Bassist Lisa Mezzacappa Brings Her Ambitious, Adventurous New Song Cycle to Brooklyn

Bassist Lisa Mezzacappa has been at the forefront of the most intriguing side of jazz improvisation for a long time. Her work has a consistent sense of purpose and often a narrative: unlike so many other well-intentioned free jazz types, her ensembles go places rather than just stumbling around in the dark. So it makes sense that her ambitious, upcoming show on Oct 12 at 8 PM at Roulette with a hefty twelve-piece orchestra would feature a new song cycle, Glorious Ravage, inspired by female explorers. $20 advance tix are still available and highly recommended.

Mezzacappa’a most recent New York show was at Downtown Music Gallery last month, leading an auspiciously low-register lineup withi Josh Sinton and Aaron Novik on bass clarinets and Jason Levis on drums, which transcended any kind of preconceptions about those instruments.

There were moments where she’d be bowing matte-black washes of sound while Novik growled along with her in the lows, but at those moments Sinton would be running judicious volleys of postbop much further up the scale. He did the same thing as a member of Amir ElSaffar’s large ensemble back in June at their album release show downtown, on both occasions infusing the music with a welcome energy and purist erudition.

In an about an hour, Mezzacappa led the quartet through three expansive numbers marked more by cohesive interplay than soloing. The group quickly flickered upward with a series of brief, flitting exchanges and found their footing. Levis provided a tersely floating swing most of the time, like an old Cadillac: you don’t hear the engine but you feel it. Meanwhile, Mezzacappa perambulated and did some elbowing, especially with Novik, who was essentially playing bad cop opposite Sinton’s matter-of-fact good cheer. There were also a few whispery moments, especially in the final, roughly twelve-minute piece, where the four echoed the ghostly exchanges that the night’s first act, the twin-bass duo of Thomas Helton and Michael Bisio had sent wafting through the space for minutes at a time. With all these low-register instruments, the night promised all sorts of darkness, but this was more of a clinic in how much further off their home turf these axes, and their players, could go. It portends well for for the Roulette gig.

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