Queen Bee: Steve Adams Jams with duo B.

Lisa Mezzacappa, Steve Adams, and Jason Levis (photograph by Emily Olman, courtesy of Queen Bee Records)

Today is the release date for the latest album produced by Queen Bee Records. This is the “house label” for Lisa Mezzacappa, whose adventurous approaches to the bass I have been following for many years. The title of the new album is never but dream the days; and it brings Mezzacappa’s duo B. (performing with drummer Jason Levis) together with Steve Adams. I first encountered Adams when he was one of the members of the ROVA Saxophone Quartet (whose other members were Bruce Ackley, Jon Raskin, and Larry Ochs). For his encounter with duo B., he plays three sizes of saxophone (sopranino, alto, and baritone), two of the less familiar sizes of flute (alto and bass), and electronics.

All eight tracks on the album were recorded on a single afternoon at Myles Boisen’s recording studio in Oakland. Having encountered all three of these performers in different settings, I have some appreciation of the individual approaches to improvisation taken by each of them. Nevertheless, as can be read on the Bandcamp Web page for this new offering, there is “a shared sense of focused, concise and disciplined improvisation” among the three instrumentalists. This is the result of in-the-moment spontaneity in a cerebral context in which each of the three performers has a clear sense of what the other two are doing.

The entire album clocks in at a little more than fifty minutes; but the richness of the performances commands so much attention that any sense of “how time passes” (with apologies to Karlheinz Stockhausen) is likely to be abandoned.