by Nate Chinen
Halvorson knew that her bond with Smith would form a flexible spine for her trio. The linchpin was Hébert, whom she first heard in a band led by the postbop avant-gardist Andrew Hill. But the jazz tradition was something that seemed to provoke a studied ambivalence in Halvorson, as if she were preemptively worried about being painted into a corner. “I knew I wanted something sort of based in jazz, but hopefully not with traditional forms and structures,” she said of the music on Dragon’s Head, a few weeks before the album’s release. “And not too rigid; I wanted to leave things somewhat open. And I wanted something that had driving energy; that was important to me too. And I felt that both John and Ches could do that.”1
One thing that drew Halvorson to Hébert’s bass playing was the roomy strength of his sound, which she described admiringly with words like “woody” and “hollow.” She was concerned with similar properties in her own playing. Producing that sound had been her primordial impulse when she first came into contact with an acoustic guitar in the house, as a child.
I remember instinctively wanting to hit the strings hard, with a really thick pick. That kind of came out of nowhere. So part of it was instinctual: that was how I wanted to play guitar. But also then thinking about it later, having a woody sound like a bass. There are some guitar players that have a more fluid, less pick-oriented sound that I love. But I was sort of taking influence from the upright bass rather than jazz guitar—getting the biggest guitar I could find and having the woodiness of the instrument come across.2
This thought was echoed by Smith, whose profile as a sideman at the time extended from the art-rock band Xiu Xiu to Ceramic Dog, a demonically intense trio led by the cult-hero guitar improviser Marc Ribot. “She picks extremely hard, every note,” Smith said. “I can relate to that. It’s almost like an antagonistic interface with the instrument at times, really aggressive. She’s not afraid to really push the limits of the instrument physically. I’ve played with rock players who play much, much lighter than her.”3
But there was a delicate quality in Halvorson’s playing too, when that’s what she intended. The compositions on Dragon’s Head cover a full dynamic range, in a way that feels entirely natural. Borrowing a practice from Braxton, she gave her compositions numbers as well as titles. The ten tracks on the album come sequenced out of order, but it’s possible to trace the evolution of her writing for the trio. The opening track, “Old Nine Two Six Four Two Dies (No. 10)” is in some respects the most sophisticated theme on the album, with a dark chordal path and a loping but determined pulse. The first several compositions she wrote, beginning with “Momentary Lapse (No. 1),” feel a bit more schematic, less tailored to the strengths of the band.
Still, the entire album is an announcement, and a marker. Few debut albums in jazz have landed with a stronger sense of self, or set up a more promising way forward. The cornetist and composer Taylor Ho Bynum, a fellow Braxtonian who had helped bring Halvorson to Firehouse 12 Records, hardly had an objective perspective on the album. But his assessment, delivered in an e-mail, held some key insights worth hanging on to nonetheless:
I think she’s made a truly definitive recording. Something that represents the potential of the next generation of musicians: artists who’ve grown up after the dust has settled on the various aesthetic battles of previous decades; artists who can comfortably reference rock, or straight-ahead, or avant-jazz, or metal, since it was all music in their ears growing up. Mary pulls off the feat of having all of this be a part of her music, yet it remaining identifiably and uniquely “Halvorson” music. She doesn’t sound like anyone else, and she doesn’t sound like she could exist at any time but the present.4
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Halvorson grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts, where she studied the violin for five years, beginning in second grade. A dawning obsession with Jimi Hendrix led her to the electric guitar: she got a Fender Stratocaster and some tablature books, teaching herself riffs from the classic rock warhorses. Her first guitar teacher, Issi Rozen, happened to be a jazz musician, and he imparted some fundamentals of harmony. Her father also had some jazz records in the house.
There wasn’t much of a jazz program at Brookline High School, though Bynum had also been a student there. (Five years older, he just missed Halvorson as a student; they first met on a Braxton tour in 2004.) Brookline’s proximity to Boston meant access to summer programs at the New England Conservatory and the Berklee College of Music, where Halvorson learned to deflect sexist appraisals of her talent. “Nobody would take me seriously,” she recalled. “They would take one look at me and say, ‘Okay, folk singer.’ That was really hard for me, and I was angry a lot of the time. I did all these summer programs, and I never encountered another female playing jazz guitar. Ever. So I don’t feel uncomfortable being the only woman in a group, but back then I would get treated differently.”5
Even as a teenager, she gravitated toward an experimental ethos: she saw the Art Ensemble of Chicago in concert, and developed an obsession with Ornette Coleman. Though her undergraduate major at Wesleyan was biology, she encountered a life-changing mentor in Braxton, who urged all of his students to forge their own paths, and in some cases their own creative lexicons. When Halvorson wrote a thesis about the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Braxton was her advisor. But one of the deeper lessons he imparted was the conceptual distinction between what he called stylists and restructuralists. “A stylist would be somebody that had basically perfected a tradition, and maybe they had their own voice within it but it was definitely confined to a particular style,” Halvorson recalled. “Like Wynton Marsalis. And then a restructuralist would be somebody who had come up with their own system and method.”6
Braxton was a vibrant role model in this respect: a fantastically ambitious conceptualist and composer aligned with the AACM, famous for the abstruse, elusive logic of his creations. He had been a media sensation in the 1970s, when he made a series of frame-exploding musical statements in performance and on record. His compositions utilized proprietary strategies and came with numerical and graphical designations, their titles sometimes resembling notes from a lecture on particle physics. His scale as a composer ran from the unaccompanied soliloquy—he pioneered the interrogative, existential mode for solo saxophone—to a vast sprawl, as in the descriptively titled 1978 album For Four Orchestras. At Wesleyan he had presided over more than one generation of musical rule breakers—though his own creative concept had its own set of guidelines, notably an elaborate theoretical framework called the Tri-Centric model.
Halvorson took Braxton’s exhortative instruction to heart, though she was still in the formative stage of her musical path. The emphasis on originality was echoed by another important teacher, the experimental guitarist Joe Morris, with whom she took private lessons. And that go-your-own-path ethos stood in stark contrast to the prevailing atmosphere at the New School, where Halvorson transferred in her junior year, in search of more formal training.
She lasted just one year, practicing constantly and bristling against the pressure to conform. But she also met some future collaborators, like the explosive drummer Mike Pride, who introduced her to Trevor Dunn. Even at this stage she gave the impression of someone with a clear bead on her sound. “I remember we played this standards gig, and she came out with these huge, weird intervals,” recalled Peter Evans, a trumpeter of audacious instinct and exceptional technique. “Any individual that’s pursuing this kind of music, there’s going to be this beautiful individual stamp on it, which can only come from this person. Mary always sounded like that, really.”7
These and other musicians in Halvorson’s emerging peer group were serious but not self-serious, well schooled but not overrefined. They drew no distinction between jazz’s “inside” and “out,” nor between jazz and other musical languages. Evans had studied jazz and classical music at Oberlin; he was already developing a trademark of spontaneous solo recitals that se
emed to stretch the limits of human possibility, let alone the delineations of genre. Matana Roberts, a saxophonist who had come up in the Chicago chapter of the AACM, was intently focused on a performance piece called Coin Coin, which she envisioned as a living sound assemblage, interweaving genealogy, fugitive slave narratives, superstition, incantation, and folklore.
Halvorson’s own constellation of interests included the visionary English multi-instrumentalist Robert Wyatt, formerly of Soft Machine; Deerhoof, a jumpy and exclamatory modern art-rock band; and the heavy-gauge experimental outfits Hella and Orthrelm. But she also had her jazz-world preoccupations: one reference point for her second album—Saturn Sings, released on Firehouse 12 in 2010—was the small-group writing of Benny Golson, notably his signature ballad “I Remember Clifford,” as arranged for the Jazztet.
Saturn Sings is a quintet album, with Finlayson and Irabagon joining Halvorson’s working trio. She released another album by this band in 2012, calling it Bending Bridges. Then came an expansion to seven pieces, with the 2013 release Illusionary Sea, which signaled a step forward in Halvorson’s skills as a composer-arranger. Her indirect inspiration for that album came not only from sources like Dimensions & Extensions, a Sam Rivers album with a similar instrumentation, but also recordings by Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers, for their use of four-part gospel vocal harmony.
The stubborn integrity of Halvorson’s albums, which feel of a piece despite their various quirks, carried her name beyond the avant-garde circle that claimed her. Keith Jarrett once mentioned her as the rare younger improviser who had caused him to sit up and take notice.
“Mary’s interesting to me because of who she found,” he said. “She found some horn players I never heard of before. Very proficient at the least. But the ideas that are coming out of these guys! I’m sure they probably think they’re playing jazz.”
He laughed. “I don’t think she thinks she is.”8
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“I don’t enjoy jazz guitar in general,” Halvorson said in 2008. “I don’t enjoy listening to a lot of it. I don’t enjoy the tone. In general I’ve found its role in jazz to be kind of difficult, and not something I would put on and listen to.”9
She liked Ben Monder and Kurt Rosenwinkel, two of the instrument’s leading miracle workers, each of whom had brought sleek new proficiencies to its modern-jazz dialect. What repelled her was the received wisdom of a boppish fretboard language, though there were some exemptions there too. This was, after all, a matter of taste rather than ideology. And taste is mutable, no less than the historical perceptions around a given work.
One evening in the spring of 2014, Halvorson plugged into an amp at Le Poisson Rouge in Greenwich Village, cleared her throat, and began playing an unusual set. She was the opening act for another guitarist, the well-traveled experimentalist Nels Cline. But whereas he would be leading his longtime band, the Nels Cline Singers, she was onstage with nothing more than a chair, her guitar, and a few standard effects pedals. She was quiet, alert, with an almost classical composure; the air around her grew very still and clear, and so did the mood in the club.
Her first selection was “Sadness,” a piece by Ornette Coleman, and she quickly set her own terms of engagement with it: emphatic attack; sparse, deliberative phrasing; a judicious yet jarring pitch-wobble at the tail end of a note, or sometimes the beginning. This was all in keeping with her established style, but the exposure of a solo setting brought an added frisson, intensifying the music’s gawky elegance and giving it the lonesome integrity of outsider art.
That impression held through the remainder of the set, which consisted of interesting cover tunes: a slinky and unsettled “Ida Lupino,” by Carla Bley; a terse, melancholy “Blood,” by the art-rock and free-jazz polymath Annette Peacock; “Platform,” by one of Halvorson’s peers, the bassist Chris Lightcap, outfitted with gnarly power chords; Thelonious Monk’s “Ruby, My Dear,” recast as a crooked saloon song. Halvorson varied her approach with each piece, moving along the axis from delicate fingerpicking to furious strumming. She never sounded at a loss for ideas, and her careful sense of pacing kept the set from slipping into monotony.
Sparseness was hardly a new proposition for Halvorson. She had extensive history in a duo with the violinist Jessica Pavone, another Braxton affiliate, with whom she created art songs of dissonant, untutored effect. But the strategies available to Halvorson and Pavone—intuitive counterpoint, prickly call-and-response, chamber miniatures, even a sort of tandem folk singing—were contingent on duologue. As a soloist, Halvorson was more limited. She further circumscribed her options by focusing on the instrument at hand; she wasn’t predisposed to build self-referential loops, like Bill Frisell, or elaborate striations of noise, like Cline.
The only touchstone that came easily to mind during Halvorson’s performance—maybe a bit too easily, at least during her minor-key elaborations on “Blood”—were the ugly-beauty solo-guitar peregrinations of Marc Ribot, especially on his 2001 album Saints. Asked to name her guitar influences in the solo format, Halvorson mentioned Ribot first, followed by Joe Morris and the noise-rock legend Bill Orcutt. There was a kind of punk integrity to her restrictive parameters, which made sense: as it happened, she’d devised her solo-performance ethos as a tour opener for Buzz Osborne, aka King Buzzo, of the Melvins.
Halvorson’s album Meltframe, which arrived in 2015, was the eventual manifestation of these solo investigations. “Ruby, My Dear” had dropped out of the program, but other songs remained, with notable additions, like Duke Ellington’s “Solitude.” The album opens with a version of the Oliver Nelson composition “Cascades,” which appears on the classic album The Blues and the Abstract Truth. Rather than interpret the tune with a postbop pulse, she goes stark—underscoring its original purpose as an étude, while using distortion and halting silence to give it the feeling of something menacing and barbed. McCoy Tyner’s ballad “Aisha,” best known for its appearance on the John Coltrane album Olé Coltrane, comes in for a similar reinvention: Halvorson is reverential with the melody, applying a watery shimmer of delay, but her improvisation edges toward darker territory, briefly flaring into demonic distortion.
Meltframe was heralded as a breakthrough, mainly outside the jazz ecosystem: it received glowing coverage in Pitchfork and Rolling Stone. It served as a hinge in Halvorson’s work, swinging open the door to a more complex articulation of her ideas. “Oddly enough, I think doing the solo record made me think orchestrally,” she said. “I was trying to make each song not sound the same. How can I orchestrate these songs and make as wide a palette as possible? So I was in the headspace of thinking about those things when I started writing the octet music.”10
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Away with You, which has a central catalyst in Alcorn’s pedal steel, was only one manifestation of Halvorson’s capacity for collaboration. From the beginning of her experience as a working musician, well before most people were paying attention, she was forming allegiances with a broad range of improvisers and composers of unplaceable style.
Some were fellow Braxtonians like Bynum, who featured Halvorson on several albums by a chamberlike sextet. “She’s completely spoiled me in my own ensembles,” he said. “I’ve always tended towards the Ellington tradition of writing music for specific individuals, and she offers such a powerfully individualistic voice to play with. For a lot of my tunes, I just want to create a canvas for her to do her thing.”11 Bynum also featured Halvorson alongside more than a dozen other improvisers—unconventional virtuosos like the trumpeters Nate Wooley and Stephanie Richards—in a formidable and stylistically roving large ensemble. In 2016 this group released an album whose title reads like a stage direction: Enter the Plustet.
Halvorson worked in texture-mad, experimental ensembles led by her own band members, including Smith, Garchik, and Laubrock. She struck a tone of sparse elegance in Secret Keeper,
a collaborative duo with the bassist Stephan Crump. In the excellent Tomeka Reid Quartet, which evoked an avant-garde jazz lineage stretching from Eric Dolphy to Abdul Wadud, she served multiple roles at once: chordal scaffold, rhythmic booster, contrapuntal foil for Reid’s cello. And in the Hookup, a combo led by the drummer Tomas Fujiwara, Halvorson exercised a slippery license, choosing at any point to mingle with the horn section or hang back with bass and drums.
Together with Fujiwara and the bassist Michael Formanek, she also worked steadily in a collective trio called Thumbscrew, which released its self-titled debut album in 2014. Its guitar-bass-drums format would seem to dictate a conventional hierarchy, but Thumbscrew defied the mold. Pushing toward epiphany, the group explored an ever-shifting alignment of texture while remaining grounded in pulse, a strategy that drew on Halvorson’s full creative resources even when she wasn’t taking the lead. “Improvisationally she’ll find a point of view that I wouldn’t have been able to think of on my own,” said Formanek, who made Thumbscrew the rhythm foundation of his big band, Ensemble Kolossus. “She’s always working on perfecting these different approaches, following these different interval studies and these personal combinations of things. She’s kind of ready for any idea.”12
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As if to illustrate that point, Halvorson branched beyond instrumental music for a proudly unclassifiable project called Code Girl, featuring the members of Thumbscrew behind a galvanizing front line of Amirtha Kidambi on vocals and Ambrose Akinmusire on trumpet. Commissioned by the Jazz Gallery, where it had its premiere in the summer of 2016, Code Girl was conceived as a focused push into songwriting for Halvorson, who took it seriously.