sylvie courvoisier/Mary Halvorson duo
SYLVIE COURVOISIER piano
MARY HALVORSON guitar
Albums
-
Bone Bells
Pyroclastic Records, 2025
-
SEARCHING FOR THE DISAPPEARED HOUR
Pyroclastic Records, 2024
-
CROP CIRCLES
Relative Pitch Records, 2017
ABOUT BONE BELLS
Coming out in March 2025
Sylvie Courvoisier (piano) and Mary Halvorson (guitar) will perform brand new compositions, as well as music from their most recent release, Searching For the Disappeared Hour (Pyroclastic Records, 2021). An eagerly awaited follow-up album to 2017’s Crop Circles, the duo presents intricate compositions, telepathic interplay, riotous and ferocious fun: acoustic piano and electric guitar duets have rarely provoked such pleasure.
Swiss pianist Sylvie Courvoisier and American guitarist Mary Halvorson show how virtuosity and joy of playing can be beautifully combined in a duo. Their snapping, over-snapping runs sparkle with the neighboring genres of jazz in particle form. Is this now flamenco, blues, country, noise? Unison voices in a rhythm that has more of Stravinsky or progressive rock than Louis Armstrong or John Coltrane. If there were anyone left who harbored prejudices against female jazz musicians (about which female jazz musicians are always complaining), these two would offer a shimmering quick fix.
Ulrich Stock, Die Zeit,
translated from German
Courvoisier and Halvorson mine the jazz canon for inspiration while finding ways to playfully disrupt each other’s style.
Giovanni Russonello,
The New York Times
Top jazz albums of 2021: “The simpatico is now utter and a wonder. Both are players in the New Jazz world who value strong writing and how it connects to improvisation that is not defined or bounded by sets of chord changes.
Will Layman,
PopMatters
★★★★ Courvoisier and Halvorson have a chemistry that brings out something new in both of them. The sounds they make here are both familiar and alien at the same time. This is a totally involving and, in its own warped way, beautiful session of music.
Jerome Wilson,
All About Jazz
ABOUT SEARCHING FOR THE DISAPPEARED HOUR
“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 lack of a better term) the Brooklyn jazz scene. Their second duo album, ‘Searching for the Disappeared Hour,’ was a chance to mine the jazz canon for inspiration while finding ways to playfully disrupt each other’s style.”
Giovanni Russonello,
The New York Times
2021 BEST RECORDINGS
Jerome Wilson, All About Jazz
2021 TOP JAZZ ALBUMS “The simpatico is now utter and a wonder. Both are players in the New Jazz world who value strong writing and how it connects to improvisation that is not defined or bounded by sets of chord changes.”
Will Layman, PopMatters
2021 TOP 12
Nate Chinen, NPR
2021 TOP 10 JAZZ AND IMPROV. RECORDINGS
Bill Meyer, The Wire/Magnet
★★★★ Courvoisier and Halvorson have a chemistry that brings out something new in both of them. The sounds they make here are both familiar and alien at the same time. This is a totally involving and, in its own warped way, beautiful session of music.
Jerome Wilson,
All About Jazz
★★★★ ½ The synchronicity between these two move what is unapologetic experimental music into the realm of sheer musical beauty. They take turns heading to the musical edge, while the other holds the foundation. The result is always thoughtful, surprisingly accessible and perhaps unexpectedly melodic.
Keith Black Winnipeg,
Free Press
This is a duo whose members, while like-minded musically, are different enough to surprise and entertain both the listener and each other.
Robert Iannapollo,
New York City Jazz Record
“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.”
Dave Sumner,
Bandcamp
Courvoisier and Halvorson mine the jazz canon for inspiration while finding ways to playfully disrupt each other’s style.
Giovanni Russonello
The New York Times
by Richard Williams, 2023
ABOUT CROP CIRCLES
The duo released the album Crop Circles in 2017 via Relative Pitch Records. Dusted and All About Jazz gave the disc glowing reviews, as did several European publications. And DownBeat set up its four-star review of the album by describing Courvoisier and Halvorson as “two of New York’s most distinctive improvisers,” going on to praise the music’s “deft, interactive intimacy” and the duo’s way of “coming together and then drifting apart with unspoken grace… always serving the cumulative sound but remaining very much themselves.” "The affinity heard between the two is something that can't be taught... This meeting of two of the brightest minds on the edgier side of jazz today produces music that’s astonishing both in its fluency and ceaseless ingenuity.
—S. Victor Aaron, Something Else