Locced Down

Berklee College of Music famously draws a very international student body, so it’s no surprise that the ongoing summer showcase of emerging Berklee artists, Tuesdays at the Beehive, has presented groups led by musicians from such far-flung places as Nigeria, Brazil, and Italy. What attracts all this young talent to the Boston institution and weaves a common thread through their work is jazz, the American music par excellence. But the diversity

of backgrounds and prior experience also makes Berklee a place for novel encounters between global traditions, using, to varying degrees, jazz as a common aesthetic setting and a source of shared methods and technique.

The Maeve Gilchrist Trio, which appears at the Beehive next Tuesday, represents one such border crossing. Gilchrist, who was raised in Edinburgh by an Irish mother and Scottish father, is a singer and instrumentalist who plays the harp; her repertoire and original compositions draw heavily on Scottish and Irish folklore. Bassist Andres Rotmistrovsky and percussionist Marcelo Woloski , meanwhile, are both from Argentina and versed in a wide range of traditional rhythms from that country as well as Brazil, Uruguay, and Peru. The songs on “Reaching Me,” the album the three released last year, combine these elements and set them, in most cases, to jazz arrangements.

On the phone from Astoria, Queens, where she moved just a month ago, Gilchrist says she came to Berklee at age 17 at the suggestion of her teachers at the City of Edinburgh Music School, after they saw she was interested in expanding her harp playing beyond that instrument’s customary uses in classical and folk music. “I wanted to play harp as my main instrument,” she says, “and to find ways of allowing the harp to fit tastefully into different musical situations in jazz and Latin music. To fit tastefully, that should always be the aim.”

It’s a useful standard to shoot for, and on “Reaching Me,” it’s achieved. The record is a fluid and easy listen that successfully subverts the preconceptions one might have about Scottish folk songs. The relaxed, shuffling Latin beats provide momentum and a certain plasticity that permits even the ballads to groove. Gilchrist’s harp holds down the melodic center with an unexpected tonal versatility that frequently evokes the jazz guitar.

Percussionist Woloski explains that at least one part of this amalgam was easier to accomplish than one might think. “What is common between Scotland and Argentina is that the meter of most folk l oric music from Scotland is the same as in most Argentinean folk music, in 3/4 or 6/8,” he says. Indeed, given that Argentina was long a destination for immigrants from the British Isles, it’s an intriguing question whether certain folk traditions made the journey with them. Moreover, Gilchrist points out that variants on the harp are commonly found elsewhere in Latin America, for instance in Colombia.

Less obvious is how to adapt the harp for jazz, and indeed, only a few jazz harpists have ever achieved anything close to renown. The best known is probably Alice Coltrane, primarily a pianist, who used the harp’s 46 strings texturally, weaving its ethereal tones into her mystically oriented soundscapes full of resonance and drones. Gilchrist’s approach, however, is more akin to that of obscure musicians like Dorothy Ashby , who played the harp as the melodic lead.

Gilchrist achieves this thanks in part to the levers, placed at the top of each string, that she engages as she plays to raise or lower the note, producing a full tonal range. But she also has learned, she says, to play judiciously, within her instrument’s potential, rather than trying to mimic more common lead jazz instruments. “It’s learning to distinguish playing something because you want to play it, and playing something that sounds good on your instrument,” she says.

At any rate, she’s not trying to do typical jazz: “I’m not a born-and-bred jazz player,” she says. And indeed, “Reaching Me” operates in multiple genres, from the groove-oriented instrumental “Nightcrawlers” to the rapid-fire traditional jig “Rattling Roaring Willy” and several songs with a balladeer’s or singer-songwriter’s sensibility, including the lovely title track, the lyrics of which Gilchrist penned herself. There’s also a pair of Robert Burns airs — this is a Scottish album, after all.

Appropriately , Gilchrist and her Argentine accomplices have taken their music back to its roots by playing, last year, to a packed house at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe . During the trip, Woloski says, they enjoyed parties where they got to play impromptu with Scottish fiddlers and other musicians. “What’s great about the trip is that we got to know more about Scottish tradition,” he says. “By getting more deeply into the culture, we can interpret her music in a different way.”

Gilchrist is enjoying introducing new players — and new audiences — to both her culture and her instrument. “People have a lot of curiosity about the harp,” she says. “There’s the stereotype of lilting angelic harmonies, and I don’t think my music sounds very angelic at all. I definitely think people have been surprised at what the harp can do.”© Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.Related links:  music blog Local music events Recent CD reviews : Maeve Gilchrist’s ‘Nightcrawlers’12var cpgnum=0,articlepgs=2,articleurl=’http://www.boston.com/ae/music/articles/2007/06/29/scotland_and_argentina_on_one_harp’,asep=’?';articlePaginate();More:Globe Living/Arts stories

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