Hamptons JazzFest Winter Jazz Series 2025: Journey Into the Art of Listening With Mary Edwards

In officially opening the Hamptons JazzFest’s winter season, composer and environmental sound artist Mary Edwards celebrates Valentine’s Day on Friday, February 14, with a concert at The Church in Sag Harbor.

With her unique sonic experience of melding composition with a keen appreciation of the unrecognized sounds of our planet, the multidisciplinary keyboardist promises her audience a fascinating journey into the fine art of listening at a time when we are consistently bombarded by noise and cacophony of all sorts. As such, she’s making a social statement that what we hear and how we hear sound is vital for the future of the planet.

She combines her original music informed by her captivation with the sounds of the world around her, ranging from the Arctic ice lands to the Canaveral National Seashore in Florida close to the space launch platforms.

“We didn’t frame the Valentine show as a series of romantic songs, but more as a love for our planet, a love for the natural world,” says Edwards who will play her music in a duet format with flutist/saxophonist Michael Eaton. “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.”

In her 90-minute show, the Staten Island-born and -based Edwards will play pop jazz tunes as well as ambient music, including her earlier work as a singer/songwriter. She also visually documents her soundscape adventures, providing remarkable video representations of the pieces, especially her field-recording Arctic experience in 2022, which she describes as listening “to the rhythm and breath of our planet from another pulse point.”

She was accepted into The Arctic Circle expeditionary residency arts and science program that includes artists of different disciplines, photographers, scientists, architects and educators. Since its founding in 2009, it takes place on the international territory of Svalbard, an Arctic archipelago just 10 degrees latitude from the North Pole.

“It’s one of the quietest places on Earth absent of human voices,” Edwards says. “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.”

She submerged her hydrophone into the water to hear the sounds of the unheard, the movement of subterranean rivers, the crashing of a calving glacier, the changing depths of the melt water channels and her biggest surprise aboard the specially outfitted exhibition ship, a school of Beluga whales in one fjord swimming together and singing to each other. When getting off the boat, she and the others took smaller Zodiac boats to get to the frozen land to explore more.

“We had to endure the cold and do the work,” she says. “As long as we were safe from polar bears.”

Edwards used these opportunities to develop an epic composition. “One of my colleagues asked what I was doing,” she says. “When I told him about the piece, he said , ‘Oh, so you’re working on an elegy.’ I said, no, it’s an ode that’s not embracing sadness, but listening to the beauty of now.”

She titled the work “Everywhere We Are Is the Farthest Place,” which she’ll play at the end of her excursion at The Church. “It’s not exactly jazz,” she says. “But these days jazz is so expansive, in quite a range, that what people are playing beyond the tradition is a different iteration. What I’m doing now is smaller, quieter. It’s speaking of what I am now in my career. My horn player, Michael Eaton, is firmly in the improvisatory jazz world, which elevates my music to jazz. In fact that’s what it is — firmly rooted in the musicality that speaks with a jazz expression.”

Even so, Edwards has history with popular music, citing important influences such as singers/composers Laura Nyro and Minnie Riperton. She also loved the jazz depth of Alice Coltrane and cites such adventurous modern composers as John Luther Adams, Brian Eno and Vulker Bertelmann as her inspirations.

She began her early life as a musician and composer, but as she got older she wanted to go deeper into the music, thinking with a ”something lived, something scientific” sensibility. It was when she attended the progressive Goddard College (the Plainfield, Vermont campus closed in May 2024) for her B.A. and a distinguished Interdisciplinary Master of Fine Arts in Sound and Architecture that she discovered her career path.

“It allowed me to do the creating that I had been wanting to do,” she says. “The whole world opened up for me to think about music and architecture at the same time, which allowed me to find myself in the natural world. That led the way to make sound installations. They were experiences in listening to the sounds that were intimate and immense. They were also acoustically built to gauge the wellness of the planet. Music is the bedrock of the natural world’s terrain.”

Also in 2022, Edwards was invited to be the artist-in-residence at the Canaveral National Seashore’s listening lab the ACA Soundscape Field Station where she built new sound installations based on her practice of how deeper listening raises an awareness to the soundscape. This led to her book “Conservation/Conversation” about the healing of our relationships to wellness of the environment.

“This gave me vast privileges to explore the biodiversity of the grounds when visitors went home each day,” Edwards says. “I could hear the Atlantic Ocean on one side 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. You see, but you also hear, which is another aspect of listening.”

Edwards returned to the site later in the year to read from her book and lead visitors on soundwalks.

Edwards has recorded digital albums (available on Bandcamp), ranging from her intimate pop vocals in earlier albums to her sublime cinematic journeys of lyricism and sounds of invisible architectures she has discovered. Meanwhile, she has been invited to a variety of different places to engage in listening experiences, from her geophonic reimagining of a seismic event based on a blind thrust fault through Mount Tamalpais in the Sausalito Headlands north of San Francisco to her conceptual soundtrack for the TWA terminal at New York’s JFK airport.

Closer to home, she discovered untapped stories in the environment of Staten Island. An African burial ground was discovered under a present-day mall parking lot that covered over an old Episcopal church formerly a congregation of slaves.

“There were ancestral connections for me,” Edwards says. ”I wanted to be a part of this conversation. As a composer and sound artist, I set out to reimagine the sounds of an active church there. And I played field sounds over the composition. My roots are here from my father’s side, so it was a real honor to reconnect to attempt to bring lost history back to life. Two filmmakers are documenting the unearthing, and they invited me to do the score of ‘American Graveyard.’”

On a personal note, Edwards has composed a sound piece and narrative poem about her mother growing up in the Jim Crow South.

“To go to her segregated school, she had to wake at 4 a.m. and walk through the woods to catch her bus,” she says. “She used to tell me stories about all the sounds she heard. She said she didn’t walk in fear, but in determination, because the end goal was getting a good education. All that time she was learning how to be a steward of the natural world.

“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 opens the Hamptons JazzFest Winter Jazz Series 2025 on Friday, February 14, at 6 p.m. at The Church, 48 Madison Street, Sag Harbor. Tickets are $30 ($25 members) at thechurchsagharbor.org. The series continues Saturday, February 22, with CocoMama at Bay Street Theater and Saturday, March 22, with Slavic Soul Party at Bay Street Theater. Visit hamptonsjazzfest.org for more information.

Dan Ouellette is a Shelter Island writer and author of the book “The Landscape Chronicles: Unearthing Legends of Modern Music,” published by Cymbal Press via Amazon.