Sylvie Courvoisier & Mary Halvorson Duo | JazzFest White Plains
Featuring pianist-composer Sylvie Courvoisier and guitarist-composer Mary Halvorson, two of the most influential and celebrated voices in jazz.
Courvoisier, winner of the 2025 Swiss Grand Prix and American Academy of Arts and Letters Music Award, is renowned for blending European chamber music traditions with New York’s avant-jazz scene. Halvorson, a 2019 MacArthur Fellow and nine-time DownBeat Critics Poll Guitarist of the Year, has emerged as one of the most influential improvisers and composers of her generation. Together, the duo earned widespread acclaim for their 2025 collaborative album, Bone Bells, which won the 2025 Jazz Journalists Association Award for Duo of the Year and was widely praised as one of the year’s most innovative jazz recordings.
Showtime: 3:00 pm *Doors open at 2:30pm
General Admission:
$30 ($25 early-bird through August 1) + fees
Mary Halvorson is a Brooklyn-based guitarist and composer widely regarded as one of the most important voices in contemporary jazz. In 2019, she received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. Over the past decade, she has been voted Guitarist of the Year in the DownBeat Critics Poll for nine consecutive years. More recently, she was named both Composer and Guitarist of the Year in the International Critics Poll, underscoring her standing as both a leading improviser and a singular compositional voice. She leads a range of ensembles and appears on more than 75 recordings that span jazz, experimental music and collaborative improvisation. Her 2025 album About Ghosts was named Best New Jazz Album of the Year by NPR Music and Slate. It also topped both the Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll and the International Critics Poll.
Pianist-composer Sylvie Courvoisier, a Brooklyn-based native of Switzerland, won the Swiss Grand Prix and The American Academy of Arts and Letters Music Award in 2025. She 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. She is known for her collaborations with luminaries John Zorn, Wadada Leo Smith, Evan Parker, Ikue Mori, Ned Rothenberg, Fred Frith, Andrew Cyrille, Mark Feldman, Christian Fennesz, Nate Wooley and Mary Halvorson.
A complete guide for JazzFest White Plains 2026 can be found at artsw.org/jazzfest
