The Hamptons JazzFest Winter Jazz Series 2025 opened on Friday, February 14, with a Valentine’s Day concert by Mary Edwards at The Church in Sag Harbor. The unique soundscapes of Mary Edwards are a kind of love letter to the planet, melding musical composition with the often-overlooked sounds of our world, from the growl and crack of Arctic ice to the waves of Canaveral National Seashore near Florida’s launch platforms for NASA rockets.
Loving the Planet
A multidisciplinary keyboardist born and based in Staten Island, Edwards crafts music that invites listeners to recover the art of listening at a time when so much sound bombards our daily lives that we easily lose the signal amid the noise. Her music conveys the idea that what we hear and how we hear it makes a difference for our future and the future of our planet.
Edwards’ 90-minute opening concert in Sag Harbor features a duet—she will play her music accompanied by flutist and saxophonist Michael Eaton—but Edwards stresses that there is a larger duet within the composition itself: a duet between the human voice and planetary sounds, blending jazz tunes and ambient music. “We didn’t frame the Valentine show as a series of romantic songs,” she emphasizes, “but more as a love for our planet, a love for the natural world. It’s bigger than ourselves. It’s about keeping open to listening experiences, creating a glimpse into our imaginations of how to inhabit our planet.”
Bringing the Arctic to Concert
The closing title of the concert is “Everywhere We Are Is the Farthest Place,” an ode to a dying Arctic. While collecting auditory material for the piece, Edwards was accepted into the Arctic Circle expeditionary residency arts and science program, which includes scientists and artists of varied disciplines, as well as architects and educators. The program sends these teams to international Svalbard, an archipelago only 10 degrees latitude distant from the North Pole. Thinking back to her field recording in Svalbard in 2022, Edwards describes her work there as a matter of listening “to the rhythm and breath of our planet from another pulse point.”
“It’s one of the quietest places on Earth, absent of human voices,” Edwards adds. “I set out to capture the authentic environment of the unfolding sound with my geophones, hydrophones and contact microphones. It was a listening lab for me, hearing how the sounds would transform each day.”
To do this, Edwards dipped her hydrophone into the Arctic sea to hear sounds human beings rarely hear, such as the rush of subterranean streams, the halving of a glacier, and a pod of Beluga whales swimming through a fjord and singing to one another.
Later, while Edwards composed, one of her colleagues asked her if she was creating an elegy. “No,” she recalls answering, “it’s an ode that’s not embracing sadness, but listening to the beauty of now.”
The Sound of the Shore
In the same year (2022), Edwards became the artist-in-residence at the ACA Soundscape Field Station, a listening lab at Canaveral National Seashore. Her work there led to new jazz compositions and also to the publication of her book Conservation/Conversation, comparing healing in our relationships to healing in our ecosphere.
Each day, after visitors left the seashore, Edwards would walk across the grounds, exploring the location’s biodiversity. “I could hear the Atlantic Ocean on one side,” she recalls, “and a lagoon on the other side. Sonically, they were so different. I captured them to use compositionally. Because NASA had donated this small sandspit of land, we were able to view the Florida rocket launches, which was another sound in itself. One launch was such a visual experience, but then came the overwhelming sound. Within moments the sonic booms brought tears to my eyes. It was such a vibratory experience.”
Some of Edwards’ other compositions are based on experiences nearer to home. On her own Staten Island, an African American burial ground was unearthed beneath a shopping mall parking lot that had once been the site of an Episcopal church serving a congregation of former slaves. Edwards was invited by two documentary filmmakers to score their film about the unearthing, American Graveyard. She has also composed a narrative poem and soundscape to share her mother’s experiences growing up in the Deep South during the Jim Crow era.
“To go to her segregated school,” Edwards recalls, “she had to wake at 4 a.m. and walk through the woods to catch her bus. She used to tell me stories about all the sounds she heard. Even today, 80 years later, her story is still quite relevant. And to me, it’s a lesson on being able to educate listeners to be open to that which you cannot hear on the surface.”
Mary Edwards’ concert opens at 6 p.m. February 14 at The Church, 48 Madison Street, Sag Harbor. Tickets are priced at $30 ($25 for members) at https://www.thechurchsagharbor.org.
