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Glorious Ravage

Lisa Mezzacappa

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Lisa Mezzacappa Glorious Ravage

Record Details

Released:
2017
Genre:
Jazz

San Francisco Bay Area composer, acoustic bassist, and bandleader, Lisa Mezzacappa used those lines-and more from the writings of Bird and other women adventurers of the 19th and early 20th centuries-to fashion lyrics for her ten-part “panoramic song cycle for improvisers.” Sung by the extraordinary vocalist Fay Victor, those two lines might also be taken to reflect Mezzacappa’s place in the world of progressive and avant-garde jazz.

With Victor’s voice at the core, and musical ideas percolating up from the texts, Mezzacappa tailored the open-ended structure of Glorious Ravage to the gifts, sensibilities, and personalities of the individual musicians. That required her to develop a bigger compositional framework than she had ever built before, and one that could both reflect and refract the multifaceted stories and personas of the women she met in her research and meet the challenge of keeping the composition, in her words, “open to the kind of collective wisdom that emerges from any given musical community.”

Mezzacappa has written that initial inspiration for her work “comes from a messy, unfocused, overwhelming, brilliant, seductive, and terrifying pool of sensations, ideas, gut reactions, intellectual concerns, moral ambiguities.” From that pool has bubbled up something that retains many of those qualities, but that also manifests focus, chemistry, communication, and an emergent sense of both order and transcendence.

Glorious Ravage is a musical exploration of what is possible. Soaring with it can trigger an experience of the sublime, similar to the altitude sickness that Isabella Bird, Ida Pfeiffer, and Annie Smith Peck fell into during their lofty adventures, an ecstatic mind state South Americans called veta or soroche. When Bird wrote in her letter from Hawaii, “This is the height of the last and most glorious ravage,” she could not have foreseen that Lisa Mezzacappa would bring us another of equal magnificence.

Fay Victor, voice
Nicole Mitchell, flute
Kyle Bruckmann, oboe and English horn
Vinny Golia, alto flute, sopranino saxophone, bass clarinet, contralto clarinet, bass saxophone
Cory Wright, B-flat clarinet, tenor saxophone
Darren Johnston, trumpet
Michael Dessen, trombone
Dina Maccabee, viola, violin
John Finkbeiner, electric guitar
Mark Dresser, acoustic bass
Lisa Mezzacappa, acoustic bass, conductor
Myra Melford, piano, harmonium
Kjell Nordeson, vibraphone, percussion
Tim Perkis, electronics
Jordan Glenn, drum set, percussion

LEADER/SOUNDNOISEFUNK – We’ve Had Enough

We've Had Enough

LEADER/FV Albums – BARN SONGS

LEADER/SoundNoiseFUNK – WET ROBOTS

LEADER/FV Albums – ABSINTHE & VERMOUTH

LEADER/FV – KAISO STORIES

Guest: William Parker – Harlem Speaks

William Parker Migration of Silence

GUEST: Roswell Rudd – EMBRACE

LEADER/FV Albums – THE FREESONG SUITE

LEADER/FV Albums – BARE

Exposed Blues Duo - Bare

LEADER/FV Albums – Cartwheels Through the Cosmos

Cartwheels Through the Cosmos

LEADER/FV Albums – LAZY OLD SUN

Fay Victor - Lazy Old Sun

GUEST: Ab Baars’ TRIO + NY Guests

Invisible Blow

COLLECTIVE: ReDDeer

GUEST: Nicole Mitchell – maroon cloud

Maroon Cloud

Guest: Marc Ribot – Songs of Resistance

Songs of Resistence

Guest: Lisa Mezzacappa – Glorious Ravage

Lisa Mezzacappa Glorious Ravage

Guest: Anthony Braxton – Trillium E

Anthony Braxton Trillium E

Guest: Roswell Rudd – Trombone for Lovers

Trombone for Lovers

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