Coming November 2 to
All Souls at Sundown:

Edmar Castaneda, harp

Andrea Tierra, voice
Jeison Linden, piano

and the poetry of Katherine Lee Bates

“Edmar Castañeda is a virtuoso, and a modern jazz musician in that he collects different musical languages of the New World and melts them together, fusing them with swing and improvisation. But he also does the same thing with instrumental approaches: he borrows the technique and sound of several other instruments and applies them to his own, which is a harp. He can turn a harp into a bass, a guitar, a piano and a hand drum… Castañeda has created his own vocabulary for his instrument, and it’s as curious to the eyes as it is to the ears. He slapped the strings for percussion or smashed out a chord like a flamenco guitarist; cupped his hands and brushed them by the strings in a cycling motion; bent a note by plucking a string, then pushing it at the bottom with his thumb; counterposed melodic hummingbird solos picked by one hand with bass lines picked by the other.”

—Ben Ratliff, The New York Times, July 4, 2008

Best known as author of the words to “America the Beautiful,” Katherine Lee Bates was a prolific poet and a professor of English at Wellesley College from 1885 to 1925. A progressive reformer, she opposed American imperialism in the Phillipines and championed workers’ rights and women’s suffrage.