Mary Halvorson may just be one of the most versatile guitarists of our time. She is known and beloved for her free improvisations, but she has a keen sense of melody as well. Her Amaryllis Sextet, which she has been recording and touring with extensively over the last few years, mainly sees her playing in service of her own compositions.

“It’s funny, it’s almost hard for me to separate the two”, Halvorson says. “Both components are there. And I think what I try to do with this group is create a framework that I feel allows people to jump out, different people popping out at different times, and putting themselves forward. That’s kind of how I’m seeing it.

Generally speaking, I don’t set who takes on the solo on which piece. So at some of the gigs, there will be different people soloing on certain tunes than there were on the record. That’s kind of nice, because it leaves an element of surprise.

Having said that, the Amaryllis Sextet music is quite heavily composed. And I think that stems from that I really love composing for that group, and the instrumentation that it offers. There are so many possibilities, in terms of color and different arrangements and things like that. So I definitely enjoy doing that. But I do try to leave a lot of space, because it’s nice when it unfolds in a different way every time you perform the material.”

A Certain Level of Communication

Apart from the instrumentation, one thing that sets the Amaryllis Sextet apart is the simple fact that it is such a tight-knit group of musicians in a scene that is known for constantly varying combos. “I have always been a fan of trying to keep bands together for a long time”, Halvorson admits. “You see that a lot with rock bands: there’s a certain level of communication that you can really only achieve by playing together a lot, and I think those things get better with time.

I have had a bunch of bands that I have kept together for a long time, and it always gets better. And I think part of that is that you can almost anticipate someone’s sound. You know what they sound like. But also, there’s a level of trust that develops, so you feel you can take more risks, because you’ve got this group of people that have your back. So you can try more things, and I think it’s much easier to do with a group that’s been together a long time.

This particular group really gets my music. They understand what the concept is, what the sound is, and that’s what needs almost no explaining. In fact, I try to say as little as possible, and just hear the music and go.”

Thinking More of the People

“The other thing about the group which is great, is that everyone really gets along. So we have a lot of fun together. We laugh a lot. It’s a good time. I think it’s just a good energy with that group of people, both personally and musically. That’s part of why I kept it going as long as I have. It’s funny, because you never know how well people are going to get along.

When I put this group together, I played with everybody in the group before. Some people for twenty years, other people just once. So I did know everybody a little bit. And obviously, I was a fan of everybody’s playing. But you really don’t know until you put people in a room and start playing how it’s going to work, or what the chemistry is going to be.

However, I remember being struck right away. The first time the band played a note, I thought: oh wow, this is already something. It felt very good from the beginning. I mean, it developed a lot as well, but I didn’t feel like there was a period when we were awkwardly trying to figure it out. It just felt kind of strong right away.

The other thing is that I really like the instrumentation. When I put the group together, I was thinking more of the people than the instrumentation, but I also happen to really like the instrumentation. There is a lot you can do color-wise with all those instruments.”

The Perfect Guitar

The instrument Halvorson is most commonly associated with is the large Guild Artist Award she has been playing with for her entire adult life. “I got it in the year 2000”, she says. “I was in college, and I didn’t have a nice guitar, and I was looking to get a guitar. The teacher I had at the time was a jazz guitarist named Tony Lombardozzi. He said he found the perfect guitar for me, and it was for sale at a shop in New Jersey.

So I just trusted him. I thought: I’m just going to go and check out this guitar. So I drove to the shop in New Jersey. I played it for about two seconds, and I thought: yup, he’s right, it’s the perfect guitar. So I bought the guitar, and I have been playing it for 25 years.

Since then, I really haven’t done much to it at all. I haven’t even had the frets re-done or anything. You might think that means I have a soft touch with my fret hand, but weirdly, I don’t think I do, haha! It’s probably getting to be about time. But I have not done it yet.”

Inspiration from Upright Basses

“My travel guitar was built for me by Flip Scipio, a luthier who is originally from Amsterdam. He lives in New York now. He built this guitar for me with a removable neck, so that I can take it apart, put it in a suitcase, and travel with it. So that’s the guitar I’ve been playing when I have to fly somewhere.

What’s kind of cool is that he actually used to work at Guild a long time ago, and he understands that guitar very well. He built this guitar to sound and feel similar to my Guild, so that it would not be difficult for me to switch between the two. The sound is similar, the feel of the neck is similar, yet I can take it apart and travel with it more easily.

It’s hard enough travelling with every kind of guitar, or try and carry it on an airplane, but with the Guild being as large as it is, it’s just impossible. So I’m really thankful that I have this other instrument that I can travel with.

I think more guitarists are travelling with guitars you can take apart nowadays, just because travel has gotten so much more difficult. But it’s funny, I feel like the inspiration – at least for me, and I imagine for other guitarists who do that – came from upright basses. Because there was a period  when upright basses had these removable necks, so they could travel a little more easily. That’s why I did it. I saw bass players doing it, and I thought: well, if bass players can do it, why can’t I?”

A Common Amp Everyone Can Get

“The body of the instrument is a little smaller, but it’s still fairly big. It’s actually a flat-top, but it’s hollow, which is cool. There’s a little hole in the side. So the sound hole is on the top when I’m playing, which is interesting. And then it has the same DeArmond pickup that the Guild has. Also, he took these Guild inlays and flipped them around into these cool patterns. So it’s a really cool guitar, and it sounds great.

When I’m on tour, I usually request Fender Twins. Not because it’s my favorite amp, but it’s a common amp that everyone can get. I find them to be fairly consistent, and I can get a decent sound out of them. But I love vintage Fender amps. The amp I’ve got at home I sometimes use if I have to bring an amp is a ’66 Princeton Reverb. I really love that one. Also, it’s lightweight, which is great.

Sometimes I’ll go into a studio that will have five or six really cool vintage amps. I actually like to record using two amps. I split the single with my Line6 delay pedal, because sometimes I will get these stereo effects between the amps. Sometimes one of them is my Princeton, but if the studio has great amps, I’ll just use what is there. There are many amps that I enjoy. Sometimes I just like checking out what’s available.”

Keeping It Really Light

Despite Halvorson’s expertise at playing fairly traditional guitar jazz, she doesn’t shy away from coloring her sound with effects. In fact, the song ‘Carved From’ on her most recent album ‘About Ghosts’ even features some particularly over-the-top use of effects. “There’s a couple of things going on”, she explains. “If you’re hearing a pitch-bendy sound, that’s coming from my Line6 delay pedal.

But if you’re hearing kind of a weird electronic arpeggiated kind of thing, that’s actually a pocket piano synthesizer that I was playing, which I overdubbed later. But I added synth parts onto the record. And if it was directly related to my guitar notes, then it was a Line6 delay pedal. It sounds like a pitch shifter, but I actually have a foot pedal that controls the Line6, so if you mess around with the delay time, you get a pitch-bendy sound.

That Line6 is the main pedal that I use. It has a lot of different settings. You can program things in it. So I have that, and an expression pedal to control it. And then I just have a volume and a distortion. And that’s it. I try to keep it really light. With travel, I try to lighten my load. I’ve always got the lightest volume pedals I can get.

It’s always tempting to add pedals. But with the amount that I travel, I’d like to keep it just my favorite ones, and just as small a set-up as I can do.”

Electricity, Energy and Recklessness

Although becoming a jazz improviser came quite early for Halvorson, she started elsewhere. “Jimi Hendrix was the original inspiration”, she says. “And actually, my first guitar was a Stratocaster. I think it was really the way he improvises that drew me in. There’s a lot of bridges between the way he plays and jazz improvisers. To me, it was the electricity, the energy, and the recklessness of what he does that was so cool.

The first thing I did was get some tablature books and try to learn the intro to ‘Little Wing’ and things like that, trying to learn the rhythm parts. But then, when I started to get more into jazz, I started moving away from that. But I think that because the music that I liked involved improvisation, I did start experimenting with that pretty quickly.

I had a jazz teacher. When I started improvising, it would be like: learn these scales, and then you can just mess around with any note in the scale. Things like that. So I probably started doing that: learning scales and arpeggios, and then just thinking about using those notes in my own way.

Also, I remember having a friend in high school who was into free improvisation, and he would often say: let’s just play! And I thought: what do you mean? It sounded so weird to me. But I remember having this revelation of just thinking: oh, I can just play whatever I want, and not think of any of that. Just go by ear.

So I remember having that experience fairly early. Just seeing that different types of improvisation exist, and that you can improvise over a form, not over a form, with people, without people, just kind of doing whatever you want. Gradually, I was introduced to different ways of looking at improvisation.”

Encouraging Risk-Taking

“I think the biggest thing that helped me open up musically was my teacher, Anthony Braxton. He was just into everything, every kind of music. And he had great respect for everything. He would get so excited about any genre of music. Also, his own music was completely original and really crazy. He would almost take all these different types of music, and put them together.

A lot of times in music school, you are taught: you have to do it like this, this is the correct way to do it, this is how you play in the style of jazz, you can only use these notes in this situation. There’s all these rules. And his thing was: no, just take whatever you want from anything. He had great respect for the tradition, but then you’re not beholden to it. You can take it and do whatever you want.

So I think for me, that was a really strong lesson. Because I didn’t really understand, and his thing was: music is just creativity, you can use what you want, there are no rules. And then he would also say: if you’re not making mistakes, something’s wrong. He really encouraged risk-taking. And those were really strong lessons for me. So I think a lot of that came from him: realizing that there are more possibilities than maybe I thought previously.

Because he’s totally right: if you’re not making mistakes, it means you’re not trying anything. You’re just trying to play it safe or whatever. I think there’s great value in learning a tradition and learning how to do something traditionally in whatever tradition that is. But then, trying to get away from that is the harder part. Anthony Braxton did a good job of teaching that, haha!”

An edited version of this interview appeared in Gitarist 414 (September 2025)