Sylvie Courvoisier & Mary Halvorson – Bone Bells

The pianist Sylvie Courvoisier and guitarist Mary Halvorson combine to spellbinding effect on their third duo album Bone Bells, whose title takes its name from a passage in the Pulitzer Prize-winning 2022 novel Trust by the Argentine-American author Hernan Diaz.

The record follows a couple of stellar efforts under their own banner in the form of To Be Other-Wise, a series of solo piano vignettes where Courvoisier paid tribute to Halvorson, with ‘Edging Candytuft’ summoning up images of wire-brushed skies ripe with condensation as she reckoned with other inspirations and idols from the player piano studies of Conlon Nancarrow and the limpid percussive exercises of Julian Sartorius to her three cats, her father and her Chimaera ensemble partner Wadada Leo Smith; and Cloudward the latest album by Halvorson’s ensemble, which tended steadily in the direction of billowing uplift as the sextet played blues jukes and post-bop with Latinate flair, the guitarist all the while accompanied by Tomas Fujiwara’s anxious and endlessly mutable percussion, the piquant plunks and overtones of Patricia Brennan on the vibes, the motley bursts of Adam O’Farrill’s burrowing trumpet, Nick Dunston’s buzzsaw bass and the pellucid trombone of Jacob Garchik.

Alternating their contributions to the album, the title track and opener ‘Bone Bells’ finds Courvoisier’s keys striving and straining through jagged plunks and a few more plaintive airs as Halvorson’s guitar ambles tipsily alongside, traipsing through the composition mostly by way of wriggly plucks and a pinging array of slides, pulls and harmonics. The collaborators seamlessly switch roles, with Halvorson taking the lead for much of the first half of the piece before Courvoisier picks up the pace at the four-minute mark through some ringing glissandos and more wilful or dizzying runs, maintaining a fine vamp until the deftly poised climax, which serves as a cliffhanger for the rest of the album.

Courvoisier’s crashing chords and more ruminative airs faintly evoke Porgy and Bess while Halvorson in more whimsical fashion dashes off a few flamenco strums before adopting a grungy riff as she cedes to the piano in the second half of the composition. In his reader’s guide of 1926, the Spanish author and diplomat Salvador de Madariaga wrote of the Sanchification of Don Quixote and the Quixotization of Sancho Panza as the folksy yet plainspoken squire begins to indulge in arabesques or wild flights of fancy while Quixote gains a little patience and forbearance as he descends back to earth, and there is something of this push and pull throughout Bone Bells between Courvoisier and Halvorson.

Despite sharing a milieu for the past quarter-century as increasingly distinguished members of New York City’s avant-garde jazz scene, both with a penchant for blurring the borders between improvisation and composition, it took until 2017 for the pianist and guitarist to collaborate together on record. Crop Circles their debut as a duo was followed by Searching for the Disappeared Hour in 2021, now on Kris Davis’s routinely brilliant Pyroclastic Records which belies its name by moving at an unshakeable pace and still carrying an ambery or magma-like glow. Then in the fall of 2023 they featured astride the drummer and frequent Halvorson collaborator Tomas Fujiwara on the reedist Ned Rothenberg’s quartet outing Crossings Four.

Whether she is elaborating her longstanding partnership with the violinist Mark Feldman or recombining with Drew Gress and Kenny Wollesen as a trio, Courvoisier’s music which often possesses a finely demarcated technical bravura lies at the nexus of chamber jazz, a natural outpouring of her upbringing in Lausanne, and the more groove-oriented downtown scene of New York City, a legacy which she inherited upon her move to Brooklyn in the late nineties. Halvorson on the other hand tends to unspool a certain wiriness or angularity, a trait which she developed through her European adventures with Anthony Braxton, her early collaborations with Jessica Pavone and Weasel Walter and with Fujiwara and the bassist Michael Formanek across eight animated albums as Thumbscrew. Halvorson says:

I feel a real musical kinship with Sylvie. We’re coming from very different places musically, but there’s a lot of overlap musically and in where our interests lie. It’s been fascinating to explore those intersections and tensions.

The second piece ‘Esmeralda’ opens with a pungent din of springy strings, both on the piano and guitar as Courvoisier heaves down on her keyboard while Halvorson tugs on a wire. With both instruments briefly resembling a double bass, the duo scamper forth and soon stretch out through a mash of piano rolls and sustained tones as the guitarist continues her straggly and rangy walk before furnishing her fretboard with a few queasy harmonics. And after interspersing her stately brooding with a few tipsier runs, Courvoisier now falls into a beautifully elegant though still pensive melody as Halvorson fidgets away underneath, somehow enhancing and adding resonance to the plaintive and plangent beauty.

That’s all within the first couple of minutes of ‘Esmeralda’ which continues in the same vein, as Courvoisier overtakes her plangent keys through roiling runs while Halvorson’s guitar gets more wiry and spacey. She embraces the percussive possibilities of her instrument by way of some gargling and sputtering as the atmosphere thickens, with Courvoisier’s runaway keys and broken chords vying with the slashes and squiggles of Halvorson’s axe, which she wields more like a flexible fencing foil, thrusting but with a rubbery tip and plenty of recoil as she deftly controls the resulting vibrations. And while those broken chords fall haltingly from Courvoisier’s piano, soon enough the duo are off to the races again, conjuring another sudden and unexpected shift of momentum. It all seems too lively, too dramatic and action-packed to achieve the result, which is somehow emotionally rooted and meditative, a contortion of the proverb ‘still waters run deep’ as we glimpse and feel the still pool which lies beneath all of the wild water rapids and flotation devices.

Bone Bells manages to blend bristling modernism with a kind of dusty and off-kilter classicism, which touches upon roots music, folk themes and big screen iconography or some of the cultural bric-à-brac of artifactual Americana. With the guitarist Mary Halvorson back in the compositional saddle, ‘Folded Secret’ at first sounds like creaking bed springs, with Courvoisier wringing out a piano preparation as Halvorson circles the room. In formal attire or beneath the shade of a parasol or umbrella, the piano goes for a stroll but never seems to get too far down the block without doubling back on itself.

While the duo have drawn inspiration from the sculptors Cornelis Zitman and Sophie Bouvier Ausländer plus Monty Python sketches, and culled the name ‘Nags Head Valse’ from a British pub which they encountered on tour, their record sometimes plays out like the audio equivalent of an old Disney or Warner Bros. cartoon where a shadow detaches from its figure and begins to pull off all sorts of pranks and capers, though the attempt here is to cajole rather than vex its counterpart. By the end of the track Courvoisier’s bright and lilting arpeggios and Halvorson’s bow-legged strut have imbued ‘Folded Secret’ with the character of an old saloon bar of the type which straddled the turn of the twentieth century.

‘Nags Head Valse’ combines more roiling drama with little waltzes as Halvorson plays watery basslines while Courvoisier plucks a lightly percussive string. ‘Beclouded’ finds Courvoisier taking a circuitous walk, as her piano unspools a sped-up swing bassline while Halvorson dallies and frolics over the top until Courvoisier rejoinders through an array of hammered keys, staggered arpeggios and dashing glissandos in the final third of the piece, as the walking bassline begins to break down and Halvorson resorts to a few shrugging strums of her six-string. And then ‘Silly Walk’ is just as the name suggests, with the duo matching each other’s gait in a manner which is increasingly high-pitched and high-strung despite a few vicious, headlong tumbles down the ladders or stairs, their collective chin striking each step or rung in startling yet almost comedic fashion.

There’s no nursing of wounds though for ‘Float Queens’ rolls out as a wiry Western, with Halvorson’s spindly strings splaying out over the steady gallop of Courvoisier’s piano. Amid the precipitous strings and sunken atmospherics there’s a winsome romance to some of the lines here, perhaps suggesting a little bit of Santo & Johnny or the golden age of Hollywood musicals (in fact the winding arc of Halvorson’s guitar over Courvoisier’s incessant keys reminds me of the song ‘Belle’ from Beauty and the Beast).

Then the closer ‘Cristellina e Lontano’ picks up the theme, as Courvoisier adds more reflective and summary notes to her piano while Halvorson’s playing is especially refractory as she ranges over the strings and frets of her instrument. A few wobbly matador airs like a Don Rickles introduction on The Tonight Show meld with post-rock textures and more twanging sections. And at about the three-minute mark we even get a rare vocal dah-dahing over the top of the composition, which suggests that the duo are enjoying their music as much as we are even as they finally draw to a halt.