MISSION EYE & EAR series :: New Music & Film about DREAMS June 18, 2010

MISSION EYE & EAR
a new quarterly series at the Red Poppy Art House
hosted by Lisa Mezzacappa

Summer 2010 Edition: DREAMS

San Francisco bassist, bandleader, composer and musical ringleader LISA MEZZACAPPA launches a new quarterly series at the Red Poppy Art House combining improvised music and original compositions with film, songs, stories, readings, and visuals. For each program in the series, Mezzacappa leads a band of house musicians to perform live scores to film and video by local artists; accompany vocalists and songwriters; and premiere new music based loosely on an evocative theme or topic.

For this first SUMMER edition, Mezzacappa's chamber group NIGHTSHADE (clarinets, guitar, vibraphone, electronics, acoustic bass) and guest vocalists, musicians and video artists respond to the idea of DREAMS: each artist has been asked to create a new work based on or inspired by a dream sequence from a film, a work of literature, a dream or nightmare of their own...

Live film music by Lisa Mezzacappa & Nightshade
Aram Shelton, clarinets
John Finkbeiner, guitar
Tim Perkis, electronics
Kjell Nordeson, vibraphone
Lisa Mezzacappa, bass

• Songs by Katy Stephan, voice and Adam Shulman, piano

• Live film projection/installation by Alfonso Alvarez

• New dream music by the Holly Martins
Kasey Knudsen, saxophone
Lorin Benedict, vocals
Eric Vogler, guitar

Artist Bio
Lisa Mezzacappa is a San Franciso-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 collectives duo B., Cylinder, and the Oakland Active Orchestra. She collaborates frequently on cross-disciplinary projects in sound installation, digital poetry, film, sculpture and public music/art, and curates the annual JazzPOP concert seres at the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Lisa has performed at countless Bay Area venues including Intersection for the Arts, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SFMOMA, Yoshi's, and the de Young Museum, San Francisco; as well as the Earshot Jazz Festival, Seattle; and the Montreal Jazz Festival; Canada. She currently performs in more than a dozen original jazz, pop, improv and chamber ensembles, working with bandleaders Phillip Greenlief, Aaron Novik, Beth Custer, Graham Connah, Cory Wright, and Ross Hammond, among many others.