March 25, 2019
Doors At 7. Music At 7:30pm
San Francisco Bay Area bassist and composer Lisa Mezzacappa presents a program that showcases different aspects of her far-ranging musical personality—combining improvisation, original compositions, graphic scores, and music for experimental film. She performs solo and in duos with with longtime collaborator, Bay Area drummer Jason Levis, plus some duo and quartet pieces joined by Joshua Berman (cornet) and Jason Stein (bass clarinet).
“Lisa Mezzacappa (bass) and Mezzacappa & Jason Levis (drums) duo. "Highly prolific, SF Bay Area bassist, composer, bandleader and producer Lisa Mezzacappa has been active for more than a dozen years leading, co leading with many musicians and ensembles including Bait and Switch, the Interlopers and the Lisa Mezzacappa Trio. She also collaborates frequently on sound installation, film/video, sculpture and public music/art. This will be Mezzacappa's first trip to the Option stage and should not be missed!” - OPTION curators
Lisa Mezzacappa is a San Francisco Bay Area-based composer, bassist, bandleader, and producer. Called “one of the most imaginative figures on the Bay Area creative jazz scene” by The Mercury News and “a Bay Area treasure” by KQED public radio, she has been an active part of California’s vibrant music community for more than 15 years. Mezzacappa’s activities as a composer and bandleader include ethereal chamber music, electro-acoustic works, avant-garde jazz, music for groups from duo to large ensemble, and collaborations with film, dance and visual art.
Recent projects include avantNOIR, a suite for sextet inspired by noir fiction; Organelle, a chamber suite for improvisers grounded in scientific processes on micro and cosmic scales; Glorious Ravage, an evening-length song cycle for large ensemble and films drawn from the writings of Victorian lady adventurers; and Touch Bass, a collaboration with choreographer Risa Jaroslow for three dancers and three bassists. Current projects include a suite for sextet inspired by Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics stories about the origins of the universe; the new duo B. Experimental Band which performs original compositions for improvisers bimonthly in Oakland, CA; and The Electronic Lover, an opera podcast created in collaboration with writer Beth Lisick.
Mezzacappa has released her music on the New World, Clean Feed, No Business, Leo, and NotTwo record labels, and her work has been supported on the national level by the MAP Fund, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Aaron Copland Fund, and the Andy Warhol Foundation; and by Bay Area funders the Wattis Foundation, Zellerbach Family Foundation, and Intermusic SF. She has been artist-in-residence at the Cité International des Arts in Paris, Fr; Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Headlands Center for the Arts and the Banff International Jazz Workshop. She has also been a participant in the Jazz Composers Orchestra Institute, a program of American Composers Orchestra and the Jazz Studies Institute at Columbia University.
Photo credit: Scott Friedlander
March OPTION concerts are sponsored by Luhring Augustine.
