Belladonna

Listeners get a sense of Mary Halvorson’s writing for The Mivos Quartet on the latter three tracks of *Amaryllis*. But on *Belladonna*, the companion album from the same year, the pairing of the Mivos strings and Halvorson’s guitar becomes the sole focus. While the horns and rhythm section of *Amaryllis* make for a busier, more groove-oriented sound, the sparser texture of *Belladonna* renders it more guitar-centric. In a sense, The Mivos Quartet becomes a string quintet, though Halvorson’s instrument is plucked rather than bowed, and she makes liberal use of pitch-shifting and bending effects to tweak her otherwise clean and unadorned hollow-body sound. (Four minutes into “Flying Song” is a particularly stark example.) The writing is sonically rich, dense with counterpoint and astringent lyricism, with a porous boundary between composed and improvised elements. In the closing minutes of the title track, Halvorson takes an aggressive turn, multitracking distorted lines over a metal-like cello riff. For a moment, the aesthetics of shred crash the chamber-music party, right before the whole affair comes abruptly to an end.

On a pair of interlinked albums—one performed with a jazz quintet and the other with a string quartet—the composer-guitarist finds new context for her singular style.

The release of two contrasting albums demonstrate how far this inventive, singleminded guitarist has come, and offers a glimpse of a dazzling future