Mary Halvorson’s guitar tone comprises inside it a microcosm of her whole apply as a composer and bandleader. She gives the look, by way of her ingenious use of a selected delay pedal, that her instrument is inhabiting two states of matter directly, or making an imperceptibly gradual transit between them: now dry and unadorned, definitively guitarlike, virtually uncanny in its naturalism; now liquidy and unstable, with digital processing liberating each static pitch from no matter invisible forces are holding it in place. Typically, you get one state or the opposite, however principally you get each. Every be aware takes on the character of an ice dice disregarded a little bit too lengthy, glistening solidly within the materials of its personal dissolution.

Cloudward, the MacArthur-winning New York jazz musician’s newest album, can be like a doc of edges melting away. Halvorson composed the music for Amaryllis, the ensemble she first assembled for her 2022 album of the identical title: Patricia Brennan on vibraphone, Nick Dunston on bass, Tomas Fujiwara on drums, Jacob Garchik on trombone, and Adam O’Farrill on trumpet. (Laurie Anderson additionally seems for a scraped-violin cameo on the clamorous “Incarnadine.”) In “The Tower,” dramatic chord modifications give approach to atonal free improvisation so progressively as to obscure the variations between the 2 modes. And from swimming pools of amorphous improv come up moments of peculiar order: Two devices would possibly converge instantly in a shared melodic line, or slyly imitate one another’s articulation, then nonchalantly diverge once more. After all, almost all jazz carries some stress between compositional rigor and expressive freedom. However Halvorson is unusually attuned to the porousness of those putative borders. Although I can’t assist however wonder if sure fragments of construction have been outlined upfront or created spontaneously by the gamers, such questions of class will be the unsuitable ones to ask of music so preoccupied with the liminal second of turning into.

Halvorson places her idiosyncratic instrumentation to good use on Cloudward. Brennan’s vibraphone and Garchick’s trombone are significantly properly suited to the album’s dissolving sensibility: the previous with its pointed percussive assault and flickering sustained resonance; the latter with its sliding articulations of every be aware. For a jazz guitar album, it comprises few guitar solos, a dynamic that solely serves to emphasise the holism of Halvorson’s enjoying and composing. The sonorities of her collaborators’ entwined voices so totally replicate her personal that she will be able to recede to the background for prolonged stretches with out compromising the music’s identification.