Mary Halvorson's guitar tone contains within it a microcosm of her entire practice as a composer and bandleader. She gives the impression, through the clever use of a particular delay pedal, that her instrument inhabits two states of matter at once, or makes a subtly slow transition between them: now dry and unadorned, definitively guitar-like, almost uncanny in its naturalism. now fluid and unstable, with digital processing freeing each static step from whatever unseen forces hold it in place. Sometimes, you get one state or the other, but mostly you get both. Each note takes on the character of an ice cube left a little too far, glimmering steadily in the material of its own dissolution.
cloudy, The MacArthur award-winning New York jazz musician's latest album is also a melting-pot document. Halvorson composed the music for Amaryllis, the ensemble she first assembled for her 2022 self-titled album: Patricia Brennan on vibraphone, Nick Dunston on bass, Tomas Fujiwara on drums, Jacob Garchik on trombone and Adam O'Farrill on trumpet . (Laurie Anderson also pops in for a fiddle-scratch cameo on the raucous “Incarnadine.”) On “The Tower,” dramatic chord changes give way to atonal free improvisation so gradual as to obscure the differences between the two modes. And from pools of amorphous improvisation emerge moments of surprising order: Two instruments may suddenly converge on a common melodic line, or slyly mimic one another's articulation, then diverge nonchalantly again. Of course, almost all jazz carries some tension between compositional rigor and expressive freedom. But Halvorson is unusually attuned to the porosity of these supposed borders. While I can't help but wonder if certain pieces of structure were sketched out in advance or created spontaneously by the players, such questions of category may be the wrong questions for music so concerned with the liminal moment of becoming.
Halvorson uses her idiosyncratic instruments Cloudy. Brennan's vibraphone and Garchick's trombone are particularly suited to the album's dissolving sensibility: the former with its pointed percussive attack and flickering with constant reverberation. the latter with the sliding joints of each note. For a jazz guitar album, it contains few guitar solos, a dynamic that only serves to emphasize the holism of Halvorson's playing and composition. The sonority of her collaborators' intertwined voices so closely mirrors her own that she can recede into the background for extended stretches without compromising the music's identity.
