BIO:
Max Hatt / Edda Glass have "an incomparable spook” (Nashville Scene) and a "unique sound" (Larry Groce, NPR Mountain Stage), comprised of Glass's unmistakable voice and Hatt's epic guitar landscapes. Their award-winning original compositions and wistful interpretations of Jazz and Brazilian Bossa Nova have taken them coast-to-coast from New York City's Lincoln Center to NPR Mountain Stage and Sundance Film Fest. "Bossa Nova has these infectious rhythms, this street energy," says Glass, “yet it was originally sung for a few friends in tiny Rio de Janeiro apartments. The melodies are so exacting and sophisticated, yet they sound as easy and natural as humans whispering to one another." Praised for her "impeccable vocal command" (PopMatters) and compared to a gamut of singers from Astrud Gilberto to Billie Holliday, Glass's voice is ultimately "one of a kind...you cannot confuse her with another artist" (New York Theatre Guide). Hatt's equally distinctive guitar work combines the harmonic innovations of jazz with the melodic resonance of folk, creating music that's "subtly poignant, elegantly funky, and haunting without trying to be" (Nels Cline, Wilco). Together with Glass's literate lyrics, Max Hatt / Edda Glass evoke the grandeur of the western landscape as easily as the beaches of Rio de Janeiro, leaving audiences with a feeling both light and deep.
Hatt and Glass started playing together 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 NPR Mountain Stage / NewSong Competition. It was there that their songs of migrating geese, dispossessed tribes, and love in the wheat fields captured the attention of their future producer, Pat Sansone of Wilco. “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 Portugues through obsessive teenage listening to an obscure Nara Leão album (followed by the famous Getz/Gilberto). With other influences ranging from Neil Young to Pat Metheny, Jim Jarmusch to Casablanca, J.D. Salinger to Icelandic poetry, the duo truly creates "a unique sound harmoniously forged from seemingly disparate elements," (Larry Groce of NPR Mountain Stage). They are still based in the west, in Sante Fe, NM, O'Keefe country and home of the green chili.