If you have to review Slo-Mo Neon Luminate Hoverings in five words or less, you can’t beat the title. Its nine tracks are indeed unhurried, colorful and inclined to float over circumscribed zones of focus and effect. When they’re lyrical, they’re quite gorgeous; when they’re wiggy, they shake up your notions of what the well-known musicians who made them are about.
Prior to this release, electric guitarist Mary Halvorson and trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire’s only recording together was on her Code Girl album in 2018. Given the elevated positions that each player currently holds in jazz, you might expect Slo-Mo Neon Luminate Hoverings to be some sort of scrupulously plotted star-meets-star vehicle. Instead, it’s a sequence of freewheeling duets that make public a playing partnership between the two musicians that’s developed mostly in private over the past decade and a half.
The opening “Prelude In The Ash” is elegant, but not too surprising. It’s an unabashedly gorgeous ballad that invites the listener to steep in Akinmusire’s patient lyricism, which Halvorson frames with delicate restraint. The next tune, “This Vivid,” could easily have built upon that mood, since it features a typically plangent, singer-worthy theme by the guitarist. But it neatly derails such expectations.
Reportedly, Halvorson gifted Akinmusire a Line 6 delay pedal, which is an essential part of her own signal chain, at the beginning of the session. He plugged it in, hollered into it, then manipulated the echo, thereby injecting some confrontational freakiness into the mix. The duo goes on to purposefully crisscross the creative space between these parameters, patiently developing their ideas to the fullest at each stop. [Nonesuch]
—Bill Meyer