Mary Halvorson Sextet

The generation-defining, MacArthur “Genius Grant” award-winning guitarist and composer Mary Halvorson brings the band behind her acclaimed 2022 album Amaryllis to Portland!

Featuring Halvorson alongside trumpeter Adam O’Farrill, trombonist Jacob Garchik, vibraphonist Patricia Brennan, bassist Nick Dunston, and drummer Tomas Fujiwara.

“It sounded like a band from the first note.”

Mary Halvorson still marvels as she recalls the initial rehearsal of the sextet that anchored her acclaimed 2022 Amaryllis, and the new Cloudward. She’d written music for an unusual new-to-her lineup—trumpet, trombone, vibraphone, guitar, bass, drums—as a post-pandemic “reset” experiment. It was a hunch, and Halvorson, a veteran of countless ad-hoc groups and short-term projects, kept her expectations earthbound. Until they started playing.

“It was fun right away,” the guitarist and composer says. “Everyone connected. And as we’ve played more over the last couple of years, it’s definitely gotten better. It’s almost like you start to, not finish each other’s sentences, but you start to understand someone’s language a little bit more. The more touring we did, and hanging out, I think everyone feels they can take more risks because we’re comfortable with each other. It’s one of the most fun bands to tour with for me.”

The band hadn’t been a band for very long when Amaryllis was recorded. Yet during the sessions, the players went beyond the notes and dynamic markings Halvorson had provided. The band was fully immersed in bringing the sonic infrastructure she’d dreamed up to life, breathing fire into her broad, overlapping melodies, metric skirmishes, and tense harmonies like it was no big deal. Before the album landed on countless best-of lists and was named DownBeat magazine’s album of the year, Halvorson knew she would be writing more for this ensemble.

“I never want to do the same thing twice,” says Halvorson, who was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2019. “This band, though, I could see myself writing music for it for years.” 

Described by NPR as “the most future-seeking guitarist working right now,” Halvorson has long been a provocative original voice among those exploring the jazz/not jazz axis. One explanation for that is her temperament—she’s both a restless seeker and an exacting critic of her work, wired for both the spontaneous outburst and the carefully considered score. “I think it’s important to challenge yourself. That’s how this group started. I love the instrumentation, and I still feel there’s lots of room to explore. And at this point they know my music—they get it. So it’s easy to bring in a piece and have it take shape pretty quickly.”

The rapid evolution is audible throughout the eight dizzying, vignette-like compositions of Cloudward. Halvorson’s new originals continue the textural richness of Amaryllis, but lean more heavily on the sextet’s interplay, and accentuate the individual voices a bit more. The pieces are something more than the typical settings for improvisation. They’re intensely visual scenes, with small interior deliberations that rise up to become throttling/roaring peaks. In one, called “Ultramarine,” the orderly, reassuringly consonant cycle of a baroque canon is juxtaposed against a tense fantasia on the chromatic scale. In another, the spellbindingly tempo-less “Incarnadine,” the atmosphere is set by Laurie Anderson’s otherworldly violin harmonics. 

Each of these scenes arrive fully detailed. Some have a linear, through-composed orientation; others rely on recurring “hooks” and structural touchstones. None are organized around conventional verse/chorus form. There are extended, gracefully curving melodic arcs that wind through mountains and eventually return. There are nervous, scampering themes that appear once and vanish. The music unfolds, passage by passage and scene by scene, as if guided by Zen intuition, shaped first by the written notation and then, to a much greater degree, by the group’s shared understanding of what the music needs.

About the only constant: The music rarely stays in one zone for long. Just when a narrative idea snaps into focus, the band zooms up to a higher altitude, to pursue metaphysics of a different order. There are, naturally, shifts in tempo and texture—the pieces are knit together with sly transitional sections that are sometimes written and sometimes improvised. These are masterful in themselves, leaving more questions than answers in their wake. Among them: “How did we get here, exactly?”

Halvorson says that in the process of writing some of those intricacies into Cloudward, she intentionally shifted away from tactics she’d used on the last project. “I try to guard against returning to some method or system that ‘works’ for composing. You can get comfortable, and you wind up just writing the same music. So I was thinking about “What are my tendencies? What am I doing too much of? On the first record (Amaryllis) there were a lot of moments when everybody was playing. When there was a written part, everyone had a part. I tried something different this time—so like on ‘Collapsing Mouth,’ there’s a whole section of just vibes and trumpet. I wanted that sound, and the contrast with the full band. That was something I thought about throughout the writing: Just leaving more space orchestrationally.”

That had a major impact, opening up possibilities for dramatic swells for the full group, and also moments where the band disappears and there’s just a single instrumentalist, off on a solo journey. “In the past I’ve tended to overwrite, and overprescribe, and I think some of that comes out of insecurity…this need to know how it’s going to go. So I’d say stuff like ‘After this melody there’s a trumpet solo and then we do this other thing.’”

That didn’t happen with the sextet—trumpeter Adam O’Farrill, trombonist Jacob Garchik, vibraphonist Patricia Brennan, bassist Nick Dunston, and drummer Tomas Fujiwara. The musicians were integral to the development of the overall sound, and, Halvorson says, she wanted them to be stakeholders as soloists too. She very rarely even suggested who the soloists on a tune should be. The players stepped in as inspiration hit. Result: Moments of sublime beauty and throttling collective roars, fast-moving weather systems and multidimensional interactions that she could not have anticipated when she was writing. 

“With this group, I like seeing what direction [the music] is going in and just letting that happen,” Halvorson says, noting that some of her favorite moments on Cloudward grew out of suggestions from the players. “I’m actively trying to give up controlling what’s going to happen.”

That extends to everything, even the circumstances of the recording. Halvorson wrote the music of Cloudward in the fall of 2022. She sent out the charts in late fall. There was one rehearsal in December. The band reconvened in March for a European tour, and during that run, Halvorson used the performances (and soundchecks) to refine the new material. “That’s where we really got to know the music, trying different versions each night and honing the structures and compositions as we went along. We played the older music (from Amaryllis) on that tour, and gradually incorporated more and more of the new compositions into the sets. By the end of the tour, we were playing almost all new music.” Cloudward was recorded immediately after the group returned to New York.

Employing this loose, let-it-happen approach to bandleading allowed Halvorson to think about—and shape—the pieces in a more global, big-picture way, one reason the new record is so riveting. “A lot of the stuff is specifically notated, but I wanted it to be so that different things can happen. It’s balance, something I’m thinking about a lot. I want to have written material that’s strong so that we’re able to use it [as a starting point] for improvisation, to then go somewhere else. Because we’re improvisors.”

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Mary Halvorson’s first instrument was the violin. She began playing electric guitar in seventh grade after hearing Jimi Hendrix, and continued playing casually when she began college at Wesleyan, studying biology. She changed her path after taking one of Anthony Braxton’s classes. She eventually began playing with Braxton, and embraced the visionary saxophonist and composer’s open, resolutely genre-blind approach in her own work. (She named her band Code Girl in tribute to him, after he jokingly used the phrase on a tour they did together.) 

Halvorson’s recording career began in 2004, and for years she was involved in a dizzying array of project bands; some, like the collective trio Thumbscrew, continue to be active. Her first work as a leader, Dragon’s Head, appeared in 2008; since then she’s written and recorded original music of considerable ambition, works that utilize different compositional and performance tactics, and incorporate a staggering range of styles and traditions. She made her Nonesuch debut with the twinned 2022 releases Amaryllis and Belladonna.