About Space Ghosts
Exploring best of 2025 lists...
I’ve been busy lately - who hasn’t?
In the hustle and bustle I’ve been enjoying media and bloggers’ best jazz albums of 2025 lists. The album About Ghosts, from Mary Halvorson’s sextet Amaryllis, while not everywhere, appears the most places to me. It is notable that both NPR and Slate Magazine named it their #1 jazz album.
Halvorson also appears at the top of other folks lists, with some preferring her 2025 collaboration with pianist Sylvie Courvoisier’s Bone Bells.
I really enjoyed About Ghosts over the last couple weeks. I’ve put Bone Bells in my listening queue, but it hasn’t burbled to the top yet. If you want to hear what the buzz is about go have a listen or check out these videos:
At the same time as I put Mary Halvorson’s About Ghosts in my listening queue, I added Ye Olde 2: At The End of Time (2025). I’d been enjoying Calibro 35’s S.P.A.C.E, and trombonist Jacob Garchik’s Ye Olde 2 kept the outer space theme going for me.
This teaser shows how far they take the space odyssey and how ubiquitous Halvorson is right now. She plays on Jacob Garchik’s prog metal album… and he plays in her band Amaryllis (which made About Ghosts).
Note: Brooklyn grown drummer Tomas Fujiwara, mentioned in Amplify a couple posts ago, is also in Amaryllis.
And Then What?
After reading a post from The Slow Movement, I checked out the mostly ethereal and at times dissonant Uncharted Waters from Arve Henriksen. I’ve come back to it 3 times since. Moody, expressive, the sounds and tracks names evoke watery meditations, reflection and times persistence in me.
And finally I began listening to JJJJJerome Ellis’s Vesper Sparrow, a work made using a technique Ellis calls “granular synthesis,” in which sounds are broken down into “grains,” and then those tiny grains of sound can be re-arranged to make music. It’s pretty wild.
One Song - Evensong, part 1
“JJJJJerome Ellis (any pronoun) is a disabled Grenadian-Jamaican-American artist, surfer, and person who stutters. Through music, performance, writing, video, and photography, Ellis asks what stuttering can teach us about listening, generosity, and justice.” - https://www.jjjjjerome.com/about
I find Granular synthesis interesting, the music is engaging and so is his story. Ellis explains in a “voice over” that’s integrated into the track what he’s doing to make the track. I recommend listening to this on whatever streaming service you use so you can continue right into track 2 or beyond, and I don’t think you need to listen to the whole album… and you could. It happened to me.
One Album: Ye Olde 2: At The End of Time
“Ye Olde 2: At the End of Time serves as a sequel to the 2015 album Ye Olde, which imagined a band of heroes traveling through an imaginary medieval Brooklyn. This time the musicians reunite for a sci-fi quest, rocketing through millennia before dueling with alternate versions of themselves at the twilight of the universe. Influenced by sci-fi concept albums by Chick Corea and Lenny White, Spinal Tap, 1970s Hannah Barbara cartoons, and the rising scales of Ligeti’s etudes for piano, it’s a wildly fun album that showcases some serious musicianship.” - Jacob Garchik
Maybe I’m just a little Star Wars/Trekkie grown up, dreaming of distant galaxies and I was more into Ye Olde 2: At The End of Time (which of course includes Halvorson) than the much more buzzed about About Ghosts. I’m not making some bold stand as I do so, the NYT (behind a paywall) included Ye Olde on their best of 2025 list while leaving off About Ghosts.
I loved these moments:
The expansive, ominous sound being ripped across by horns in tracks like Transcending Time.
How Dyson Spheres starts in reflection, peacefully drilling in through to minute two but is in a funhouse complete with wavy mirrors by the 4th minute.
Floating Brain, the final track starts in a nebulous wiggle before escalating into cosmic ecstasy and beyond…
more than the intricate beauty and “adventurous optimism” of Mary Halvorson’s About Ghosts. I’m going to think later about what that says about me. So listen to your friendly neighborhood jazz blogger (and the NYT): listen to Ye Olde 2: At The End of Time and if you dig it, let me know and amplify it yourself.
Liner Notes
I feel validated. After blogging recently about Don Was and the Pan Detroit Ensemble and Detroit sax legend Dave McMurray, I saw both get articles in the latest Downbeat Magazine.
Rosalía’s LUX, sitting atop some people’s album of the year list (across all categories of music), has been growing on me.
I fell into a nap this weekend listening to Linda May Han Oh’s Strange Heavens. I nap briefly almost every day, even 10 minutes of shut eye where I block out everything or everything expect 1 thing like a podcast or album, always recharges me. So does the americano I typically chase it with. Featuring trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire, Strange Heavens shows what both Linda and Ambrose can do musically and to relax the soul.
Note: Ambrose’s honey from a winter stone was on many people’s best of 2025 jazz albums list and I wrote about his 2011 album When the Heart Emerges Glistening several weeks ago.
SML, Mono Neon, Jeff Parker and other performers at The Biamp Portland Jazz Festival are making their way back into my queue. I want to hear more before I see these artists and hear more from other festival performers to see if I should add a show or 3 to my calendar. I’ll be sharing the cream of that crop here in the months ahead.
I set out to listen to Robert Glasper this week but went back to Chief Adjuah’s Christian Scott days and his album Diaspora.
Here’s the tracklist.
It’s fair to say that at some point I was obsessed with Adjuah (in a healthy way?) and then I got to see him and his band perform 3 times. While I still love his work, my obsession has tempered to a love, but that’s another journey for another time.