MARY HALVORSON
(Booking in North America)
Photo credit: Elena Olivo
PROJECTS:
MARY HALVORSON: AMARYLLIS
Mary Halvorson (guitar), Adam O’Farrill (trumpet), Jacob Garchik (trombone), Patricia Brennan (vibraphone), Nick Dunston (bass) and Tomas Fujiwara (drums)
MARY HALVORSON: CANIS MAJOR
Mary Halvorson (guitar), Dave Adewumi (trumpet), Henry Fraser (bass), Tomas Fujiwara (drums)
MARY HALVORSON and TOMAS FUJIWARA
Mary Halvorson (guitar), Tomas Fujiwara (drums)
TOUR:
*NOW BOOKING SEP 12-21, 2025*
2025 - Available upon request
2026 - Available upon request
LATEST ALBUM
About Ghosts Released on Nonesuch (2025)
BIO:
There’s a theory of record production that says the best results come shortly after musicians have encountered a piece for the first time. That’s when it’s possible to get the intuitive reaction, before players develop a frame of reference. First thought, best thought.
An opposite theory holds that the magic happens later, after the ensemble has absorbed the material. That’s when the musicians can lean into its nuances, leveraging familiarity into swagger.
Mary Halvorson’s dramatic, daringly intricate new album About Ghosts suggests that these approaches can be complementary. The eight-song work is the guitarist and composer’s fourth full-length with her sextet Amaryllis—plus saxophonists Immanuel Wilkins and Brian Settles. Halvorson wrote some of the music for the core group in 2023, and then, following what she describes as a snap impulse, experimented with a piece for four horns instead of two. Just to try it.
“This record is actually a good example of both approaches mixed together,” Halvorson explains. “The songs I had written for the sextet (‘Eventidal,’ ‘Absinthian,’ ‘Amaranthine,’ ‘Polyhedral,’ and ‘Endmost’) had already been performed a lot on the road; we were quite comfortable with the music by the time the session rolled around. And because the music was in a good place, it felt easy to add Immanuel to ‘Absinthian’ and Brian to ‘Endmost.’
“However,” she continues, “the three songs I wrote explicitly for octet (‘Full of Neon,’ ‘Carved From,’ and ‘About Ghosts’) were brand new; we rehearsed only once, one or two days before the recording session. Of course there’s always the risk it won’t quite gel, but if it does, and I feel it did, there is certainly a freshness, magic, energy that can go along with playing something for the first, second, third time and needing to just dive right in and go for it.”
Note the verb choice: Needing, not wanting, to dive in and go for it. Suggesting a certain urgency within the creative act, as though Halvorson is aware of being almost physically compelled to leap into the unknown.
“I guess I do that a lot,” she laughs. “Take something that already feels good and then add an element, kind of throw a wrench in it, and see what happens.”
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The wrenches fly throughout About Ghosts. It’s the fourth Amaryllis project; the previous three, all also produced and mixed by Deerhoof’s John Dieterich, were each named Jazz Album of the Year in DownBeat magazine’s Critic’s Poll. (Halvorson has twice been recognized as Jazz Guitarist of the Year in the poll, in 2023 and 2024.)
The new work is Halvorson’s most compositionally intricate—alive with splashy Day-Glo chords, tricky hocketing ensemble passages, subtle and disruptive metric shifts, and moods that blossom and then evaporate in less than a minute.
Where do these ideas come from? Halvorson says she tries to generate them by picking up her guitar and focusing on whatever small elements turn up. “I go with my intuition and try to not overthink,” she says. “If I were painting, the first step would be messy broad strokes, without an idea of the big picture.” Then, after she lands on an idea she wants to develop, she’ll work with it through repetition. “I’ll expand it, contract it, add layers, go train-of-thought.”
What happens next is just as crucial, in Halvorson’s estimation. It involves harnessing and shaping the small shards of ideas, methodically building the structural frame for the piece. “The notated parts are specific. There are moments when people can take liberties and moments where they really are just, basically, reading it the way I wrote it,” she says, adding that this means it’s important for her to create an accurate score. “I want things to be as clear as possible because I know that there’s not going to be much time when we’re all together [to record]. It’s a little nerve-wracking in that situation, because you’ve been writing all this music and then you don’t get to hear it until right before the session.”
Halvorson says she worried about at least one of the “wrenches” —adding saxophones to the Amaryllis sound. The anxiety was misplaced. “You know what? It didn’t feel like a wrench at all. It actually felt quite natural because Immanuel and Brian stepped right in and learned the stuff, and it felt to me like they had already been part of it.”
Settles previously worked with Halvorson on Code Girl, so he had a good idea of what to expect. “Mary is incredibly organized,” says Settles, who plays tenor saxophone on About Ghosts. “The charts are clear; all the information is there. No surprises. Which makes it very easy to find your way into the music.”
Halvorson recalls a moment during the session when she was overcome with gratitude to be playing with Amaryllis—Patricia Brennan (vibraphone), Nick Dunston (bass), Tomas Fujiwara (drums), Jacob Garchik (trombone), and Adam O’Farrill (trumpet)—who are so clearly tuned to her wavelength. “I was like, ‘Okay, wow, everyone is crushing it off the bat.’ I’m lucky I have these musicians who can play anything and who immediately get a sense for what the tune is and how to make it sound bigger.”
That was more than luck; it developed over years of performances and touring. The players of Amaryllis have absorbed Halvorson’s compositional devices and soloistic tendencies. They intuit when light textures are wanted, and when the music needs snarly, fully torqued exclamations. They execute deft transitions and relay-race handoffs to connect the written and improvised passages. Halvorson’s score is a blueprint; it’s the group’s cohesion that transforms it into a multi-layered sonic ecosystem.
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About Ghosts isn’t literally “about” ghosts. Instead, it’s a celebration of ghost effects—random whispers, weird synthesizer sighs, breathy horn bleats that emulate the icy chill of a ghost’s presence. Embedded within Halvorson’s pieces are nods to other ghosts, among them Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus, two titans who balanced elaborate orchestration with improvisation, as well as glances in the direction of traditional line-carving guitarists like Jim Hall and masters of abrasive invention like Sonny Sharrock. There are cleverly fractured tributes to nearly vanished melodies—check O’Farrill’s brilliant glance at the standard “My Ideal” in his solo on “Amaranthine.” And then there are fantastical sendups of ghost genres—passages that suggest zombies marching, or surreal postmodern vaudeville exit music, or chase scenes from ’70s action films. All evoking the menace of pursuit from different (often dizzying) perspectives.
Sometimes Halvorson’s canvas overflows with dense clusters of information orbiting in close proximity. “Adam O’Farrill made a comment once that was like, ‘It’s hard to know which part is supposed to be the main part,’” Halvorson recalls. “I think that probably has to do with how I write it because I often write by layering. I’ll have one layer, and then I’ll add another layer and another. Then, it’s like, ‘Which one is in front, and which one isn’t?’ That can be tricky in mixing. It’s like I almost need to figure it out because I don’t know. Often, there’s a lot of layers, and I guess I like the idea that it would be up to a listener to see which one they grab on to.”
When pressed, Halvorson says she does believe in ghosts. “I’ve always been interested in haunted places, how sometimes a place just ‘feels’ a certain way, positive or negative. You can be drawn to a place or it can give you the creeps. This ties into intuition, too, which I think is so important in music.”
She remembers having a visit from a ghost during a performance at the Village Vanguard. “Given the incredibly rich history of the Vanguard, there are ghosts, for sure. We were playing, and it must have been a ghost who at one point turned my low E string down to a D. In the middle of a tune, it happened out of nowhere. I was like, ‘Yeah, somebody is messing with me,’ because my guitar never goes out of tune like that. Ever.”
The album is dedicated to the memory of Susan Alcorn, the pedal steel guitarist who died unexpectedly in January. Halvorson and Alcorn collaborated frequently, and though the new album was completed before Alcorn died, Halvorson says she feels Alcorn’s presence when she hears it.
“Of all the leader albums I’ve made, About Ghosts is most similar to my octet record, Away with You (2016), which Susan played on,” Halvorson says. “Although the personnel on the albums is almost entirely different—only me and Jacob Garchik play on both—the instrumentation is the same except for swapping vibraphone for pedal steel guitar. So I felt a vague kinship between the two records, and therefore it felt right to ‘hear’ Susan, almost as another ghost, in this music.”
“The most future-seeking guitarist working right now.” - NPR
“An unflinching original who has revealed new possibilities within the music.” - New York Times
“No one is making music like this.” - JazzTimes
"I should come right out and say it: This is a front-runner for one of my albums of the year. This is just an unbelievable statement from one of my favorite artists. And it advances the narrative that she has been building over the last decade or so ... With this particular band, she's surrounded by incredible improvisers who really understand her language." - Nate Chinen, NPR