Mary Halvorson

American guitarist, composer and improviser Mary Halvorson was born on October 16, 1980 in Brookline, Massachusetts. After studying at Wesleyan University, where she discovered improvised music and followed the teachings of saxophonist Anthony Braxton, she also studied at the New School in New York, where she immersed herself in the jazz and experimental scene. In the early 2000s, she made a name for herself by collaborating closely with Braxton, and later with the likes of Marc Ribot, Tim Berne, John Zorn, Taylor Ho Bynum, Trevor Dunn and Tom Rainey. She soon developed a unique guitar style, combining subtle distortions, controlled dissonances, pitch-shifting effects and angular melodies, in an aesthetic that oscillates between jazz, experimental rock and contemporary music. In 2008, she launched her first trio with John Hebert (double bass) and Ches Smith (drums), which gave birth to the album Dragon's Head, followed by Saturn Sings (2010) and Bending Bridges (2012), which saw her group expand into a quintet and then a septet. These albums establish her approach to composition, which is highly structured yet open to improvisation. She went on to form several groups, including Mary Halvorson Octet and Reverse Blue, and explored a variety of formats, often in dialogue with other avant-garde musicians. In 2015, she founded the group Thumbscrew with double bassist Michael Formanek and drummer Tomas Fujiwara, recording a number of critically acclaimed albums: Thumbscrew (2014), Convallaria (2016), Ours/Theirs (2018), The Anthony Braxton Project (2020) and Multicolored Midnight (2022). At the same time, she is multiplying her collaborations with artists such as Ingrid Laubrock, Jason Moran, Sylvie Courvoisier, Nate Wooley and Kris Davis, always in adventurous contexts. In 2016, she released Away with You, an album for octet that testifies to her ease with orchestral writing. In 2019, she forms the duo Code Girl with singer Amirtha Kidambi, a project between vocal jazz and spoken word. In 2022, she releases two major albums on the Nonesuch label: Amaryllis and Belladonna. The first, a sextet with a string quartet, combines scholarly writing and improvisation, while the second features works for guitar and string quartet, where she plays with the Mivos Quartet in a more contemporary vein. These two albums mark a wider recognition in the world of jazz and contemporary music. Considered one of the most singular voices of contemporary jazz and the experimental avant-garde, Mary Halvorson continues with the albums Cloudward (2024) and About Ghosts (2025).

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