Mat Maneri & Lucian Ban with Lisa Mezzacappa vs. The CMG All-Star Improviser's Orchestra is at the Leaven Community Center

Berkeley-based composer, bassist, bandleader and producer Lisa Mezzacappa has been active in the San Francisco Bay Area music community for more than 20 years. Her activities as a composer and ensemble leader include ethereal chamber music, electro-acoustic works, avant-garde jazz, music for groups from duo to large ensemble, and collaborations with film, dance, and visual art. Recent projects include Cosmicomics, a suite for electro-acoustic jazz sextet based on Italo’s Calvino’s stories about the origins of the cosmos; Organelle, a chamber work for improvisers grounded in scientific processes on micro and cosmic scales; Glorious Ravage, an evening-length song cycle for large ensemble and films drawn from the writings of Victorian lady adventurers; Touch Bass, a collaboration with choreographer Risa Jaroslow for three dancers and three bassists; and the serial audio opera The Electronic Lover. She is a recipient of the Pauline Oliveros New Genres Prize from the International Alliance for Women in Music (IAWM), and has been commissioned by the San Francisco Girls Chorus and Del Sol Quartet. With Jordan Glenn, she runs the Do-Over Music series at Shapeshifters Cinema in Oakland.

On their second ECM duo album Romanian pianist Lucian Ban and US violist Mat Maneri find fresh inspiration as they follow the trail of Béla Bartók, revisiting the folk music that spurred the imagination of the great Hungarian composer who, in the early 20th century, collected and transcribed numerous pieces from Transylvania. For the duo these songs have become “springboards and sources of melodic material” for arrangements “that capture the spirit of the original yet allow us to improvise and bring our own world to them. If you go deeper into the source material, new vistas open up. These folk songs teach us many things.” (Steve Lake, album liner notes). Recorded live in October 2022 in the context of the Retracing Bartók project in Timișoara, these performances also bear testimony to the finely attuned understanding that Lucian Ban and Mat Maneri have achieved in their long-running musical partnership.