Apropos Trio - The EP (2018)

1. First One 05:16

2. Second One 04:17

3. Third One 06:27

4. Fourth One 07:43

Matt Renzi - oboe, Bb clarinet, tenor saxophone

Lisa Mezzacappa - acoustic bass

Jason Levis - drums

Lisa Mezzacappa - Glorious Ravage (NEW WORLD RECORDS 2017)

"I am doing what a woman can hardly ever do . . . , " wrote British world traveler Isabella Bird in an 1872 letter from Hawaii. "And I can fall, I can fall into anything." San Francisco Bay Area composer, acoustic bassist, and bandleader, Lisa Mezzacappa used those lines - and more from the writings of Bird and other women adventurers of the 19th and early 20th centuries - to fashion lyrics for her ten-part "panoramic song cycle for improvisers." Sung by the extraordinary vocalist Fay Victor, those two lines might also be taken to reflect Mezzacappa's place in the world of progressive and avant-garde jazz.

With Victor's voice at the core, and musical ideas percolating up from the texts, Mezzacappa tailored the open-ended structure of Glorious Ravage to the gifts, sensibilities, and personalities of the individual musicians. That required her to develop a bigger compositional framework than she had ever built before, and one that could both reflect and refract the multifaceted stories and personas of the women she met in her research and meet the challenge of keeping the composition, in her words, "open to the kind of collective wisdom that emerges from any given musical community."

Mezzacappa has written that initial inspiration for her work "comes from a messy, unfocused, overwhelming, brilliant, seductive, and terrifying pool of sensations, ideas, gut reactions, intellectual concerns, moral ambiguities." From that pool has bubbled up something that retains many of those qualities, but that also manifests focus, chemistry, communication, and an emergent sense of both order and transcendence. 

Glorious Ravage is a musical exploration of what is possible. Soaring with it can trigger an experience of the sublime, similar to the altitude sickness that Isabella Bird, Ida Pfeiffer, and Annie Smith Peck fell into during their lofty adventures, an ecstatic mind state South Americans called  veta  or  soroche. When Bird wrote in her letter from Hawaii, "This is the height of the last and most glorious ravage," she could not have foreseen that Lisa Mezzacappa would bring us another of equal magnificence.

1. I. Veta  4:06

2. II. Make No Plans  6:16

3. III. Heat & Hurry  7:15

4. IV. Taxonomical  4:59

5. V. Great Green Gloom  8:03

6. VI. Soroche  4:42

7. VII. For the Dusky Mourner  13:26

8. VIII. Marianne  5:03

9. IX. Shut Out the Sun  7:29

10. X. City of Wonders  8:18

Lisa Mezzacappa, acoustic bass, conductor

Fay Victor voice

Nicole Mitchell  flute

Kyle Bruckmann  oboe

Vinny Golia  woodwinds

Cory Wright  woodwinds

Darren Johnston  trumpet

Michael Dessen  trombone

Dina Maccabee  viola

John Finkbeiner  electric guitar

Myra Melford  piano, harmonium

Kjell Nordeson vibraphone, percussion

Mark Dresser acoustic bass

Tim Perkis  electronics

Jordan Glenn drum set, percussion

Lisa Mezzacappa - avantNOIR (CLEAN FEED RECORDS 2017)

San Francisco Bay Area bassist and composer Lisa Mezzacappa draws inspiration from a wide range of sources in her music, from film to visual art to science.  Her newest release, avantNOIR, is a suite of compositions for jazz sextet based on noir crime fiction—classic works by Dashiell Hammett set in San Francisco, and later works by Paul Auster that are part of his New York Trilogy. Mezzacappa probes the psychological depths of these stories, creating musical profiles of characters like Big Flora from Hammett’s The Big Knockover, and Daniel Quinn from Auster’s City of Glass. She also uses clues from detective’s cases—addresses, aliases, phone numbers, hotel rooms—and translates them into musical structures, melodies and rhythms, in a kind of postmodern jazz serialism. The result is a contemporary jazz gem influenced as much by Charles Ives and Pierre Boulez as by Eric Dolphy and Henry Threadgill.

Mezzacappa’s partners in crime couldn’t be better suited to the challenge of navigating her sometimes gnarly, sometimes spacious but always imaginative music. Guitarist John Finkbeiner and tenor saxophonist Aaron Bennett were regulars in the California edition of Adam Lane’s Full Throttle Orchestra, and have been part of Mezzacappa’s Bait & Switch quartet for nine years. Jordan Glenn, of Fred Frith’s current trio, is one of the Bay Area’s most in-demand and versatile drummers. Tim Perkis is a pioneer of laptop improvisation, and adds a supremely sensitive layer of sound to the compositions. And veteran percussionist William Winant, well known in contemporary music circles and a longtime associate of avant-jazz heroes John Zorn, Fred Frith, Roscoe Mitchell and others, plays vibraphone and Foley sound effects—rotary phone, typewriter, hotel desk bells—as part of the record’s rich and mysterious sonic landscape.

1. Fillmore Street 3:12

2. The Ballad of Big Flora 7:05

3. Army Street 3:48

4. Medley on the Big Knockover (Green St. / At Larrouy's Bar / Montgomery St.) 9:53

5. A Bird in the Hand 7:24

6. Quinn's Serenade 6:33

7. Ghosts (Black and White, Then Blue) 8:19

8. Babel 7:57

Aaron Bennett  tenor saxophone

John Finkbeiner  electric guitar

William Winant  vibraphone, percussion, Foley

Lisa Mezzacappa  acoustic bass, samples

Tim Perkis  electronics

Jordan Glenn  drums

All music composed by Lisa Mezzacappa (c) 2017 ASCAP

Recorded by James Frazier at New, Improved Recording, Oakland CA, November 28–29, 2015 | Additional engineering by John Finkbeiner | Mixed by Myles Boisen at Guerilla Recording, Oakland CA. | Mastered by Myles Boisen at Headless Buddha Mastering Lab, Oakland CA. Band photo by Myles Boisen

Produced by Lisa Mezzacappa | Executive production by Pedro Costa for Trem Azul | Design by Travassos