Mezzacappa’s Music Inspired by Calvino

courtesy of Lisa Mezzacappa

At the beginning of last month, Queen Bee Records released an album that was the result of a major project that occupied bassist and composer Lisa Mezzacappa for the better part of 2018. The title of the album is Cosmicomics, taken from a collection of stories by Italo Calvino. The project resulted in an eleven-movement suite performed by the Lisa Mezzacappa Six. The other five members of the group are Aaron Bennett (tenor saxophone), John Finkbeiner (electric guitar), Mark Clifford (vibraphone), Jordan Glenn (drums), and Tim Perkis (electronics). The album was released both as a physical CD and for digital download. Once again Amazon.com has been negligent in allowing purchase of the physical item, but the above hyperlink takes the reader to a Bandcamp Web page that supports both options.

The original Cosmicomics was first published (in Italian) in 1965 and consisted of twelve stories, each of which amounted to a highly imaginative unfolding of ideas based on some scientific principle (which was not necessarily a valid one). Similar stories along the same lines would show up in subsequent collections of Calvino stories, leading to the publication of all of them in the 2009 volume The Complete Cosmicomics. (Calvino died in 1985.) Four of Mezzacappa’s movements are based on stories from the original Cosmicomics.

Bird & Beckett Books and Records provided the Lisa Mezzacappa Six with a five-concert residency, over the course of which the tracks on the Cosmicomics album evolved. Eight of those tracks were inspired by Calvino texts. The other three share the title “Signs;” and each is a structured improvisation. Sadly, my schedule limited me to attending only the third of the Bird & Beckett concerts, which took place on July 5, 2018. That meant that I was unable to attend the first performance of the entire suite at Bird & Beckett on November 3, 2018.

By way of disclaimer, I should confess that I have been hooked on Calvino ever since I read If on a winter’s night a traveler; and I consider myself very fortunate to have experienced a story-theatre dramatization of The Baron in the Trees. I also got hooked on Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy when it was first broadcast as a radio series. As a result, I have a longstanding fascination with literary efforts that can take some unorthodox scientific theory and weave a fiction based on the implications of that theory (the more absurd the better). I like to call the genre “slapstick metaphysics;” and the technique probably goes all the way back to some of the more outlandish comic strips that used to run in the newspapers (Krazy Kat probably being the richest source of all).

That said, Mezzacappa herself explained that the movements of her Cosmicomics suite are not really efforts to realize Calvino’s narratives through music (certainly not in the spirit of Richard Strauss’ attempt to turn Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote into a tone poem). Rather, as she put it, she allowed Calvino’s stories to “fully inhabit my mind for a year.” That “habitation” basically “primed the pump” for her own creativity. During the Bird & Beckett concert I attended, Mezzacappa provided summaries of the the stories that led to the pieces being played that evening. Similar background material can be found on the Bandcamp Web page for the recording.

From a listening point of view, what is probably most interesting is the rich novelty of sonorities. For example, Perkis takes an extended solo with his electronic gear in “All at One Point’ (from the original published collection), which is almost like a vocalist’s aria with accompaniment from the rest of the group. The extent to which that aria is “about” the hypothesis that the entire cosmos was originally compressed into a single dimensionless point is left as an exercise to the listener, and I am perfectly content to let it stand as virtuoso jamming! On the other hand the shimmering reverberations of Clifford’s vibraphone work will probably trigger memories of previous ventures into “space music.”

Of course Mezzacappa is no stranger when exploring territories of new sonorities for her instrument (just as she is no stranger to conducted improvisations). I must confess, however, that, for the most part, I found myself listening to the music on this album as composition and improvisation for its own sake. If we think of each of these tracks as a journey, I suspect that Calvino’s contributions rarely extended beyond the first few steps (if that many). That said, listening to this album amounts to enjoying a splendid eleven-course banquet of innovative sonorities and imaginative jamming. What more can we expect of the serious practice of jazz?