I don’t plan one step ahead,” says guitarist and composer Mary Halvorson, chilling between tour dates in her New York home. “I don’t do a record unless I feel really excited. … The main thing that I do think about is never making the same record. That’s the challenge that I give myself. How will this most excite me in the moment and how can I make the most of everything that I have before me, from musicians to arrangements?”
Take Halvorson’s last handful of albums — the nu-classics Belladonna and Amaryllis, Cloudward from 2024 and now the new About Ghosts, featuring the lineup of Patricia Brennan (vibes), Jacob Garchik (trombone), Adam O’Farrill (trumpet), Nick Dunston (bass) and Tomas Fujiwara (drums).
Across this swath of music, you witness what have become Halvorson’s signatures: a playing style jagged, yet fluid, a sound rampant with digi-fx yet oddly naturalistic, even level and smooth. Her most haunting tones will jump out at you like a drunk carny working a funhouse. Additionally, that same spindly character will slip by you as would a shadow or a vapor or a cloud of smoke. On About Ghosts, Halvorson will take all those tips and apply them, for the first time, to a spiky synth sound on tracks such as “Carved From” and “Endmost.”
It’s a full bag of tricks without trickery as her aim, and About Ghosts features equally dramatic moments as the albums of her recent past, only with weirder twists to each line. “My goal is to always create a voice on the instrument,” says the guitarist. “To try to develop and get better. I don’t want to create an identity on the guitar only to have it remain static — and if developing it means change to any degree, then so be it. It’s never about moving away, but rather taking risks.”
The “synth thing” on About Ghosts was about Halvorson taking a chance, as each time she used the mini-keyboard — say on the lengthy, elastic expanse of “Full of Neon” — she overdubbed each blip, wheeze and screech after the initial recording session.
“I had no idea if it would be any good,” she says of her new toy, the Critter & Guitari Pocket Piano synthesizer. “The only reason I recorded those overdubs is that I knew that I could throw all of it out. And it was cool because a childhood friend of mine built the synth, kept sending me patches for it that created odd textures — weird sounds that he thought reminded him of my guitar — and I kept recording with it.”
That same wealth of wild experimentation can be heard across all of the music she’s released so far in 2025, which also includes the metallic harangue of Ches Smith’s Clone Row, her third balletic duo album with pianist Sylvie Courvoisier (Bone Bells) and her work on Amaryllis trombonist Jacob Garchik’s Ye Olde project.
“I think all these albums reflect not where I am singularly, but where this group of musicians that I associate with are going,” says Halvorson, barely skirting the word “scene.” “This is a snapshot of what the musicians I know and work with are thinking about. That’s cool too because you hear how different each record is. Ches’s record is so different vibes-wise from what he’s done and what I’ve done. Same with Sylvie. And Jacob’s record is just crazy — there’s a nostalgia to his songs where you feel as if you’ve heard them your whole life.”
Drummer Tomas Fujiwara was in the team of four that made Halvorson’s Reverse Blue (2014); he and the guitarist have also worked extensively in the trio Thumbscrew with bassist Michael Formanek. “I recognized something in this group of musicians from the very first second that they played, that there was a special energy to them,” says Halvorson. “It often takes time to develop a ‘group sound.’ This one happened much more quickly.”
Deep in the Reeds
As Halvorson began writing for About Ghosts in 2023, she found herself wanting to write for saxophones. “And when I get a thing in my head, I can’t get it out.” So on that saxophone day, Halvorson — who had longed to write for horns again since her octet album of 2016, Away with You — penned reed parts to go with what Amaryllis would execute, with “Full of Neon” being the first track written as part of this experiment.
“And I just kept going writing this music, some of which included music that the sextet and I played on the road, and tracks where I expanded the group — threw a wrench into their sound to see what it would sound like. If you take a group that already has a strong foundation and throw in elements that move it forward or change the dynamics … it was instinctual.”
Welcomed to her saxophone stands for About Ghosts was nu-tenor titan Brian Settles and holy alto man Immanuel Wilkins. “I really did have Immanuel’s sound in my head, and knew that the energy he brings would work with this group,” she says, having worked together with Wilkins not long ago during her week of duo improvisations at The Stone.
Skirting any idea of scenes, and the idea of jazz itself (“I understand that people have to label my music something … to each his own?”), Halvorson realizes just how different About Ghosts is from the live versions she and Amaryllis have recently shared on the road. “I guess you have to be more crafted and succinct on the album, whereas live these songs expand and the solos become so different. I never set the solos with this band, so a trumpet solo on the album can be a guitar solo, or a drum solo or a trumpet solo on any given night. Everyone in Amaryllis, me especially, enjoys how everything we do happens differently, all the time.” JT