duo B. on Queen Bee Records

Once again, I can enjoy announcing the release date for the latest album produced by Queen Bee Records. The title of the album is Incomplete, Open; and it is a performance by duo B., which consists of Lisa Mezzacappa on acoustic bass performing with drummer Jason Levis. The album will be released this coming Friday, and Bandcamp has created a Web page for processing pre-orders.

My awareness of Mezzacappa goes all the way back to when I was writing about music for Examiner.com. In the summer of 2015, I was covering the Outsound New Music Summit; and she contributed to a program entitled Comprovisation: the art of compositional improvisation. On that occasion she led her Bait & Switch quartet, whose other members were Aaron Bennett on tenor saxophone, John Finkbeiner on guitar, and Jordan Glenn on drums.

Mezzacappa was working with Levis long before I had that first encounter with her. Indeed, they have been “exploring and expanding the expressive possibilities of the drums-and-bass duo format” since the beginning of this century. Their influences have included Anthony Braxton, Wadada Leo Smith, Cecil Taylor, and Henry Threadgill, each of whom has explored adventurous departures from “traditional” jazz. More explicitly, the album they released in February of last year, Luminous Axis, was a performance of a graphically-notated score by Smith.

Mezzacappa and Levis describe Incomplete,Open as “a suite of improvised←→composed music inspired by the drawings and sculptures of Sol LeWitt.” Indeed, LeWitt created his series of Incomplete Open Cubes between 1974 and 1982, resulting in 122 different ways of “not making a cube, all the ways of the cube not being complete.” The Incomplete,Open suite emerged as “a sonic parallel to Lewitt’s intriguing visual vocabulary.”

I recall begin aware of LeWitt’s work since my student days, but those were in the last century. Since my move to San Francisco, I have had almost no encounters with his work. Fortunately, Wikipedia has provided a low-resolution fair use reproduction of LeWitt’s “Horizontal Lines, Black and Gray,” which captures the spirit of the seven tracks on Incomplete, Open:

This imagery served as a new approach to musical notation, which was then interpreted and realized through each of the seven tracks on the album.

To be fair, I have not devoted much time to aligning the tracks on Incomplete, Open with any of LeWitt’s work. I have focused, instead, on the interplay between the two instrumentalists. Over the course of those seven tracks, there has been more than a generous share of originality in how each of the musicians develops a melodic line and in how those lines engage with each other in a duo performance.