2015: Lisa Mezzacappa

Bait & Switch:
Aaron Bennett: tenor saxophone
John Finkbeiner: electric guitar
Lisa Mezzacappa: acoustic bass and sampler
Jordan Glenn: drums
with special guests
William Winant: vibraphone, Foley
Tim Perkis: electronics

avantNOIR 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 electronic musician 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 and composed and improvised material.

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.

Artist (photo by Photographer)