Artist Statement

We’re interested in stories.
How a melody can come home soundly to a place it didn’t grow up.
How a major chord can trouble your sleep with minor insinuations.
How we look to the horizon, no matter how wide the plain between us.

MAX HATT / EDDA GLASS is an experiment. We want to know: is complex, sophisticated music still culturally relevant? Can it resonate without translation and abstraction? Can it cut to the bone? A song like “Giant Steps” has long allowed the improvisor to tell ecstatic jazz stories— for instance the Story of the Shifted Major Thirds and the Augmented Triad. We dearly love that story. It’s the never-ending story, containing stories curled up inside other stories, like fractals and string theory. But is it even bigger? Is it, in fact, giant enough to collude with a little sung fiction and tell what it feels like to smile and wave / for the folks / though our mouths / and hands are broke? 

Jazz is regularly pronounced dead. There’s usually some snarky talk about ivory tower musicians that play too abstractly, or dumbed-down and pandered-to audiences. Yet jazz nurtures rich, narrative melodies, experimental chordal movement, deep musical dialog between players, and of course improv, the ecstatic art of instantaneous composition. So don’t get us wrong; we’re not out to save jazz. We want it to save us.

We see limitless potential in old songs like “All the Things You Are” and “Girl from Ipanema” —  and we play them along with our original music. But there’s room, out here, out west, for so many stories. We’re not from Brazil or New York; Max Hatt / Edda Glass was born in Montana, and spends a lot of time in Santa Fe. We love Neil Young, Ella Fitzgerald, Jefferson Airplane, Coltrane, Baden Powell, João Gilberto, Rossa Passos, Santana, Pat Metheny, Charlie Parker, Keith Jarrett, Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen, Cassandra Wilson, Talking Heads, Wes Montgomery. We’re drinking in Anais Mitchell, Gretchen Parlato, Esperanza Spalding, Rebecca Martin, Lionel Loueke, Julian Lage. And T.S. Eliot and Jim Jarmusch and J.D. Salinger and Nietzsche and Waiting for the Barbarians and Little Big Man and Casablanca and American Hustle. And now…green chile. And that’s the experiment— can jazz be All The Things We Are?

Crossing Over