avantNOIR is a suite of compositions for improvising sextet by bassist and composer Lisa Mezzacappa. 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 15 years). 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. The suite has been performed at the California Jazz Conservatory, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts' New Frequencies Festival curated by Myra Melford, the Outsound New Music Summit, SFJAZZ Center, and SFMusic Day. A CD was released January 2017 on Clean Feed Records.

MONTEREY JAZZ FEST