Onstage Orange City, Orange City Arts’ free summer concert series, continues on Wednesday, July 3, with Max Hatt / Edda Glass. The performance will take place in Windmill Park downtown Orange City starting at 7:00 p.m.
Bossa Nova, Americana, and Folk music come together in this truly impressive, genuinely unique duo. Praised by critics for their incredible sound and extraordinary lyrics, Max Hatt / Edda Glass have recently been beloved by NPR, the legendary Daytrotter studio, PBS, Paste magazine, Huffington Post, and the Lincoln Center.
Max Hatt / Edda Glass began in Montana, where Hatt had a jazz trio and Glass had a knack for singing Brazilian Portuguese. Glass sat in on songs like “Girl from Ipanema” and they soon became the state’s only Bossa Nova band, honing their original material on the side. On long drives between Bossa Nova gigs, Glass wrote lyrics to Hatt’s solo guitar compositions: “Max’s compositions are so cinematic,” she recalls, “and you look out the window and it’s like the camera’s panning for you, over these enormous landscapes, and you start expecting something to happen— a story to begin.” This highway collaboration took them all the way to New York City at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, where the two unknowns won the 2014 Grand Prize of the International Mountain Stage / NewSong Competition. It was there that their songs of migrating geese, dispossessed tribes, and mysteries in the wheat fields captured the attention of their future producer, Pat Sansone. “I was mesmerized from the first moment I heard them,” Sansone recalls. “They have the ability to create a deep sonic landscape with only voice and guitar, with songs that poses a mysterious and soulful magic.”
Hatt grew up in the Chicago-land area, studied jazz guitar in the David Baker program at Indiana University, and has taken classes with Pat Metheny, Julian Lage, and Lee Retinour. The daughter of a jazz trombonist and a music aficionado, Glass was likewise steeped in jazz, and learned to sing in Portuguese through obsessive teenage listening to an obscure Nara Leão album (followed by the famous Getz/Gilberto). With other influences ranging from Neil Young to J.D. Salinger, Homer, Jim Jarmusch, and Casablanca, the duo truly creates“a unique sound harmoniously forged from seemingly disparate elements,” (Larry Groce of NPR Mountain Stage).
