Mary Halvorson: The Sonic Origamist of Jazz Guitar

Mary Halvorson doesn’t play the guitar so much as coax it into alternate dimensions.

Her sound lives at the crossroads of jazz, avant-garde, and dream logic—a place where notes bend like clock hands in a Dali painting and melodies unravel just as you think you’ve caught them. She’s like a musical origamist, folding harmony into improbable forms, sometimes with elegance, sometimes with delicious awkwardness. And somehow, it always lands.

Listening to Halvorson feels like eavesdropping on a conversation between a robot and a ghost, conducted entirely through dissonance and swing. Her solos lurch, teeter, and then soar—like watching a tightrope walker who invented their own rope. One moment it’s sweet and nostalgic, the next it’s full of angular plinks and cartoonish detours. She’ll hit a note that sounds like it’s wearing a disguise, and you realize: this is music that knows it’s being watched.

But beneath the strangeness is serious thought. Halvorson’s compositions are smart, deeply rooted, and often surprisingly emotional. There’s heart in the abstraction—if you tilt your head the right way, you’ll hear it beating between the tremolos and the time shifts.

She’s a reminder that jazz is still a living, mutating creature. And also: that weird is not the opposite of beauty. Sometimes, it is beauty.

So here’s to Mary Halvorson—the guitarist who takes your expectations, puts them in a blender, and turns them into origami swans.