2024 gathers pace as The January Steeplechase reaches its final furlongs and medal contestants gather at the front of the field. Prominent in the chasing pack is Jazz dark horse, the leggy and bespectacled Mary Halvorson (sorry if that comes across as sexist, I was aiming at descriptive), who commentators discounted as an also ran before the starting pistol was fired.
Not so. Halvorson's latest album Cloudward is muscular and spacey in turn. Mary, who you might assume is Norwegian, but is actually based in Brooklyn, martials her eight piece band masterfully, contributing guitar herself on a set of fabulous improvisatinoal, instumental pieces that made me think of Dorothy Ashby and Alice Coltrane though in terms of Jazz I don't know much, I just know what I like. Like the Rolling Stones' schoolboy although he of course claimed not to be. .
I'm no Jazz specialist, though I listen to lots of Jazz, live and in my living room. This though immediately strikes me as something else and I urge you to put down that Bill Ryder Jones record, good as it is, and cup an ear to this instead. I'll leave the descriptions to critics with a better thesaurus than I own, (I'll direct you here, a fine job is done). Sometimes though words are not enough to describe what is happening on a record. This is a case in point.
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