbed a harp by way of support while tumbling out of the cradle, you wouldn’t quite guess that it was trumpet he learned when he went to music college – folk harp didn’t register on the curriculum. Yet when you hear him play with jazz horns, you’re conscious of his ease in such company.

Ask him what his early jazz influences were, and he laughs: “Wow! Charlie Parker, Chick Corea … so many.” Gonzalo Rubalcaba, with whom he plays on Double Portion, was a big influence on the youthful Castaneda when he first followed his father, also a harpist, up to New York. “It was great to share music with him and to jam with him was just very special.”

Castaneda regards his music as simply an extension of his religious faith. In his solo performance in Edinburgh, he says, he wants to get “right to the heart of people, with the love of God,” and, he adds, “just groove with the harp.” His performance should prove inspiring in anyone’s book.

Other highlights of this 31st Edinburgh Harp Festival include a repeat performance of Seavaigers, Sally Beamish’s concerto for Scottish harp, fiddle and strings, premiered at January’s Celtic Connections (which co-commissioned the concerto with the Harp Festival) and featuring the peerless fiddle-harp duo of Chris Stout and Catriona McKay with the Scottish Ensemble.

The festival’s eclectic programme, part of Edinburgh’s ongoing Ceilidh Culture season, further ranges from harpist-storyteller Patrick Ball’s one-man theatre show O’Carolan’s Farewell to Music (with the Rachel Hair Trio), to a celebration of the clarsach at Gaeldom’s National Mod. Intriguing cross-cultural performances include Ancience, an amalgam of Scots and Welsh harps, Northumbrian and Irish pipes and computer technology, and a “Music of Two Nations” evening combining Chinese zheng virtuoso Yi Dong, clarsach player Hannah Phillips and composer and flautist Eddie McGuire, while Castaneda himself shares a bill with the trio Namo, who fuse African kora with guitar and viola d’amore.

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