Mary Halvorson’s guitar tone contains within it a microcosm of her entire practice as a composer and bandleader. She gives the impression, through her ingenious use of a particular delay pedal, that her instrument is inhabiting two states of matter at once, or making an imperceptibly slow transit between them: now dry and unadorned, definitively guitarlike, almost uncanny in its naturalism; now liquidy and unstable, with digital processing freeing every static pitch from whatever invisible forces are holding it in place. Sometimes, you get one state or the other, but mostly you get both. Each note takes on the character of an ice cube left out a little too long, glistening solidly in the material of its own dissolution.
Cloudward, the MacArthur-winning New York jazz musician’s latest album, is also like a document of edges melting away. Halvorson composed the music for Amaryllis, the ensemble she first assembled for her 2022 album of the same name: Patricia Brennan on vibraphone, Nick Dunston on bass, Tomas Fujiwara on drums, Jacob Garchik on trombone, and Adam O’Farrill on trumpet. (Laurie Anderson also appears for a scraped-violin cameo on the clamorous “Incarnadine.”) In “The Tower,” dramatic chord changes give way to atonal free improvisation so gradually as to obscure the differences between the two modes. And from pools of amorphous improv arise moments of surprising order: Two instruments might converge suddenly in a shared melodic line, or slyly imitate each other’s articulation, then nonchalantly diverge again. Of course, nearly all jazz carries some tension between compositional rigor and expressive freedom. But Halvorson is unusually attuned to the porousness of these putative borders. Though I can’t help but wonder whether certain fragments of structure were outlined in advance or created spontaneously by the players, such questions of category may be the wrong ones to ask of music so preoccupied with the liminal moment of becoming.
Halvorson puts her idiosyncratic instrumentation to good use on Cloudward. Brennan’s vibraphone and Garchick’s trombone are particularly well suited to the album’s dissolving sensibility: the former with its pointed percussive attack and flickering sustained resonance; the latter with its sliding articulations of each note. For a jazz guitar album, it contains few guitar solos, a dynamic that only serves to emphasize the holism of Halvorson’s playing and composing. The sonorities of her collaborators’ entwined voices so thoroughly reflect her own that she can recede to the background for extended stretches without compromising the music’s identity.
One notable exception is “Desiderata,” the album’s most rock-oriented piece, across whose middle section Halvorson explodes with a solo that begins like a buzzsaw and ends like a supercomputer going haywire. On a record whose every moment is so delicately balanced, it is a rare and exhilarating passage in which wild abandon decidedly wins out over careful control. Likewise, “Unscrolling” reaches its climax with an arco bass solo that nearly abandons pitch entirely in favor of the tactile sound of bow on strings. Dunston’s playing is powerful, but the solo’s impact owes as much to Halvorson’s instinct for the deliberate arrangement of passages that other out-jazz bandleaders might leave to the intuition of the moment. Just as Dunston is reaching a peak of feverish intensity, rather than rise to meet him as many improvisers would, the accompanists abruptly drop out, leaving him to howl alone.
There is something curiously absolute about Cloudward, whose eight pieces seem chiefly to express their own elegant systems of order and disorder, rather than reaching outside themselves to convey particular emotions or images. At their best, they find real beauty in stillness, continuous change, and the occasional sudden rupture. But that self-contained and inward quality—prizing the solid purity of a good idea over the intoxication of a sensuous surface, and avoiding gushy sentimentality like the plague—can make their beauty difficult to articulate. The deeper you dig into your bag of figurative language, the further you may stray from faithfully describing what the music is putting across. I could say that the twisty guitar and vibraphone lines that envelop “Ultramarine” are like vines growing unpredictably over the song’s rigid scaffolding, or try a more literal approach, examining the way their increasingly dense chromaticism inflects and complicates the otherwise simple underlying harmonic structure. The poetic license of the first risks obscuring the music’s hard reality; the clinical distance of the second risks reducing it to bare formula. The truth, as ever with this beguiling album, is somewhere in between.
