The late great improviser/composer Kenny Wheeler once reported to the Guardian that what he liked doing best was “writing sad tunes, and then letting wonderful musicians destroy them”. The New York guitarist and new-music original Mary Halvorson (who, like Wheeler, was once a receptive disciple in the challenging bands of veteran boundary-buster Anthony Braxton) has also made a home in the turbulently dreamlike spaces where composition and the whims of improv meet. Lessons learned as a live improviser and off-stage as an imaginative student of musical form have created the rare artist she’s become.
In 2022, Halvorson’s already exalted reputation took a new leap with Amaryllis and Belladonna, albums respectively angled toward improv and written chamber music. Now comes Cloudward, a superb eight-piece set (reflecting in its title and moods the composer’s sense of liberation at the then-receding pandemic) for her sextet, joining guitar and Patricia Brennan’s vibraphone with trumpet, trombone, bass and drums, and the legendary Laurie Anderson on effects-violin for one track.
The slowly mounting brass-and-vibes fanfare of The Gate conceals the groove of the building bassline and softly hustling drums that eventually emerge, while trumpeter Adam O’Farrill – secure and clean-toned all over the horn’s range – shares beautifully interwoven brass harmonies with trombonist Jacob Garchik on Collapsing Mouth and Unscrolling. The latter is bookended by quiet drum rolls and glittering cymbal flickers, and a contrastingly dark, slithery bowed-bass breakout late on. Halvorson throws distorted guitar into the avant-funky Desiderata; Anderson sketches bugged violin sounds from brass tones to chimes into the graceful arcs of Incarnadine; and the almost Latin jazz-like Tailhead sets exhilarating band-riffing behind the climbing, twisting melody. Halvorson’s fusions of written and spontaneous music reach an entrancing new seamlessness and seductive warmth with this terrific set.
Also out this month
Much-acclaimed young American vibraphonist Joel Ross releases Nublues (Blue Note) with regular bandmates including gospel-fuelled saxist Immanuel Wilkins. They put orthodox and unorthodox angles on the blues in an occasionally solemn but mostly vibrant tracklist featuring seven originals alongside an implacably grooving account of John Coltrane’s Equinox and a playfully inquisitive one of Thelonious Monk’s Evidence. New York percussionist, vibraphonist and composer Ches Smith, a virtuoso of free-jazz, Haitian Vodou music, electronics and more, unveils Laugh Ash (Pyroclastic Records) – minimalism, spoken word, free-jazz tenor sax, abstract electronics, and gracefully close-knit chamber music intertwine on the prolific Smith’s most genre-inclusive release yet. And the melodically freewheeling American tenorist Rich Halley, an unjustly close-kept secret beyond his native Oregon, delivers a scalding postbop-to-free reminder of his long-honed eloquence in a formidable quartet including masterly post-Cecil Taylor pianist Matthew Shipp on Fire Within (Pine Eagle Records).
