# Mary Halvorson: You can lose yourself in music for a minute. It’s healing for people: Video, Photos

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2024/03/05/mary-halvorson-you-can-lose-yourself-in-music-for-a-minute-its-healing-for-people-video-photos/
- Published: 2024-03-05T00:02:55+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**The 43-year-old likes to disrupt tradition with noise, experimental and indie 
influences. She explains how new album Cloudward is yet another curveball.**

New York-based guitarist and composer Mary Halvorson doesn’t have time to hang about.
When we speak she’s about to run out the door for a Saturday evening gig at John
Zorn’s venue the Stone – and when that’s done she has to be up at 5am for a flight
to Chicago for another show. The improvising jazz musician wouldn’t have it any 
other way. “Going through that period of Covid, I’m feeling very grateful that we
are able to play music again and do shows,” she says from her home in Brooklyn. “
It’s so gruelling, the travel that we do. We’re in a different city every day, and
it’s exhausting. But I don’t even want to complain about it; I’m just grateful to
be able to do it. It beats sitting in an office.”

Since bursting on to the creative music scene in 2002, Halvorson has proved one 
of the most thrilling guitar players of her generation. She’s played with the likes
of Anthony Braxton, Ornette Coleman’s bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma, Tom Waits’s guitarist
Marc Ribot and members of Deerhoof and Xiu Xiu. She’s steeped in the jazz guitar
tradition yet also versed in the disruptive nature of punk, no wave and noise music.

Her own oeuvre is equally uncontainable. Meltframe, her 2015 solo album of standards,
warped the likes of Duke Ellington and Ornette Coleman into weird new shapes. Whether
she’s playing in jazz ensembles, indie bands or noise improv, her tone is clean 
and crystalline, but liable to combust. With her latest, Cloudward, her writing 
reveals a newfound sense of beauty and clarity. “It signifies this period of optimism
and moving forward,” she says. “But it’s also literal, like hey, we’re flying and
travelling places again.” Tomeka Reid, cellist and longtime collaborator with Halvorson,
says: “I feel like her personality really comes through on Cloudward … her sensitivity,
generosity, care and her subtle humour.”

Halvorson started playing violin in second grade, but on hearing Jimi Hendrix for
the first time she switched to guitar. She intended to study biology at Wesleyan
University, but her muse kept beckoning to her. Thanks in part to two professors
there, Anthony Braxton and experimental jazz guitarist Joe Morris, her focus reverted
back to the guitar. “With both Joe and with Anthony, there was a lot of emphasis
on exploring, taking risks, and finding your own voice,” she told one interviewer.

![Halvorson in concert with Sylvie Courvoisier at the Berlin Jazzfest last year.](
https://i0.wp.com/i.guim.co.uk/img/media/57f4de8b44b14a3e0c4273838a8d8e37f908eec1/
0_0_3648_5472/master/3648.jpg?resize=640%2C960&ssl=1)

‘Often quirky’ … Halvorson in concert with Sylvie Courvoisier at the Berlin Jazzfest
last year. 

In the early 2000s, Halvorson landed on the New York new music scene, where adaptability
was necessary to survive. She would take just about any gig: avant-indie band People,
chamber-jazz with violist Jessica Pavone, performances with her old professor Braxton,
not to mention leading her own groups. And no matter the band, her singular style
stood out. Zorn once described her as “a brilliant soloist with a unique, often 
quirky approach and a beautiful guitar tone that reaches back to tradition”.

In 2019, Halvorson was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, popularly known as the “genius”
grant, though soon the global pandemic brought life as a globetrotting player to
a screeching halt. After her hectic touring life, Halvorson saw it as some much 
needed downtime and delved into all manner of new hobbies: practising yoga, studying
tarot, learning how to make cocktails and watching basketball. “There was no real
deadline or timeframe and that did feel different for me,” she told We [Jazz](https://www.theguardian.com/music/jazz)
Magazine about her life during the pandemic. She also began to write for her recently
formed sextet, as well as a string quartet, which eventually yielded 2021’s ambitious
Amaryllis and Belladonna albums. These twin albums were just as spiky and nervy 
as her previous works, but also offered moments of gentle beauty, like blooms in
a cactus garden.

Cloudward represents yet another shift: “It’s the total opposite [of previous work]
in terms of my headspace when I was writing it,” says Halvorson. “My tendency before
was to overwrite. The biggest change I made consciously was to leave a lot more 
space and breath.” In the past, she might have augmented her group or formed a new
band altogether, but she loved the sextet responsible for Amaryllis so much that
she kept it intact. That continuity and stability is audible in Cloudward. The track
Unscrolling moves at an unhurried pace, propelled by bowed bass and skilled cymbal
work. And the elegant intertwining melodies of closer Ultramarine suggest an innate
understanding of how her band works together.

You can hear the Mary Halvorson of the past and present collide on The Tower. Named
after the card in the tarot deck, “it represents a time of upheaval, but it’s not
a negative card. Sometimes everything has to blow up and then you start over.” The
opening minute is scratchy and frantic, before the ballad emerges and the piece 
lifts to a calmer place. Looking back on the past four years, Halvorson sees that
the piece and album as a whole reflect the chaos of the pandemic. “Music can be 
almost an escape from that. You can lose yourself in music for a minute. It’s healing
for people,” she says, although she’s quick to clarify: “But being optimistic _musically_
and being optimistic about the state of the world are totally different categories!”

![SFJAZZ.org | 5 Things Mary Halvorson](https://i0.wp.com/www.sfjazz.org/globalassets/
discover/blog/blog-images/5050s/mary-halvorson_5050.jpg?w=640&ssl=1)

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