Lisa Mezzacappa

My teaching experiences over the past fifteen years have ranged from formal classroom seminars with university graduate students, to ensemble classes with student musicians at Bay Area colleges, to hands-on workshops with high school students and amateur adult musicians, and private instruction in acoustic bass, composition and improvisation.

My primary teaching is focused on a small group of (predominately female) acoustic and electric bass students, from middle school age through to adult. Some play in their high school jazz bands and orchestras, others are adult beginners working to be able to join a community ensemble. A couple are poised to begin careers as professional musicians. As I have often found in my life as a bass student, bass lessons are a mix of technical problem-solving, inspiration, and “musical life-coaching.” My students and I speak about self-confidence, about gender dynamics in the classical and jazz worlds, about ageism on the bandstand. My goal is to help them become complete and confident musicians, ideally lifelong students who I have given the tools to follow their curiosity, develop their voice, and communicate their ideas in any musical contexts they might find themselves in. I tailor their lessons and assignments to help them become strong, solid, bass players but also flexible, imaginative artists. This intimate mentoring experience, with individuals at very different stages of their lives and musical careers, with unique aspirations and concerns, is something I hope would serve me as part of the Mills faculty.

In university settings, I have prepared formal lectures on improvisational practices and key artists and creative movements; taught improvisation to beginning improvisers; coached jazz-trained improvisers in developing their voices in free/nonidiomatic improvisation contexts; and worked with student ensembles to select, arrange and rehearse compositions for performances. This often involved creating listening and composition assignments, and mentoring/critiquing student work as it was in development.

I have also often visited students at UC Berkeley and Mills College in the San Francisco Bay Area as a guest artist in their classes, sharing my work and process as an improviser and composer, and inviting students into the messy, complex process of creating and presenting multi-dimensional  works as an independent artist. They have performed and arranged my compositions, and I have coached them in projects that mirror my own artistic life as part of the Bay Area music community: creating live music scores for experimental film and video; composing, rehearsing and performing graphically notated pieces; harnessing extramusical sources like literature or visual art or science, into original works; and combining notated music and structured improvisation with game pieces and conduction techniques. I hope that all students I interact with come away reflecting on how to add rigor to their process of exploration; how to open themselves to discomfort and failure as part of their creative process; to treasure the joys and struggles of true collaboration; and to maintain a critical perspective towards all the musical approaches and strategies they encounter.

I have also taught workshops as a guest artist in the UC Irvine Integrated Composition, Improvisation, and Technology program; at the University of Nevada, Reno; CalArts; UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music; UC San Diego; Saddleback College; Wesleyan University; the University of Virginia; the CA Jazz Conservatory; the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts youth mentoring program; and through the Jazz in the Neighborhood organization. I have collaborated with improvisation collectives in Vancouver, Canada (the NOW Society); Turin, Italy (Green Brotz); and Naples, Italy (Crossroads Improring), and the Bay Area (Thingamajigs Performance Group) to lead improvisation workshops in conjunction with performances of my music by their ensembles. When I first moved to the Bay Area, I taught small children how to play guitars and basses and drums at a local “school of rock,” Bandworks.