Across the lake to the north, the sky darkens, blue to grey. The wind whips. Pines and birches bend. But the skies above remain clear. We’re about fifty yards offshore, standing on and swimming around rocks a few feet below the surface. Waves rise and fall. The water is warm and splashes our faces. It feels safe, comforting, to be in this space, with a beer to sip, balance to maintain, and a distant storm to watch.
***
Looking across Atlas Studios in Newburgh, N.Y., hardwood floors lead to white cement walls with wide windows letting in light from the setting sun. Thumbscrew—a trio of Mary Halvorson, Michael Formanek, and Tomas Fujiwara—is set up along two sides of the rectangular room. No mics, no mixing board. Just guitar, bass, drums, and two amps. Two days ago they performed at the Kennedy Center’s KC Jazz Club in Washington, DC. Tonight it’s a converted textile factory in the Hudson Valley.
***
The storm sweeps across the opposite shore. The waves lift us from the rocks and gently push us away. We swim back to our respective boulders, regain our footing, check on each other, and resume bobbing and laughing. I dip beneath the surface and look down to a blurry mystery of rocks and shadows, shades of black, brown, and green. Weightless and blissed out in the late summer water, I hold my breath and momentarily forget about breathing, about the need to surface. The spectacle of the storm continues, but it’s a backdrop to floating and the delightful sense of levity, psychic and physical.
***
Mary Halvorson sits stage right, guitar pedals and a music stand before her. She reads her sheet music with a laser focus I project onto expert pilots navigating turbulence. Bassist Michael Formanek stands in the middle, locking down, linking leads to rhythms. This is serious stuff, neither easy to build nor to keep aloft. The songs are also buoyant and whimsical; they’re more than one way. They reflect a band in which each musician moves through their own orbit and is connected to one another by a wonderful sense of collegiality, glimpses of which are audible and visible. I can’t help notice, for example, Formanek’s music folder, which reads “CRAP” in letters large enough to read across the room.
***
“That one said ‘OTHER CRAP,’” Formanek later tells me. “I have a few different ones. ‘MORE CRAP,’ ‘TOTAL CRAP.’ Maybe a couple of others. They were a gift from Mary.”
Michael Formanek has appeared on dozens of recordings outside of Thumbscrew. My favorite Formanek-as-bandleader album is The Distance (2016)—nineteen musicians under the umbrella of Formanek’s Ensemble Kolossus. The name conjures two of my favorites, Joe McPhee (“the Colossus of Poughkeepsie”) and Sonny Rollins (Saxophone Colossus). Neither McPhee nor Rollins appear on The Distance, but everyone else does, including Formanek’s Thumbscrew bandmates, along with Tim Berne, Patricia Brennan, Kris Davis, and Kirk Knuffke, among others. The Distance was recorded over the course of two days with all the musicians in the studio together, pushing air, rather than trading files. Just orchestrating the band photo on the back of the CD booklet—the entire ensemble gathered in winter coats beneath elevated train tracks in Brooklyn—must have been an undertaking. It speaks to the challenge of ensuring everyone receives ample opportunities to play, amplifying rather than compromising individual voices. The Distance cycles through a range of moods and tones, by turns lush and intimate, audacious and majestic. The record culminates with the full ensemble improvising on “Exoskeleton Part VIII – Metamorphic,” a magnetic and nerve-wracking track that is over too soon despite its seven-plus minutes. I’d love to see the film that could keep up with this piece as its score.
***
My family returns to the same lake in central Maine each summer. My grandfather built a house on the lake in the mid-’50s (Thanks, union job!), an A-frame with a catwalk connecting the two open bedrooms upstairs. My dad spent his summers there growing up. My grandparents sold the house in the early ’90s, and we didn’t go to the lake for several years. When my kids were young we started renting a house on the opposite end of the lake. We realized if you swim out past the dock you come upon a cluster of enormous rocks, which are perfect to stand on. Soon lake beers entered the picture. A good lake beer session will last hours—a delightful aquatic gabfest with our voices probably carrying farther across the water than we realize. We revisit family stories, solve the world’s political problems, and make sure we have solid footing when brother Casey breaks out his Foster Brooks impression.
***
Drummer Tomas Fujiwara sits stage left. He pushes the pulse and shifts gears, like a turntable changing from 33 ⅓ to 45 RPM and back, with the slightest lag time as he accelerates or decelerates, exploring the tempos between the gears. His delicate touch nurtures and nourishes the songs, cradles them. Then, suddenly, in the midst of a solo, bursts of colors are visible through the windows behind Fujiwara. Fireworks light up the sky while his cymbals and drums mask the sounds of the explosions. For all of their grandeur, the fireworks are silent, remaining in the background, enhancing but not eclipsing. Halvorson looks over multiple times and grins. Formanek waits to reenter, and Fujiwara plays on.
***
Mary Halvorson: “It felt pretty magical. At first I couldn’t see the fireworks behind us and didn’t realize what was happening exactly. I think I felt the fireworks before I saw them. The crazy energy of that moment amounted to a combination of factors—between Tomas’s incredible drum solo, the fireworks happening behind him at exactly the right moment, and the audience reacting to all of it and creating even more energy—it was pretty special. Michael had a cue out of that section and I remember he waited a very long time for the cue, so that that little moment was sustained longer than it normally is in that particular song (“Words that Rhyme with Spangle”).”
***
Further evidence of Thumbscrew’s sense of humor: When I uploaded the CD with “Words That Rhyme with Spangle,” the song title auto-filled with the following: “Words that Rhyme with Spangle (angle bangle dangle jangle mangel mangle strangle tangle wangle wrangle).”
***
A few years ago I went to the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tenn. I was excited to see Anthony Braxton lead a ten-piece group during a Friday matinee. I kept thinking of what I’d usually be doing at work during that time and what a treat it was seeing this incredible band, especially as Mary Halvorson and fellow guitarist Brandon Seabrook volleyed ideas from across opposite sides of the stage; the band seemed to be having the best time. Fujiwara recruited Halvorson and Seabrook for his Triple Double band, along with two brass players (Ralph Alessi, trumpet, and Taylor Ho Bynum, cornet) and a second drummer (Gerald Cleaver). March (2022) retains the Braxton ensemble’s sense of adventure, though the Triple Double band is rooted in the Fujiwara/Cleaver dual drummer mind meld. I can’t tell where one ends and the other begins, and the guitar duel that bursts through the middle of “Pack Up, Coming for You” is worth the price of admission alone (and possibly eclipsed by the mid-song freakout on “The March of the Storm Before the Quiet of the Dance”).
***
Seeing the members of Thumbscrew read their sheet music, a welcome example of public reading, reminds me of a zine release party I threw in the late ’90s. Friends and contributors met at Grass Roots, a bar on St. Marks Place, and I passed out copies of a new issue as people trickled in. After a while, the bartender dimmed the lights and turned up the music preparing for the Saturday night rush. We occupied several tables at the time, and everyone was reading. My brain gridlocked with anxiety. We’re at a bar and people are reading! Why is no one talking? I’m a terrible host! My heart had a better vantage point and took the lead. We’re at a bar and people are reading! They’re flipping through the new issue, looking for their contributions, skimming and laughing. The conversations will come in time. I’m running with the right crowd!
Over time, Mary Halvorson has led bands that have expanded in size and scope from trios (Dragon’s Head, 2008) to quintets (Saturn Sings, 2010) to septets (Illusionary Sea, 2013), and then an octet featuring pedal steel guitarist Susan Alcorn (Away with You, 2016). In 2018, Halvorson unveiled Code Girl, in which the members of Thumbscrew are joined by Ambrose Akinmusire on trumpet and vocalist Amirtha Kidambi, marking the first appearance of a singer in a Halvorson band. That string of records is one of the most breathtaking creative runs imaginable. And then, yet again, Halvorson took an unexpected turn with Amaryllis and Belladonna (2022). On vinyl, they comprise a double album. On CD, they are two separate releases. Regardless of format, though, I hear Amaryllis and Belladonna in three acts. Act one (side one): Halvorson leads a septet with Patricia Brennan on vibraphone. Act two (side two): Halvorson and that same septet joined by a string quartet, the Mivos Quartet. Act three (sides three and four): Halvorson and the Mivos Quartet. Just when you think you know an artist, they open your eyes to unexpected vistas. Each time I listen to one line-up, I swear it’s the best iteration. Then I flip the record and toss aside what I thought I knew. The brackish pyrotechnics of act two are my current favorite. The trifecta of “Side Effect,” “Hoodwink,” and “892 Teeth” is a seamless integration of strings, horns, and percussion.
***
Fujiwara’s solo, the fireworks, and the audience’s response heighten the evening’s sense of playfulness. This continues during the Q&A following the show.
Audience member: “How did you meet?”
Fujiwara: “Swipe right.”
***
Eli Baden-Lasar, the only child of two moms, grew up knowing he was conceived using an anonymous sperm donor. In his late teens, he and his parents started learning about his half siblings, all thirty-two of them. Being one of many sometimes left him feeling “mass produced.” He also resented how the sperm bank’s advertising oversimplified a complex process.
***
The members of Thumbscrew represent different ages, cultures, and genders, among other traits. Theirs is a testament to people working to their individual strengths within a group dynamic, playing nuanced music and fostering intricate stories. Thumbscrew’s music is antithetical to the shock tactics of the day. Art of this caliber can help build what Naomi Klein calls shock resistance. I’m not saying that listening to Thumbscrew will restore the federal cuts to cancer research or lead to a constructive response to climate change. But their songs, like elegant disruptions, stand in stark contrast to the din of commercial culture and propaganda.
At peak energy on their latest album, Wingbeats, individual parts may seem asymmetrical, but they intersect with such grace, multiple currents crisscrossing like a bird’s eye view of an idealized Grand Central Station rush hour, waves of ideas washing in from all directions. With all that motion it’s surprising the proceedings don’t cease up. But Thumbscrew find the flow, glide through without breaking stride. They lay out and traverse an inspiring landscape, a vision of our better selves in microcosm. It’s no coincidence Wingbeats was written during a two week residency at the City of Asylum in Pittsburgh, which is dedicated to building “a just community by protecting and celebrating freedom of creative expression.”
***
Baden-Lasar set out to meet his half siblings. He researched. He networked. He criss-crossed the country and met all but one. To document the experience he took a series of photographs using a large format camera. He anticipated a complicated journey, realizing “conflict, discomfort and maybe even a kind of love would be part of the experience.” He wanted his portraits to bring out each person’s uniqueness, to tell a nuanced story. “I wanted to produce something that would refute any simple narratives.”
***
There are up to fifteen of us at any given day at the lake. We represent seven households. We are straight and queer, partnered and single. Some grew up with birth parents, some grew up with adoptive parents, and some are growing up with a donor recipient parent. But if a married male/female couple with kids typifies the normative family, we’re 0-for-7. I think we’re pretty normal in that regard.
***
Epilogue: After the show I help stack chairs and start acclimating to regular life when James, the promoter, asks if I can give Mary Halvorson and Tomas Fujiwara a ride to the train station. Driving across the Newburgh-Beacon Bridge, I notice the passenger side seat warmer is on. I dislike seat warmers. My daughter will use them year round given the chance and likely left it on. I apologize to Mary and yes, admittedly, threw my daughter under the bus. Unbeknownst to me, my daughter has an ally in Mary who says she likes seat warmers. Then Tomas weighs in, and we spend the rest of the drive hashing out the pros and cons of seat warmers. One more welcome wrinkle in the narrative.
Mike Faloon lives in the Hudson Valley with his family. He contributes to Razorcake and Vol 1 Brooklyn. He also helps publish zines like Sonic Viewfinder, Submerging, and Zisk. For his latest book, he helped jazz legend Joe McPhee with his memoir, Straight Up Without Wings: The Musical Flight of Joe McPhee. He did not throw out this Mets t-shirts despite their prolonged collapse.