Philadelphia Weekly

Pluck off: Colombian harp is in the house.

Jazz is American in origin, but it's been international right from the jump, reliant on creative juice from Africa, the Caribbean, South America and just about everywhere else. Bogot�-born Edmar Castaneda is one of a number of young Latin jazz musicians writing the next chapter; others include Dafnis Prieto (Cuba), Luis Perdomo (Venezuela), Miguel Zen�n (Puerto Rico) and Danilo Perez (Panama).

But Castaneda stands out in the field: He's the first to develop a jazz vocabulary on the Colombian harp, an instrument previously unknown to the idiom. (Deborah Henson-Conant has played jazz on an amplified European harp but isn't exclusively a jazz musician.)

Standing upright behind the midsized apparatus which he leans against one shoulder, Castaneda summons rippling harmony and melody with his right hand and propulsive basslines with his left. No, he's not a one-man band. He's practically a one-man orchestra, the Hendrix--or at least the Charlie Hunter--of the harp, linking a train of complex and richly textured sound to a locomotive of hot pan-American rhythm.

Castaneda often performs solo and duo, but this week at the Art Museum he'll appear with Marshall Gilkes on trombone, Dave Silliman on percussion and Andrea Tierra (his wife), a gutsy contralto originally from Medell�n, on vocals. They'll be drawing on repertoire from Castaneda's 2005 self-released debut Cuarto de Colores and a new as-yet-untitled disc due out in January featuring special guest John Scofield.

The music is suffused with jazz harmony, Brazilian and Afro-Cuban rhythms and traces of m�sica llanera, the dance and folk vernacular of the Colombian plains. "It's all in 6/8 time like a fast waltz, and you improvise in a percussive way," Castaneda says of the local music he learned as a youth.

Indeed, his harp is good for staccato, drumlike effects as well as lithe and flowing harmony. It has the penetrating tone of a harpsichord but also the warmth of a guitar. With fewer strings than the familiar harp of Western classical music, the ax has its limitations. But Castaneda uses bent notes and modified tunings to put chromatic wrinkles into the music.

At 13 Castaneda took up the instrument and got his start playing with friends in Bogot�. By 16 he had moved with his family to Long Island. "I was playing lots of international music, but in high school was when I met jazz," he recalls, naming Gonzalo Rubalcaba and Chick Corea as primary influences.

"At Five Towns College I studied trumpet, but I was also still playing the harp," Castaneda continues. "They didn't have jazz harp in school, but as a trumpeter I knew how to improvise and follow progressions. So I just put that onto the harp."

Lacking any obvious role models, Castaneda had to develop a technique of his own. "I used to play in restaurants six nights a week, and I started to improvise on solo harp, figuring out how to play all the parts on just one instrument. For me that was school, where I started creating the style I do."

Inspired by pianists, trumpeters and percussionists, drinking in everything from American jazz to Spanish flamenco and Argentine tango, Castaneda has honed a globe-trotting sensibility that's hard to ignore. Now in his late 20s and based in Queens, he performs busily as a leader, hitting major festivals this past summer in Perugia and Vienna.

"We just came from a [September] tour, my first tour of Colombia since I came to this country," he marvels, recounting stops in Cali, Medell�n, Barranquilla and elsewhere.

He's racking up sideman credits as well with sax/clarinet legend Paquito D'Rivera, Venezuelan piano whiz Edward Simon, hipster trombonist Dana Leong, Manhattan Transfer vocalist Janis Siegel and others. What do these diverse artists hear in Edmar? A stark reminder that jazz's possibilities are far from exhausted.

Edmar Castaneda Quartet
Fri., Nov. 16, 5-8:45pm. Free with museum admission ($14). Philadelphia Museum of Art, 26th St. and the Pkwy. 215.763.8100. www.philamuseum.org