Mary Halvorson owns one of the more easily identifiable guitar sounds you will encounter, in any genre. That is partly due to an ingenious effect: a delay pedal that she uses as a startling, mid-note pitch-shifter. But if she didn’t have anything to offer beyond that novelty, her playing wouldn’t sustain the three modern jazz groups she currently heads (a trio, a quintet and a septet), as well as her sought-after work in various other ensembles—including two different bands led by jazz guitar luminary and occasional Tom Waits sideman Marc Ribot. With her quick, experimentalist’s mind, Halvorson resembles the great composer, saxophonist and teacher Anthony Braxton (an early instructor of hers, with whom she still collaborates). On her new album Meltframe, a set of guitar covers, she is simultaneously employing two suggestions from her former professor’s syllabus: develop a solo act, and don’t forget to engage with the past.
Halvorson is well respected in the jazz community for the speed with which she can conceive of strong ideas. In the midst of a fleet improvisation you might hear her becoming progressively enamored of some small portion of a given melody, selecting it for additional repetition within the flow of a solo. Next, she’s slowing the tempo and turning the fragment into a rollicking vamp, while switching her amplifier’s tone. As you’re appreciating the rhythmic change, you may not immediately notice that she’s also creating a new path back toward the full theme. But when she returns to the original hook, the culmination is as satisfying as any single effect she may have used for punctuation along the way.
Meltframe’s tracklist was refined during her stint as the opener for an acoustic tour by King Buzzo of the Melvins. If at first it seems like a self-consciously idiosyncratic grab bag (Duke Ellington and Ornette Coleman?), as usual, Halvorson has a plan. She links these two composers in the album’s sequencing via mournful tune-selection, but uses different methods of attack to preserve a distinction. Slide-playing and tuning quirks grace her performance of Coleman’s "Sadness" (while recalling something of the composer’s own "harmolodics" concept). Then, she slows Duke’s "Solitude" way down, using a delicate reverb to provide the sparest of pulses. Her playing shines in both performances. Nor is a conceptual subtlety the only thing Meltframe has going for it. The opening number is a finger-busting, grungy take on Oliver Nelson’s "Cascades"—a song aptly titled, given its quickly swooping figures. Those familiar with Nelson’s soulful hard-bop sound may be tempted to wrinkle a nose at the interpretive move, here, but they shouldn’t: Halvorson’s recourse to the distortion pedal successfully underlines what an imposing riff-writer this composer was. A high energy approach also predominates during the back half of Halvorson’s exciting reinterpretation of McCoy Tyner’s "Aisha" (which features on the John Coltrane album Olé Coltrane).
Halvorson also tosses recent pieces by contemporaries like Tomas Fujiwara and Chris Lightcap into her mix. These cuts don’t always carry the melodic jolt of the certified classics, but Halvorson’s performances show how today’s jazz still works with an awareness of popular textures, including indie rock (as with the noisy drone section she creates when playing Lightcap’s "Platform"). Surely, Halvorson’s most personal statements are still found on the albums where her own compositions rule. Though by liquefying some of the curatorial borders that surround jazz in the popular imagination, Meltframe refocuses our attention on an essential malleability that is the genre’s core tradition.
