Mary Halvorson – About Ghosts
There are times when emotionally enigmatic work can be a frustration. Not on About Ghosts—Mary Halvorson and her newly expanded Amaryllis backing band paint images that are evasive in their discreet emotional character but are so rich in image it feels like a luxurious riddle to ponder. Between Halvorson’s writing and Amaryllis’ almost preternatural level of sensitivity in their interplay, they’ve become sharply attuned to painting lush and deeply floral sound-pictures. The pluck and saw of strings, the murmuring of horns and pin needle dewdrop notes of the piano and tuned percussion create a dichotomous sense of a rich and overflowed garden on the side of a busy road replete with yellow taxis, black sedans and the crisp sunlight of the mid-century. Enough of this sound palette is recognizable as at least being downwind of the lounge compositions of the ’50s and ’60s punched up with the geometric abstractions of jazz animations with their tilting triangles and bomb bursts of color, but the harmonic language is denser in a delightful and bright way. God bless my being a recreational mathematician; stuff like this has a natural resonance with me, even if articulating what precisely my type sees in this can sometimes be a challenge.
Halvorson’s guitar playing is, of course, still shockingly expressive, feeling almost like a Tex Avery cartoon at times in terms of its level of exciting shock in its melodic motion. It will suddenly detune in strange and unexpected ways, sliding out before slurring itself right back into harmonic consonance in a way that feels slippery and thrilling. We see often in listeners of predominantly alternative and heavy music a tendency toward a kind of noisy jazz, admittedly stuff we love here too. This shoots straighter, asking a little bit more out of a listener in terms of literacy in the form, the ability to accept cool jazz moves and the kinds of stacked horns that call to mind swing or the more orchestral arrangements Duke Ellington may have put together. Requesting this of a listener is, of course, a good thing; those are greats, and the Duke is one of America’s greatest musical figures for a good reason. That this chews on the edges of the avant-garde adds that kind of spicy and sonic interest that tells you of its modernity. Its emotional enigmas come from charting space that we do not always have pre-existing emotional connection to; that freshness is the thrill.
What can be said though is that About Ghosts is fittingly icier than its three preceding records with this group, with the opening diptych of Amaryllis and Belladonna which each explored warm and full sonic expressions in a split of straight and avant-garde compositions while Cloudward offered a bit more air to the pieces but ultimately still kept a level of warmth to the proceedings. When discussing the literary merits of a record or piece of music, we often default to lyrical analysis over strictly musical ones. A composer like Halvorson produces jazz pieces that challenge this approach; the structuralism and dichotomy between the complex order of the comps and heads compared to the open-ended and deliberately outward soloing feels like, say, The Water Statues by Fleur Jaeggy or any given work by Lydia Davis, some of the brief works of Anne Carson that cleave to the way fragmentary works from antiquity often feel to us.
This is in part because of a kind of braveness to Halvorson as a writer; unlike many composers in an instrumental terrain, she does not write with the structures of vocal song in mind. Even in a lot of jazz contexts, you can often imagine a vocalist impress themselves on top of at least the form of a piece. Halvorson is content, nay thrilled, to explore a terrain with just these instruments, letting them more in ways that are not always lyrical in their melodic movement, an approach that opens emotional questions that are hard to answer but always thrills. “Absinthian,” for example, with its ping-ponging melodic notes and spray of horns sits next to the abstract slow-dance romanticism of “About Ghosts,” a piece that places in programmed pauses just long enough to suspend the naturalness of its movement, makes harmonic choices just odd enough to keep you from falling into a soporific slumber. These are both uncanny in their own ways, the first being frantic and reminding almost of something like Horse Lords or other more mathematically precise avant-rock, while the latter takes an image of the Glenn Miller set and sets to warp it like a shellac record left in the sun or the way fever mutates memory.
Hearing compositions written and played as though by a set of painters rather than a set of songsmiths is always a thrill. We wind up seeing recurring forms in more linguistic-focused songwriting, ones that follow either lyrical demands or a rigidity of music theory that functions as a sublimate language-form to what plays out, and this can lead eventually to a kind of staleness even to well-composed and well-played work. The classic problem: You hear a couple chords and you know how the song goes. Not so here. Halvorson and company don’t throw the book out entirely; it’s not so abstract that it’s utterly illegible. But they think in color and shape more than the requirements of a language and are able to attain these enticing alien vistas. About Ghosts comes out as a far more collaborative listen because of it, giving you enough tools and sonic interest to spur you to play in its soundspace but not giving itself over so completely that it feels like reading a receipt from a grocery trip. We need more work like this. And, it bears mentioning again, what a remarkably strange and cool voice on guitar she has.
Label: Nonesuch
Year: 2025
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Mary Halvorson : About Ghosts
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