Trumpet, guitar, effects, original compositions – abstractions.
Americans Akinmusire and Halvorson developed the material in early 2025, rehearsing and performing it at New York’s The Stone before recording the album the following day at Sear Sound.
The outcome is lean. There is no fat on the bone. It sounds quite lonesome, often elegiac. And it even has the feel of a Covid type record when there were lots of eerie duo and solo albums often recorded remotely. And while time has moved on and this was recorded in the same room together the feeling I got listening is that same starkness.
It’s been a while since I have heard Ambrose Akinmusire who is now 44 live – last time was at the Pizza Express Jazz Club in Soho; but I saw fellow American Mary Halvorson, 45, recently, at the Vortex in Dalston in a band led by Ches Smith last year (reviewed above).
Much less intense than what happens on Clone Row, this different approach is still edgy particularly with the noises off fed in via effects on Halvorson tune ‘This Vivid’. Halvorson is far less microtonal than she usually is but her signature sound is everywhere and I think unless new to her sound it would be impossible in a blindfold listening text to mistake her sound for anyone else.
Akinmusire, I first heard long before he became known as a leader live at a Southbank concert in a big band led by Steve Coleman, uses electronic delay processing on the album, but it’s done so subtly it doesn’t get in the way and doesn’t detract at all from his essential playing character which is cerebral and mournful but just as capable of bursts of transcendental rapture. What he does instead is play so plangently it’s often moving and sometimes as on his own title track so very still.
There isn’t that much here in terms of maximalist statment – that’s to its credit. But the tunes comes and go quickly so I don’t think it is a major work in either player’s discography. But it is a fulfilling enough listen. The pointillist art on the cover sleeve doesn’t give much away. What does a dense grid of tiny dots that transition from deep purple at the top to vivid pink near the bottom, creating a shimmering neon effect say beyond that? Good question. And lots of other questions occur listening to these fragments and exploratory impressions.
The motifs, if you can even call them that (they seem more phrases or clauses within clasues) often overlap and weave in and out of chromaticism and a burnt blueness that gives the tonal wash an appealing glow and warmth to it nudge towards some answers in terms of a description.
It’s unlikely you’ll come away humming anything. It’s not that kind of album. There’s no obvious beat or pulse either but that isn’t an issue given the way the duo can carry a hovering line and run with it somewhere you weren’t expecting.
Akinmusire is playing the EFG London Jazz Festival at Kings Place on 15 November; Halvorson is also touring in November, in Spain, Italy and Croatia, with her new band Canis Major that features Dave Adewumi, Henry Fraser, and Tomas Fujiwara. More reading: a brief 2019 interview with Mary Halvorson run on marlbank.