Photo: Scott Friedlander, (c) 2009Lisa Mezzacappa is a San Francisco-based bassist, composer, and musical instigator. An active collaborator and curator in the Bay Area music community, she leads her own groups Bait & Switch and Nightshade, and co-leads the ensembles duo B., Cylinder, the Permanent Wave Ensemble, and the Mezzacapa-Phillips Duo. She collaborates frequently on cross-disciplinary projects in sound installation, digital poetry, film, sculpture and public music/art. As curator, she programs the annual JazzPOP concert seres at the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles; the monthly Monday Makeout creative music series in the Mission District of San Francisco; and a music and film series, Mission Eye and Ear, at Artists' Television Access.
Lisa has been artist-in-residence at Djerassi Resident Artists Program (2008), Headlands Center for the Arts (2006), the Banff International Jazz Workshop (2000), and the Painted Bride Arts Center (2000). She holds an MA in ethnomusicology from UC Berkeley (2003), and a BA in music from the University of Virginia (1997). She has performed at countless Bay Area venues including Intersection for the Arts, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SFMOMA, Yoshi’s, the Jazzschool, and the de Young Museum, San Francisco; as well as the Earshot Jazz Festival, Seattle; the Montreal Jazz Festival, Canada; and the Monterey Jazz Festival, CA. She performs regularly in New York, where she leads an East Coast version of her jazz quartet, as well as the Brooklyn-meets-San Francisco trio Soft Pitch.
Lisa has been awarded grants by the San Francisco Friends of Chamber Music, American Composers Forum, the City of Oakland, Meet the Composer and Southern Exposure/the Andy Warhol Foundation. She currently performs in more than a dozen original jazz, pop, improv and chamber ensembles, working with bandleaders Phillip Greenlief, Aaron Novik, Beth Custer, Randy McKean, Aaron Bennett, Graham Connah, Cory Wright and Ross Hammond, and collaborating with Darren Johnston, Katy Stephan, Aram Shelton, Kjell Nordeson, Murray Campbell, Jason Levis, Dina Maccabee, Noah Phillips, Rob Ewing, Aaron Novik, Kasey Knudsen, Vijay Anderson, Michael Coleman, Sam Ospovat, John Hanes, and many many others.
For Gold Record Studio (2007-8), she co-hosted, with Jon Brumit, a free public recording studio for six weeks at an Oakland neighborhood flea market, assuming the role of record producer, audio engineer and musical instigator. For Earworms (2006-11), a collaboration with installation artist Deborah Aschheim, she composed and recorded 18 pieces, with more than a dozen musicians, for a series of sculptural installations exploring the relationships between music, memory and language. Nostalgia for the Future is another Aschheim collaboration that uses analog sounds, acoustic instruments and electronic processing in architecturally-inspired installations.