Ambrose Akinmusire & Mary Halvorson - SLO-MO Neon Luminate Hoverings Ambrose Akinmusire & Mary Halvorson

‘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.”

During his career, Ambrose Akinmusire has paradoxically situated himself in both the centre and the periphery of jazz, most recently emerging in classical and hip-hop circles. He is on a perpetual quest for new paradigms, masterfully weaving inspiration from other genres, arts, and life in general into compositions that are as poetic and graceful as they are bold and unflinching. His unorthodox approach to sound and composition makes him a regular on critics’ polls and has earned him grants and commissions from the Doris Duke Foundation, the MAP Fund, the Kennedy Center, and the Berlin and Monterey Jazz Festivals. While Akinmusire continues to garner accolades, including the DownBeat Critics Poll Trumpeter of the Year for 2025, his reach is always beyond—himself, his instrument, genre, form, preconceived notions, and anything else imposing limitations.

In 2010, Ambrose Akinmusire was signed to Blue Note Records; his debut for the label, When the Heart Emerges Glistening, drew worldwide accolades. Akinmusire’s first Nonesuch release, 2023’s Owl Song, featuring Bill Frisell and Herlin Riley, was nominated for a Grammy Award, as was its follow-up, last year’s honey from a winter stone. BBC Music Magazine called the songs on the latter record ‘five richly textured, layered (and then often delayered) pieces that speak directly to the struggles facing Black men in America. Powerful, eloquent social commentary when we need it most,’ while NPR Music said, ‘This is something completely different. This record ... has so much emotional depth ... It has a lot of moments where there’s this kind of calm, reflectiveness to the music. But then there [are] also moments of dissonance that kind of tug at your attention and break up that calm feeling.’ honey from a winter stone also was an album of the year in Jazzwise, Mojo, Record Collector, and the Wire, among others. Akinmusire was named Artistic Director of the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz Performance at UCLA in 2023.

Mary Halvorson is a Brooklyn-based guitarist, composer, and recording artist for Nonesuch Records. Her distinctive sound and innovative approach to her instrument have earned her widespread recognition over the past two decades, including numerous best-of-the-year lists, a 2019 MacArthur Foundation fellowship, and Guitarist of the Year honors in the DownBeat Critics Poll for the past nine years. When not leading her own award-winning bands, she can be heard in a wide variety of creative partnerships and on more than seventy-five releases as a co-leader or sidewoman.

Her most recent recording, About Ghosts, was selected as the best new jazz album of 2025 by NPR Music, Slate,and the voters in both the Twentieth Annual Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll and the Eighteenth International Critics Poll, which also named her Composer and Guitarist of the Year, as well as the Guardian, Jazzwise, Mojo, the Quietus, and the Wire, among others. PopMatters noted in its review, ‘The latest from guitarist Mary Halvorson is another master class in jazz performance and composition. If she is the future of jazz, we are in tremendously gifted hands ... she’s currently in the midst of what may be her most acclaimed and creatively fruitful period.” Halvorson’s ensemble Amaryllis was named Group of the Year in the 2025 DownBeat Critics Poll.