“We were still in the boundless void, striped here and there by a streak or two of hydrogen around the vortexes of the first constellations. I admit it required very complicated deductions to foresee the Mesopotamian plains black with men and horses and arrows and trumpets, but, since I had nothing else to do, I could bring it off.” 
― Italo Calvin, Cosmicomics

Lisa Mezzacappa, an avant garde jazz bassist with a quickly growing international reputation, is one of the leading lights of the San Francisco jazz community. Her questing intellect and curiosity have time and again led her to compose extended suites of music revolving around a literary theme, such as the recent “AvantNoir” project which employed a sextet to create a musical counterpart to the crime fiction of Dashiell Hammett and Paul Auster.

With her current project, she tackles the fanciful and quirky work of the brilliant Italian writer Italo Calvino–specifically, his fabulous interlinked stories gathered together as Cosmicomics, exploring certain incidents in the history of the universe.

Lisa’s sextet has been developing her Cosmicomics suite over a series of workshop salons at Bird & Beckett since last May, and this is the final outing in that sequence. Following this session, Lisa will put a final polish on the material and will premiere the suite on the first Saturday in November at Bird & Beckett.

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