Mary Halvorson has spent most of her career resisting the idea of a steady band.
The Brooklyn guitarist runs projects the way other musicians run errands: Thumbscrew, her trio with Michael Formanek and Tomas Fujiwara; Code Girl, built around Amirtha Kidambi's voice; the sextet Amaryllis. Each one gets dissolved and reformed as soon as the idea underneath it changes. Duos are where she keeps coming back, though, and none has taken this long to arrive.
She and the trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire first sat down to play together in 2009, with no plan beyond seeing what happened. Seventeen years later, that habit has become Slo-Mo Neon Luminate Hoverings, released last month on Nonesuch: nine tracks, four apiece from each musician plus one they wrote together in the room, recorded at Sear Sound the day after a show at the Stone. It was not the first attempt. Two earlier sessions, in years past, went nowhere the two of them wanted to keep.
Halvorson has spent more than three decades on an instrument most jazz guitarists treat as a source of warmth. She treats it as a source of interference, running clean lines through a whammy pedal until the pitch buckles mid-phrase. Akinmusire, whose trumpet tone can turn from a whisper to a shout inside two bars, took to her effects rig almost immediately; she has said she handed him a pedal five minutes before rehearsal and watched him do something with it she hadn't thought of herself.
That's the record in miniature: two players fluent enough in each other's vocabulary that composed and improvised passages become impossible to tell apart.
The jazz duo has a long lineage of its own, usually built on contrast — piano against horn, voice against bass — and part of what makes this one unusual is how little contrast it goes looking for. Halvorson and Akinmusire circle the same register of feeling, tender and then briefly violent, so that the writing credits (four tunes apiece, one shared) matter less on record than the impression of a single conversation with two people talking.
Neither of them needs the association to justify the record on its own terms. Halvorson studied under Anthony Braxton at Wesleyan, where she now also teaches, won a MacArthur Fellowship in 2019 and topped DownBeat's guitar poll three years running; Akinmusire has spent two decades building one of the more distinctive trumpet careers on Blue Note's roster. What Slo-Mo Neon Luminate Hoverings offers instead of a showcase for either is patience over spectacle: a record built around listening rather than soloing, the kind of unhurried exchange that only makes sense once you know it took most of two decades to arrange.
It is a quiet, considered addition to both of their catalogues, and probably the least showy record either will release this year.
