The Maltese Falcon - Film + Performance by Lisa Mezzacappa’s avantNOIR

Bay Area bassist Lisa Mezzacappa’s avantNOIR project perform to open a screening of John Huston’s iconic 1941 adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, starring Humphrey Bogart in his career-defining role as hard-boiled gumshoe Sam Spade. Considered by the late critic Roger Ebert to be one of the greatest films ever made, and appropriately set in San Francisco, The Maltese Falcon was arguably one of the first film noirs, complete with dark motives, long shadows, and femme fatales. The plot concerns Spade’s dealings with three unscrupulous parties, all competing to obtain a jewel-encrusted statuette of a falcon, and co-stars Mary Astor, Peter Lorre, Gladys George and Sydney Greenstreet in his film debut.

Based around Mezzacappa’s Bait & Switch quartet (augmented with percussion and electronics) and inspired by the crime stories of Paul Auster and Dashiell Hammett, avantNOIR takes the elements that make up the film noir experience and re-interpret it in music. In Mezzacappa’s words: "The music progresses like a detective’s case, using clues and imagery from the crime novels such as maps, letters, messages and relationships between characters, numbers and places, to create compositions with acoustic and electric sounds, field recordings and composed and improvised material. The musicians navigate musical clues, cryptograms, found composed fragments and other ‘unsolved’ musical elements to create different versions of the piece for different performances."