Edda Glass

Edda Glass
Helena, MT
Grant amount: $11,170

About the Artist

Max Hatt / Edda Glass have "an incomparable spook” and a "unique sound" (Nashville Scene and NPR’s Larry Groce) that's taken them from their home in Montana and sent them across the county from NPR and PBS to NYC's Lincoln Center, DC's Kennedy Center, and the Sundance Film Festival. Praised for her "impeccable vocal command" (PopMatters), Glass's voice is ultimately "one of a kind...you cannot confuse her with another artist" (New York Theatre Guide). Their award-winning original music and mesmerizing reinventions of the Great American Songbook and Brazilian classics create a swoon-inducing soundscape of voice and guitar that is both epic and intimate, encapsulating “the confusing sentiment of feeling both lost and found, all at once" (New York Theater Guide). If we live in uneasy times, this music is both a reflection and antidote, an escape that is really a healing-in-place. 

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 through obsessive teenage listening to a little-known Nara Leão album. Glass and Hatt’s first collaboration was a Bossa Nova party band in Montana, founded on Glass’s knack for Brazilian Portuguese and Hatt’s love of Antonio Carlos Jobim. The band’s engagements took them everywhere from the Pacific Northwest to the Rocky Mountain states and as far south as Santa Fe, NM. On these long drives, Glass began writing lyrics to Hatt's solo guitar compositions: "Max's compositions are very 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 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."

With other influences ranging from Neil Young to Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holliday, Baden Powell, Jefferson Airplane, Keith Jarrett, Bill Frisell, Patricia Barber, Chet Baker, Jim Hall, Paul Desmond, Charlie Haden, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, David Crosby, Jim Jarmusch, J.D. Salinger, Marshall McLuhan, Ursula LeGuin— and absorbing the effects of mediums ranging from epic poetry to television— the duo truly creates "a unique sound harmoniously forged from seemingly disparate elements," (Larry Groce of NPR Mountain Stage).