[My friend Anthony Luebbert has written for Molars several times over the years, and since Molars has been going for 20 years as of this month, I wanted to commemorate that anniversary with posts from all the folks who’ve written here before. Anthony kindly agreed to write a new post, and he sent along this incredible meditation on a track from this year’s Mary Halvorson album.]
Shall I start with Powell? “Are your emotions pure? Are your nerves adjustable?” Or cross over to Professor Hofmann’s office, where the notice on the door reads, “As the world shrinks and grows, there is only one thing: be singular.” Or text Mr. Hyde to see if he’ll repeat what he wrote in the pages of McSweeney’s 70: “What is the difference, after all, between one man and another? Isn’t it only by the blind lottery of birth that each man is who he is? “
In 1927 Max Ehrmann wrote, in the oft-quoted poem Desiderata, ”Be yourself,” and “You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars.” This refrain has bounced around the U.S., in its schools and self-help books and song refrains and tennis shoe and soda pop ad slogans, for much of the last century, if not longer.
Mary Halvorson, free-jazz practioner, uses the name of Ehrmann’s poem for this track, performed with her Amaryllis sextet, from her 2024 release Cloudward. The piece plays very much with the tension existing between the poem’s maxim to “Be yourself” and its admonition that one is a “child of the universe.” It begins with a short, rhythmic introduction, with bass, drums, and guitar. Soon Patricia Brennan steps in to play lead on vibraphone, freed from tiki-bar kitsch, and gives us our first sign that this quartet is playing out of its own recipe book. “Is that a goddam vibraphone?” I asked my dogs, who listen to too much free jazz with me. Blank stares. But it was vibraphone, an instrument I knew primarily from my childhood Casio keyboard that situated it on a synthesizer button below Marimba and above Space Chimes.
But moments after this strange vibraphone playing begins, there’s this lovely flamenco duet between Halvorson and Adam O'Farrill on trumpet. He plays these fanfares that remind me of Miles Davis’s playing on Sketches of Spain. It is absolutely beautiful and I could listen to those two players going after their replication of Davis’s beauty night after night. But here there is not enough for even one round of seven minutes in heaven. In fact, it’s over before the closet blushing would end.
Are your nerves adjustable?
Because what comes next is described as “absolutely crazy electric guitar fuckery,” by Rate Your Music user cal50. Halvorson said in 2019, “I heard Jimi Hendrix when I was around 11 years old and that’s what did it.…I wanted to play rock and roll.” Some blind lottery plopping a ball with Hendrix on it into Halvorson’s bedroom in 1991. And here she is, thirty years later, absolutely shredding, blowing this piece, yes, cloudward, to the stratosphere. Unmistakably descended from Hendrix. But singular. Situated in the context of all the music Halvorson and her sextet have loved and lived. Be yourself, child of the universe.