‘Richness of tone; precision of articulation; ingenuity of timbre that, when Akinmusire pursues microtonal avenues, creates the sense that particular sounds are almost hermetically sealed before being slowly squeezed and pinched into the air. In other words there is a high degree of technical mastery, but, tellingly, it underpins a profound and often engrossing sense of narrative.’ - Jazzwise
‘Halvorson has formulated a guitar style with few precedents. One inspiration might be the painter George Seurat, whose Impressionist paintings of a hundred isolated dots cohere into a picture if one steps back from the canvas. Halvorson’s pointillist approach to the guitar works much the same way.’ - JazzTimes
Slo-Mo Neon Luminate Hoverings, the new album by trumpeter/composer Ambrose Akinmusire and guitarist/composer Mary Halvorson, features four new compositions by each musician as well as one collaboration. The duo, long admirers of each other’s musicianship, met at Halvorson’s Brooklyn apartment and began playing together periodically, going back as far as 2009. They rehearsed the music on Slo-Mo Neon Luminate Hoverings in January 2025, just before performing it at the New York City club The Stone; they recorded this album the next day at Sear Sound.
Akinmusire and Halvorson made two previous attempts at recording an album but felt that they got it right with this third session. Halvorson says of their rapport, which developed over those years of friendship and collaboration, “I think it’s partly a shared aesthetic and an ease of communication. I feel comfortable to try whatever.” Akinmusire concurs, “I think it’s rare to find an improviser that all goes and nothing has to go at all. It’s rare to feel like you don’t have to do anything and you can do anything. And that’s what I love about playing with Mary.”
Though Halvorson regularly uses effects pedals on her guitar, Akinmusire’s use of one on Slo-Mo Neon Luminate Hoverings is new. Having recently gotten an updated model of the Line 6, Halvorson was passing her old ones along to friends. “Ambrose was interested in trying a Line Six. I gave him one five minutes before the rehearsal and was amazed how quickly he was able to do incredible shit on it ... in literally five minutes,” she says.
“But I’ve been watching you, I’ve been watching Bill Frisell and other people use it for a long time,” Akinmusire says. “I approached it as if it were its own musician. I played and it would process the sound and then I would choose to react to that or not. The people like Mary that I love to listen to who use delay, I like being able to hear the process of the texture that’s being built. With some people, when they use it, you don’t really hear it. But with Mary, she’ll play a line and then she’ll react to that line and then react to that,” he continues. “It’s really cool to hear how something is being built. So I kind of stole that.”
Halvorson says, “I’ve never seen someone pick up a pedal and then immediately do something with it that felt like, ‘Oh, this is a sound,’ as opposed to just tinkering, you know? It felt like he was making music on it right away, and then also doing things that surprised me, like the vocalizing really surprised me. I wasn’t expecting that, and it was awesome.”
