If you hand Halvorson's records to someone who mostly knows jazz from the standards tradition, they will probably tilt their head a few times before they get hooked. Her playing has this quality of arriving somewhere unexpected — a bent note, a sudden angular turn in a melody, a chord voicing that sounds almost wrong until it sounds completely right. She uses a pitch-shifting pedal the way other guitarists use vibrato: sparingly, precisely, and always in service of something she couldn't quite say otherwise. It's not noise music, and it's not straight jazz. It sits in its own category.

She came up through Anthony Braxton's world at Wesleyan, and that connection matters. Braxton's approach — treating composition and improvisation as genuinely equal partners, not deferring to genre conventions when they get in the way — soaked into how she thinks about music. But she's never sounded like a Braxton disciple in any imitative sense. She took the permission he offered and did something entirely her own with it. Her early groups were spare and a little austere, her later work has gotten more orchestral and ambitious without losing the intimacy.

Meltframe (2015), her solo guitar album, is probably the best place to start if you want to understand what she's actually doing technically. It's just her, solo, covering pieces by composers she admires — Ornette Coleman, Billie Holiday, Wayne Shorter — and the interpretations are so distinctive that sometimes it takes a minute to recognize the source material. That's not showing off; it's just how she hears things. Her album Amaryllis (2022), released alongside a companion record Belladonna (2022), showed she could work with strings and expanded arrangements without losing her edge. Both records won the Grammy for Best Improvised Jazz Solo and Best Jazz Instrumental Album respectively, which felt like jazz's institutional side finally catching up to something the downtown crowd had known for fifteen years.

She works constantly in other people's bands too — Tim Berne, Wadada Leo Smith, John Zorn — and she's a reliable presence in any ensemble context, never overplaying, always listening. There's a quality in her sideperson work of someone who knows exactly how much space to take. Her own groups have included longtime collaborators like Tomas Fujiwara and Michael Formanek, and those working relationships show — the music sounds like people who trust each other enough to take real risks.

What's worth telling a first-time listener is this: don't approach her music expecting it to sweep you away on first hearing. It rewards patience and repeated listening. The strangeness up front is never arbitrary — she's not being difficult for the sake of it. There's always structure underneath, always a reason for the left turn. Give it three or four listens and you'll start hearing the internal logic, and once you hear it, you can't un-hear it. That's when the records become genuinely addictive.