As an improvising bassoonist, Sara Schoenbeck is definitely a rarity. She has also forged a singular style that reflects the extent of her diverse influences. Her eponymous release, on the Pyroclastic label, showcases her uniqueness with nine stimulating duets, each …

A host of outstanding duet albums emphasized musicians not only collaborating but truly listening to each other. The violinist and multimedia artist Laura Ortman stood onstage at the Stone earlier this month clad in a bejeweled paisley jacket with a bow under her arm. …

Here pianist Sylvie Courvoisier and guitarist Mary Halvorson come together for the second time on record in a set of amorphous, ever-changing music that combines their two distinctive approaches into something unique. The musicians’ individual sounds are very complimentary as Halvorson’s strums and swoops …

More than most, 2021 was a year of mixed results — an endless scroll of gains and losses, halting progress and hard retrenchment. For jazz musicians and the community of listeners around them, it brought confirmation that improvisation is a …

Jazz isn’t an orthodoxy, a religion, a form of faith healing, or a tribal rite — you don’t have to be in the room with it the moment it happens to reap its benefits. When I had to scramble to …

Despite all the continuing crises in the world, great creative music flourished in 2021 as it always seems to do. There were some artists like Wadada Leo Smith and Vijay Iyer who continued their regular flow of excellent releases, other …

What caught my ear and held it in 2021? There’s no coherent formula to the dozen albums that constitute this answer — except that they all came from a place of fierce and abiding commitment. You can hear it plain …

Sylvie Courvoisier and Mary Halvorson are contemporary improvisers who approach abstraction from two different angles: Courvoisier as a pianist at the bridge between free jazz and European classical music, and Halvorson as a deconstructive guitar improviser, strongly affiliated with (for …

Sylvie Courvoisier and Mary Halvorson – Searching for the Disappeared Hour (Pyroclastic) The Swiss pianist Sylvie Courvoisier and the American guitarist Mary Halvorson recorded their first duet album, Crop Circles, in 2016 after a single concert. This new one follows …

MAGNET’s Bill Meyer picks the best jazz/improv releases of the year 7) Sylvie Courvoisier & Mary Halvorson Searching For The Disappeared Hour (Pyroclastic) READ MORE

On piano, nobody quite sounds like Sylvie Courvoisier, nor, on guitar, like Mary Halvorson. Their individual voices are distinctive, which is why there’s all kinds of intrigue when they come together in a recording studio. On Searching for the Disappeared …

Sylvie Courvoisier/Mary Halvorson:Searching for the Disappeared Hour (Pyroclastic Records) One result of the pandemic has been a large number of solo and duet jazz albums — one of the few ways to record under strict protocols. Many of these have …