Mary Halvorson: About Ghosts review – restless beauty from jazz's shape-shifting guitarist

The Guardian

a day ago

However edgy and angular Mary Halvorson's music gets, powerful melodies and inviting harmonies always drift below even the stormiest surface, giving the much-lauded New York composer and guitarist an appeal way beyond the avant garde. About Ghosts features an expanded version of her Amaryllis ensemble, which made one of 2024's standout jazz albums, Cloudward. The lineup retains Adam O'Farrill (trumpet), Jacob Garchik (trombone), Patricia Brennan (vibraphone), Nick Dunston (bass) and Tomas Fujiwara (drums), augmented by Blue Note Records' fiery, gospelly alto-sax star Immanuel Wilkins and the rugged, Wayne Shorter-like tenorist Brian Settles.
These two players give this release a crucially different feel, lending richer tonalities and expressive range to Halvorson's signature brass fanfares, boppish-to-abstract improv, restlessly interweaving melodies and vigilant drumming. Opener Full of Neon begins the set with a textbook piece of Halvorson ensemble variety: elliptically march-like percussion, squirming improv intro, fluent solos and luxurious ensemble passages with woodpecker-like horn chatter. Carved From starts to canter and chime after a soft, unaccompanied arrival in rich horn chords, and features driving improv from Halvorson and Wilkins, mixing crisply defined guitar figures and skidding elisions with flat-out, whooping alto-sax firestorms.
The excitement of Halvorson's music is not cinematic or illustrative, but in the kaleidoscopic fascination of its internal symmetries and conflict. Melody parts play rhythm patterns, then the melodies bend while the rhythms push on. Her harmonies sometimes echo jazz big bands, at others contemporary classical. The initially tender title track becomes a captivating journey of improv and constantly morphing thematic shapes, while Eventidal is a graceful guitar and vibes ballad, and the fast Absinthian and Amaranthine suggest hyper-compressed bebop lines. Recently discussing the quirkily wonderful English singer and songwriter Robert Wyatt in Jazzwise magazine, Halvorson said she loved his ability to blend 'the weird with the beautiful'. She wouldn't dream of it, but she could have been saying much the same of herself.
This year sees the 50th anniversary of Keith Jarrett's legendary Köln Concert, and New Vienna (ECM), a 2016 gig from the now 80-year-old's final solo tour, is a familiar but bewitching hour of hurtling free squalls, chugging-hook rockers and tender romances. Young French flautist and composer Naïssam Jalal follows up 2023's acclaimed Healing Rituals with the very different Souffles (Les Couleurs du Son), a set of eight diverse duos with eminent wind-players. Her flute glides animatedly around Louis Sclavis's solemnly evocative bass clarinet, rises in clamorous harmonies with Émile Parisien's soprano sax while she eloquently chants instrumentally and vocally as Archie Shepp plays gruffly bluesy tenor sax. And on Amoeba's Dance (Trouble in the East), prize-winning Berlin saxophonist and composer Silke Eberhard's enlarged Potsa Lotsa group makes vividly creative use of their leader's intricately structured but constantly provocative pieces.