Though she’s already perhaps the world’s most original and innovative guitarist on the scene today, Mary Halvorson isn’t satisfied at ‘merely’ being just that. She’s put as much vigor into being a serious poet as she has as a composer and musician.
Code Girl (2018) opened up a new chapter in her career as a complete artist, whereby it fully presented her as a lyricist, and it’s a task she took sincere enough that she wrote the prose first and then built the music around it. And it turns out, this was no one-off diversion: Artlessly Falling is her second Code Girl project in only two-and-a-half years and goes even deeper down that path.
Ever the eager scholar, Halvorson studied poets and poetry forms, working several months to come up with the stanzas this time. The music that followed afterwards came easier, since the poetry defined the structure, the theme and the mood. Most of the Code Girl band remains in place from the last time, namely, her Thumbscrew compadres Michael Formanek (bass) and Tomas Fujiwara (drums), as well as Amirtha Kidambi (voice). Fresh members Adam O’Farrill (trumpet) and María Grand (tenor sax, voice) give Halvorson even more options for how she chooses to present her music.
According to poets.org, a sestina is “a complex, thirty-nine-line poem featuring the intricate repetition of end-words in six stanzas and an envoi.” Halvorson tackles this tangled poetry form for “Artlessly Falling” like a pro and Kidambi delivers the lines with a liquid, nuanced delivery. Halvorson’s melody wraps itself around the lyrics and the band serves the poetry to its fullest.
“Last-Minute Smears” is found poetry that Halvorson scribbled together while listening to Brett Kavanaugh’s Senate testimony in 2018, and she set a dark tone to it by the somber chords played and the lines sung with a dreary intonation by Kidambi and a funeral march beat from Fujiwara. That sets the stage for the band to take off with Grand and then O’Farrill offering up through solos their own reads of the narrative between those stanzas.
“Muzzling Unwashed” has a whole lot of lyrics, but Kidambi doesn’t get started with them until Halvorson has expressed her part, a wide-ranging dive into her bag of tricks, including that signature pitch shifting.
The mostly genteel “Mexican War Streets (Pittsburgh)” turns into a whole ‘nother thing entirely once the singing is done; Halvorson unleashes a torrent of bellowing guitar as the Formanek/Fujiwara rhythm section goes into freedom mode. Speaking of Formanek, he gets to recite some poetry of his own on the bass in starting off “A Nearing,” which later moves into some audacious trumpet improvising from O’Farrill and balanced by a more soulful approach from Grand, moving into more adventurous territory when she tangles with Halvorson’s guitar.
Inserting prog rock legend Robert Wyatt into this scene for a trio of songs does more than matches his wispy voice to arty music once again; it illuminates a strong connection between progressive music of all kinds: from the 60’s Canterbury Scene out of England, to the avant-garde jazz of Anthony Braxton to the indie rock sensibilities of Halvorson’ own math-y jazz. Listening to Wyatt puts all of that music in the same context.
Wyatt’s presentation of the double tanka “The Lemon Trees” is a perfect complement to the softly portrayed music, but the dual later on between O’Farrill and Fujiwara ends up being the true highlight. Wyatt and Kidambi alternate stanzas for “Walls and Roses,” each one punctuated by Halvorson’s overdriven rock attack. “Bigger Flames” features the best blend of Wyatt’s voice with the musical backing, with O’Farrill and Grand offering the harmonic counterpoint to Wyatt.
Mary Halvorson is the rare artist with such a highly individual language who also never repeats herself from record to record. While Artlessly Falling is technically the follow-up to Halvorson’s poetry debut Code Girl, the new horn section, deeper experimentation with various poetry forms and the presence of art-rock god Robert Wyatt makes this Code Girl outing a significant progression from the first one.
Artlessly Falling is now available from Firehouse 12 Records.
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