Mary Halvorson is one of a (small) handful of guitarists who has defined that instrument’s contemporary voice in the last decade or so. I’d personally add Miles Okazaki, Liberty Ellman and Rob Luft to that list – but I’d hasten to add it’s incomplete! One of the benefits of digital technology is we live in a prolific recording age and we’re able to regularly plot Mary’s activities through the many recordings she appears on. Just this month she’s popped up on the new album from drummer Ches Smith (with Ellman) and now here she is with her own latest project.
It’s another angular yet tuneful gem that features her sextet Amaryllis, an improvisatory band with Patricia Brennan (vibraphone), Nick Dunston (bass), Tomas Fujiwara (drums), Jacob Garchik (trombone), and Adam O’Farrill (trumpet). Saxophonists Immanuel Wilkins and Brian Settles join the ensemble on five of the tunes, just because Mary fancied it …
“I started writing this record in the fall of 2023, for Amaryllis, and I thought, ‘You know what? I want to add saxophones.’ And I just started writing,” Halvorson says. “It felt like an experiment. I was just feeling … denser harmony, more horns. But I wanted to stick with Amaryllis, so it felt natural to add a couple of saxophones to Amaryllis rather than doing an entirely new thing; I’d been playing so much at that point with Amaryllis and we were in a really good place. I guess I do that a lot. Take something that already feels good and then add an element, kind of throw a wrench in it, and see what happens”
What happend was really rather good. Here’s what The Guardian’s excellent, long-standing jazz critic John Fordham has to say ….
www.theguardian.com/music/2025/may/30/mary-halvorson-about-ghosts-review
This is our album of the week until Friday 27th June 2025.