Mary Halvorson (1980) is an American avant-garde jazz composer and guitarist from Brookline, Massachusetts. She released an impressive album last year entitled Cloudward, which she once again recorded with the group she worked with on the albums Amaryllis and Belladonna back in 2022. She wrote that material at the height of the pandemic, and was awarded the Jazz Album of the Year award in DownBeat's Annual Critics Poll. She previously won the award for Best Guitarist three times. Her new album contains eight new compositions, featuring her sextet Amaryllis. In 2012, Troy Collins of All About Jazz called Halvorson ‘the most impressive guitarist of her generation’, and strongly felt she was re-shaping the future of the jazz guitar. In addition to jazz, Halvorson's music also contains elements of flamenco, rock, noise and psychedelia, as she is something of a chameleon musically, never sticking to any particular style or idea.
