Harvey Valdes likes pushing limits. He challenges conventions, breaks rules, innovates new concepts, and is on the lookout for alternatives. But don’t consider him an oddball iconoclast inventing systems to mask his limitations—he’s the opposite of that. He boasts prodigious chops on guitar and oud, is a master player in a variety of genres, has first rate compositional skills, and collaborates with many of NYC’s most progressive and innovative thinkers.
A New Jersey native, Valdes’ first exposure to music—aside from the salsa and cumbia in his Columbian household—was ‘80s MTV. “One of the first cassettes I bought was Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction,” he says. “That got me hooked right away. MTV at that time was a big product of metal and hair metal, so there was a lot of guitar that I was being exposed to. I wanted to know everything about it. And once I discovered Metallica I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is guitar music.’”
But Valdes didn’t join a metal band or wear spandex; he broadened his horizons, discovered new styles of music, and eventually earned a degree from New York’s New School in Jazz and Contemporary Music. Post-college he joined the ranks of the City’s progressive music scene and worked on notable projects like Karl Berger’s Improvisers Orchestra, Butch Morris’ Luck Cheng’s Orchestra and Nublu Orchestra, Harel Shachal’s Anistar, and toured as part of the Wooster Group’s production of Francesco Cavalli’s 1641 baroque opera, La Didone. His trio—featuring Sana Nagano on violin and Joe Hertenstein on drums—released PointCounterPoint in April and that was preceded last fall by Roundabout, his collection of recomposed jazz standards for solo guitar.
We spoke with Valdes about his influences, his experiences on oud, the parallels between baroque music and jazz, odd meters and polyrhythms, his idiosyncratic approach to composition, and ergonomic guitar design. Continue reading Thinking Differently: An Interview With Harvey Valdes