Pianist Sylvie Courvoisier shares a special performance celebrating two major 2025 duo releases with frequent collaborators Mary Halvorson and Wadada Leo Smith. Not only will this mark the first time the two projects will be featured together in a single evening, the performance will come fresh off the release of Angel Falls, Courvoisier and Leo Smith’s very first duo album.

Sylvie Courvoisier (piano) and Mary Halvorson (guitar) will perform music from their latest release, Bone Bells (Pyroclastic Records, March 2025). Their third album as a duo and an eagerly awaited follow-up to 2021’s Searching for the Disappeared Hour, Bone Bells presents eight new intricate compositions: four by Sylvie and four by Mary. The duo’s telepathic interplay and ferocious intensity is on full display in this magical set of music.

Next Courvoisier will be joined by trumpeter-composer Wadada Leo Smith to perform Angel Falls (Intakt Records, October 3, 2025). Leo Smith and  Courvoisier have collaborated for years, with Courvoisier performing and recording in multiple Smith-led groups and Wadada’s unmistakable trumpet voice featured on Courvoisier’s electric, atmospheric 2023 sextet album Chimaera. Smith has been hailed by The New York Review of Books as one of the nation’s “most powerful storytellers, an heir to American chroniclers like Charles Ives and Ornette Coleman.”

“Sylvie Courvoisier and Mary Halvorson take their duo language to new heights of fluency and sophistication.” -Stewart Smith, The Wire

At the crossroads of contemporary chamber music and post-jazz, the pianist and the guitarist deepen a dialogue that, with Bone Bells, stands out as one of the most essential of our time… Bone Bells takes us through the thousand twists and turns of a strange and dreamlike universe — a striking blend of intelligence, virtuosity, and intuition. A truly outstanding record. — Stéphane Ollivier, Jazz Magazine

“There’s no comping, no grandstanding, only a constant sense of ongoing calibration, oblique elements somehow poised in the perfect balance. How do they do it? I’m reminded of something the painter George Braque once said: “The only valid thing in art is that which cannot be explained. If there is no mystery then there is no ‘poetry’, the quality I value above all else in art.” -John Sharpe

Sylvie Courvoisier piano, composition
Mary Halvorson guitar, composition
Wadada Leo Smith trumpet, composition

A livestream will be available free of charge at 8pm on the day of the performance and archived for future viewing.

Pianist-composer Sylvie Courvoisier, a Brooklyn-based native of Switzerland and winner of the Swiss Grand Prix and The American Academy of Arts and Letters Music Award in 2025, has earned renown for balancing two distinct worlds: the deep, richly detailed chamber music of her European roots and the grooving, hook-laden sounds of the avant-jazz scene in New York City, her home for more than two decades. Few artists feel truly at ease in both concert halls and jazz clubs, playing improvised or composed music. But Courvoisier — “a pianist of equal parts audacity and poise,” according to The New York Times — is as compelling when performing Stravinsky’s epochal Rite of Spring in league with new-music pianist Cory Smythe as she is when improvising with her own acclaimed jazz trio, featuring bassist Drew Gress and drummer Kenny Wollesen or in solo. In music as in life, Courvoisier crosses borders with a creative spirit and a free mind; her music-making is as playful as it is intense, as steeped in tradition as it is questing and intrepid. NPR’s Kevin Whitehead has encapsulated her art in an evocative way: “Some pianists approach the instrument like it’s a cathedral. Sylvie Courvoisier treats it like a playground.”

Guitarist, composer and MacArthur Fellow Mary Halvorson has been called “NYC’s least-predictable improviser” (Howard Mandel, City Arts), “the most forward-thinking guitarist working right now” (Lars Gotrich, NPR.org), and “one of today’s most formidable bandleaders” (Francis Davis, Village Voice).

Wadada Leo Smith is a highly acclaimed American trumpeter, composer, and improviser known for his innovative approach to music. His work, often categorized as “creative music,” spans various genres and includes explorations of diverse musical cultures. He’s recognized for his unique Ankhrasmation system of notation and his powerful, socially conscious compositions, including the Pulitzer Prize finalist Ten Freedom Summers