Bird & Beckett Books and Records
653 Chenery St. SF
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“My big discovery was bassist-composer Lisa Mezzacappa’s avantNOIR project...The score was fast-paced and kaleidoscopic, Mingus-like; the ensemble hurtled from one written episode to another but gave each turn its jazz-essential immediacy, as if the music were freshly imagined. I want to hear it again!” — Howard Mandel, Jazz Beyond Jazz

Aaron Bennett, tenor saxophone
John Finkbeiner, electric guitar
Lisa Mezzacappa, acoustic bass and sampler
Jordan Glenn, drums
William Winant, vibraphone and Foley
Tim Perkis, electronics

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. Mezzacappa's 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 and composed and improvised material.

Since the project premiered in 2014, avantNOIR has been performed at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Outsound New Music Summit and SFJAZZ Center.

Listen:
https://soundcloud.com/lisamezz/sets/avantnoir

Watch:
https://vimeo.com/album/3191085

Photo: Myles Boisen

Lisa Mezzacappa is a San Francisco Bay Area-based bassist, composer, and music curator. An active collaborator in the Bay Area music community for more than a dozen years, her music spans avant-garde jazz to ethereal chamber music, scores for experimental film and immersive sound installations. Mezzacappa was voted “Rising Star” bassist in the Downbeat 2013 and 2014 critics polls, and leads her own groups Bait & Switch, Nightshade, the Lisa Mezzacappa Trio, Eartheaters and the Interlopers, and co-leads the ensembles duo B., Cylinder, BODABODA, LMNOP, and Les Gwan Jupons. She has released her music on the Clean Feed, NoBusiness, Leo, NotTwo, Evander and Edgetone record labels, and has recorded as a sideperson for the Tzadik, Kadima and Porto Franco labels. Her own label, Queen Bee Records, was launched in 2013 to disseminate the work of her West Coast creative musician peers. Lisa organizes concerts for jazz and experimental music in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and collaborates frequently on cross-disciplinary projects in sound installation, experimental film, and visual art. In fall 2015, she premiered Glorious Ravage, an evening-length song cycle for a large ensemble of California improvisers with new films, in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Cost: Free

Audio samples in which musicians at this event play:

Videos featuring musicians playing at this event