Read the Mercury‘s complete Big Ears 2016 coverage here. Visit the Big Ears website for the full lineup and schedule and ticket information.
Just about anything you read about Mary Halvorson will mention the guitarist’s wide array of music projects and her prolific discography. Since 2003, she’s appeared on over 75 recordings, many of them as a leader. Though she’s most often referred to as a jazz guitarist, she’s worked in rock, noise, improv, metal, and styles yet classified, always vehemently rejecting any labels anyone might want to hang on her. She’s recorded in duos, trios, quartets, septets, tentets, and orchestras.
Though she often performs solo live, until last year she had yet to record a solo album. Meltframe, ostensibly an album of jazz standards, turns out to be a perfect introduction to Halvorson’s playing, and one may wonder why it took so long to arrive.
“I didn’t have an idea for a solo record and I didn’t want to record an improv one,” Halvorson says. “When I practice I play standards a lot, so the idea came to me to record some of those, but also a wide mix of pieces, some by contemporary composers like Chris Lightcap and Noël Akchoté.”
The tradition of recording jazz standards is a long-standing one. It will likely continue as long as the form is practiced. It’s easy to imagine Duke Ellington’s 1934 gem “Solitude,” which appears on Meltframe, still being performed decades from now. The attraction to this canon extends even to the avant garde, as staunchly nonconformist musicians such as Derek Bailey, Bill Orcutt, and Mark Ribot have recorded solo albums of standards, often rendering the songs unrecognizable to most ears. As with much of her work, throughout Meltframe Halvorson walks the line between respect for tradition and a challenge to it. Her clean sound and cool tone can veer into distortion and hyperactivity without notice. She shreds, and she treads lightly. “Solitude” is played fairly straight, but is drenched in sustained tremolo, a tactic that underscores the mood of the piece by slowing it to an almost uncomfortable degree. She transforms the airy light funk of Lightcap’s “Platform” into something slightly menacing, with distortion, an array of effects, and Van Halen-esque tapping.
“It’s a cool challenge to come up with different arrangements for all these familiar songs,” Halvorson says. “I’ll play through them and improvise, try out different chord changes and arrangements until I come up with an arrangement I like, then try to record with as few takes as possible. I try to get the energy and feel of a live performance, with no overdubs.”
During Big Ears, Halvorson will also be performing with Anthony Braxton’s Tentet. It’s a huge thrill for her, as Braxton was her teacher at Wesleyan University and, she says, largely responsible for the career she chose.
“He’s a huge influence on everything I do,” she says. “He inspired me to become a musician in the first place. I played music in high school, but it was a hobby. I went to Wesleyan to study science, but met him, dropped science, and became a musician. He’s created a whole musical universe based in pure creativity, where you don’t have to follow rules. It’s exciting every time I play with him.”
Mary Halvorson plays at the Square Room (4 Market Square) on Saturday, April 2, at 12:30 p.m. She will also join the iconoclastic composer/saxophonist Anthony Braxton and his Tentet group at the Bijou Theatre (803 S. Gay St.) on Friday, April 1, at 4 p.m.
Eric Dawson is Audio-Visual Archivist with the Knox County Public Library's Tennessee Archive of Moving Image and Sound, and with Inside the Vault combs the archive for nuggets of lost Knoxville music and film history to share with us. He's also a longtime local music journalist, former A&E editor of the Knoxville Voice and a board member of the nonprofit performance venue Pilot Light.
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