The crime fiction of Dashiell Hammett and Paul Auster inspired bassist Lisa Mezzacappa to cook up this project, which performed the suite recently at SFJazz.  Thanks to Marty Bigos for helping to underwrite AvantNOIR’s performance today at Bird & Beckett. And thanks to Jean Conner, whose support through the years has made our entire Sunday afternoon “which way west?” series possible.

A sextet with Aaron Bennett, sax; John Finkbeiner, guitar; Vijay Anderson, drums; Lisa Mezzacappa, bass (Bait & Switch) plus William Wynant, percussion and Tim Perkis, electronics. music inspired by noir genre fiction set in New York City (LM’s hometown) and the San Francisco Bay Area (her adopted home for the past 13 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, numbers and places, to create compositions with acoustic and electric sounds, field recordings and composed and improvised material. The musicians navigate musical clues, cryptograms, found composed fragments and other “unsolved” musical elements to create different versions of the piece for different performances.