Joe Morris & Mary Halvorson - Traversing Orbits

“Two masterful artists who happen to play guitar – their marks on the music far transcend their instruments.”

All recordings, especially those of improvised music, try to freeze the sound of a present moment, but invariably melt into the past and the future, real and imagined. Listening to this album, I can’t help but think of the classic meeting of Sonny Rollins and Coleman Hawkins, where two titans of the same instrument across different generations displayed mutual love and respect through stylistic contrast and playful jousting. Or I create a fiction, of Django Reinhardt and Freddie Green crossing paths in some distant hotel, staying up late one night and pushing each other to new ideas. (I don’t make that allusion lightly – for the abundance of virtuosic extended technique, don’t miss the profound swing of the articulated lines and the chunky chords.)

Taylor Ho Bynum, excerpt from the liner notes