Mary Halvorson creates contrasting trumpet duos with Akinmusire and Evans

After starting 2025 with a pair of Chicago dates under Tomeka Reid, guitarist Mary Halvorson brought the Midwest cold back to her New York homebase for a residency at The Stone at The New School. Three of the four nights (8-11 January) included a trumpeter; when asked about the theme by Stone head honcho John Zorn, Halvorson replied, “I just love the trumpet.” The first two performances demonstrated as much: duets with two of the finest on the instrument in Peter Evans and Ambrose Akinmusire.

While the format was the same, the results could not have been further apart. Evans and Halvorson both have albums on Relative Pitch while she and Akinmusire have released expansive projects on Nonesuch. Anyone familiar with those labels already have a head start in imagining how the evenings would play out. To wit, the set with Evans was six improvisations, one as short as the five-minute opening salvo but three cresting the 12-minute mark. Conversely, Halvorson and Akinmusire played each other’s advanced pieces in mostly pithy renditions. The one thing that both nights shared was an astonishing amount of forward momentum and evocative tone poetry.

Halvorson and Evans have a long history going back to their teenage years in Boston; during the set they recalled their first gig together, a restaurant hit at the Prudential Center, which lasted six hours but, “at least we got fed,” quipped Evans. They have not worked together very often in the intervening decades—and then mostly in trio with drummer Weasel Walter—so the chance to hear them in such an open format was intriguing. Of note was that Halvorson occasionally used a slide for additional textural possibilities and Evans brought his recently acquired flugelhorn, a new tonal direction for him. Masterful circular breathing allowed him to keep up with the dense swirls of looped guitar.            

Their first piece, Evans on piccolo trumpet, increased in density and volume before fracturing to its conclusion. That was followed by the longest exploration, 13 minutes with the aforementioned flugelhorn and slide, feeling for part of its duration like a warped standard – ‘Somewhere over the Rainbow’ heard in the middle of the Kansas tornado – before devolving into a series of tones and punctuations, melodicism replaced with freneticism, beautifully resolving on a single unison note. For the next piece, Evans now on trumpet, Halvorson began with almost surf guitar before becoming more gritty and ominous in support of Evans’ wails, a cosmic menagerie of spiders and snakes. An abstract blues with piccolo trumpet – sans effects or extended techniques – somehow evoked the collaboration of Jim Hall and Tom Harrell before things got weird, as if refracted through a prism, Evans returning to flugelhorn, Halvorson dirtying her tone and a light industrial groove emerging, Evans pedaling the same foghorn note. The last two pieces showed the range of the pairing: an elegiac fanfare appropriate for funeral rites morphing into doom metal as the deceased reanimated and a zombie invasion ensued, the show closing with a rambunctious free blowout in the finest European tradition.

Akinmusire is a partner of more recent vintage, a part of Halvorson’s Code Girl project and the pair performing together in various contexts since 2016. While Halvorson still had her panoply of effects, Akinmusire, unlike Evans, who had played without processing or even a microphone, had two microphones and a loop station feeding into amplification.

As stated, most of the pieces were in the three- to five-minute range. The first began with trumpet flourishes before mystical guitar crept in, things become eerily sweet before guitar effects and extended trumpet techniques pushed everything askew. The next transported the audience from the cold city night to a warm afternoon on a Southern porch, recalling the elegance of old spirituals and folk songs. The subsequent compositions moved along ur-indie-pop, prog-rock (the principals echoing Bill Frisell and Ron Miles), Musique concrète with Akinmusire not playing but pulling up previous loops, a mild foxtrot and a longish piece of minimalist waves and swells, outward rather than linear movement, a storm on the horizon but just missing the shore.

The one extended piece featured both Halvorson and Akinmusire fully utilizing their respective loop stations, a cosmic soundscape eliding into ballad form, Akinmusire generating a trumpet choir, Halvorson chiming in with a ring modulator. Despite the layering, the results remained placid. The chart was long at five pages and the two kept returning to various sections, begging the question if and how the looping was indicated therein. But one could simply be unconcerned with such details and float away among the musical clouds.