Many adjectives have been used to describe Mary Halvorson over the course of her career: unpredictable and original, invigorating and fresh, and tirelessly inventive. Every record she’s part of pushes boundaries, so it’s become increasing difficult to pin down the effects of her music with words. Her instrument is the guitar, but the style she’s become known for requires the listener to leave all their previous understandings of that instrument at the door.
Halvorson composes for trios, octets, quintets, and duos; she holds the guitar in her hands, but she uses it as a guide to exploring a vast range of sonic possibilities, from jazz to progressive rock. Since Halvorson’s debut as bandleader on 2008’s Dragon’s Head, she’s involved herself in an extensive and wonderfully exhaustive list of projects in which she takes on varying roles, from composer and leader to companion and collaborator. She started out playing guitar in free jazz legend Anthony Braxton’s band, and she has performed and made records with other big names in avant-garde like John Zorn. She’s highly sought after in the jazz world, biut she’s not at all weighed down by her accolades, one of which is a MacArthur fellowship. Her songbook is ever-expanding, and she’ll be bringing her most frequent collaborators in Code Girl and Thumbscrew to the McGuire Theater this week to showcase what’s next for Halvorson and her band.
Halvorson is a perfect example of what jazz is and what it has become. What was once a genre centered around musical standards, commonality, and tradition has, since the mid–20th century, become somewhat of a blanket term for all forward-thinking music, doing away with the idea of being bound by a “true” genre. Halvorson is a highly trained player, composer, and improviser, yet rather than creating a music of over-thinking, she creates one of learned expression that embodies this rejection of nomenclature. Her albums can take the path of being wild and free, random with intention and purpose (imagine the chaos of life on the molecular level), and in the same moment be complex and refined. It comes down to the duality of hearing the performance and the composition at the same time, which can take some practice, especially if you’re not familiar with that style of music.
Though she had been previously involved in musical projects before the release of Dragon’s Head, it still served as the defining breakthrough moment for Halvorson. Looking back, the album is the ideal microcosm of the musical landscape she would go on to expand with her octet album, Away With You. On Dragon’s Head we begin to get a feel for her style: a fresh voice in the tradition of jazz guitar, even the avant-garde tradition within it, alongside elements of progressive rock and modern indie. She shifts through these modes seamlessly, drawing the listener into sharp melodies before bursting them wide open with effects or new interpretations.
We can also see the extent of her band’s capacity for improvising on these records. A good jazz group can improvise; a great one can refine the practice, and that’s exactly her band does. What’s amazing about Mary Halvorson and her bands is exactly what made Ornette Coleman and his original quartet so exciting back then: every player is given license to reach out and explore their instruments, but their intention lies in collective progress towards something new. This is most evident in Saturn Sings, the 2010 album that features her quintet. The addition of horns leading from her trio work adds to the compositions a vision with equal depth to her previous work but with a wider sonic palette to color in and shade with.
At first listen it’s clear that taking risks in central to Halvorson’s music. Her first and only solo album thus far, 2015’s Meltframe, is full of them, and it appears to be an entirely solitary experience. In a way, it is: Halvorson is literally the only person who performs on this record, but she isn’t the only one composing. It’s a collection of covers done in essential Halvorson style. Each song—by legends like Coleman and Duke Ellington and contemporaries like Chris Lightcap and Noël Akchoté—is a wide-eyed diversion from the original. Once again Halvorson toes the line between genre distinctions and their respective histories as she follows the jazz tradition of doing your own version of other composers’ songs, but it’s not often we hear saxophone music transposed to distorted guitar with such glaring success and ingenuity.
On paper, the experiment put forth in Meltframe is hard to understand. In practice, these effect-heavy interpretive excursions make for the perfect answer to the previous mystery of what a Mary Halvorson solo album would sound like.
Halvorson’s next be leap in her work came with Code Girl, the band/album conception we’ll be seeing in full force on February 8. The group is made up of Michael Formanek and Tomas Fujiwara, with the addition of Amirtha Kidambi on vocals. Formanek and Fujiwara are two thirds of the collective power trio Thumbscrew (of which Halvorson is an equal member), which will be opening the show. Vocalist and saxophonist María Grand has been added to the original band, as well as trumpet player Adam O’Farrill.
Code Girl, described by Halvorson as an “experimental song project,” began with Halvorson penning lyrics before any music had been composed. Once she began to create the music around the words, a new era of Mary Halvorson had begun. The record is many things: a culmination of her work as a composer, a band leader, and a musician, all while expanding into the world of poetry.
Its emotive ideas are given to the listener in the familiar form of the “song.” The distinction between a “song” and a “piece” is usually up to the creator, and here we clearly see Halvorson working with “song” formulas in the same way she turns jazz and classical methods on their heads while remaining true to form.
“Often I try to blur the lines a bit,” Halvorson recently told me of the role of improvisation in this band. “In Code Girl that blurring probably happens a little less, since I consider this a song project and the forms of the compositions tend to be a little more straightforward. Still, some of the improvised sections are free, some happen over forms or vamps/lines, some are a combination. I try to find creative ways of allowing for surprise within a relatively fixed structure.”
Halvorsonn’s Walker show will consist of music from a new Code Girl album, songs that were recorded in December of 2019 but won’t be released until fall of 2020. One of the biggest changes between the albums, besides some line-up shifting, is the process of writing the words, wherein Halvorson is taking more of a conscious poetic approach.
“At the suggestion of David Breskin, co-producer of both albums, I wrote all the new lyrics in different poetic forms,” said Halvorson. “So I spent a lot of time studying, reading, and writing poetry. The lyrics you’ll hear at the Walker may include a sestina, ghazal, tanka, pantoum, found poem, free verse, villanelle, and haibun.”
It’s this very same eye towards the future that keeps Halvorson at the top of the jazz world. One would be pressed to think of any artist, past or current, who is committing themselves to new ideas like she is. Now, we get the chance to be part of the process and take in the work before the general public does.
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