California Jazz Conservatory
2087 Addison Street Berkeley
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World premiere! avant-NOIR is a new project by bassist and composer Lisa Mezzacappa, for her critically-acclaimed experimental jazz quartet, Bait & Switch. The music is inspired by noir genre fiction set in New York City (where Mezzacappa was born and raised) and the San Francisco Bay Area (where she has lived for the past 13 years). For this project, the quartet is joined by special guests percussionist William Winant and electronics wizard Tim Perkis.

avant-NOIR is a musical companion to Paul Auster’s abstract “soft-boiled” crime stories from his New York Trilogy of the 1980s, set in conversation with the West Coast classic hard-boiled 1920s-era detective fiction of Dashiell Hammett. The music progresses like a detective’s case, using clues and imagery from the crime novels such as maps, letters, messages and relationships between characters and places, to create compositions with acoustic and electric sounds, field recordings and composed and improvised material. Featuring Aaron Bennett on tenor saxophone, John Finkbeiner on electric guitar, Lisa Mezzacappa on acoustic bass and Jordan Glenn on drums.

Lisa Mezzacappa’s avant-NOIR is made possible through the Musical Grant Program, which is administered by the San Francisco Friends of Chamber Music, and supported by the Heller Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, the San Francisco Foundation and Grants for the Arts|San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund.

Cost: $15/$12 students and seniors

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