Five(ish) Finds Otherworldly Orbits in the Lab
In a raucous, high-voltage set at SFJAZZ Joe Henderson Lab, Berkeley bassist and composer Lisa Mezzacappa led Five(ish) through the shifting biomes of a newly imagined cosmos. The music moved like weather across alien terrain—dense, electric, alive with sudden turns—yet it was driven by a muscular groove that kept the room leaning forward.
The evening marked a live unveiling of othrwrldly, the final chapter in Mezzacappa’s ambitious cycle of twelve releases issued over a single year. More than a concert, the performance unfolded as speculative cartography: a system of pulses, textures, and eruptive color assembled in real time.
The album’s sonic architecture draws on pulp imagination and literary world-building. Mezzacappa has cited her teenage Dungeons & Dragons campaigns and the speculative fiction of Ursula Le Guin as touchstones, shaping the music as “sonic terrain.” She seeks an intersection of propulsion and atmosphere, where texture carries narrative weight and abstraction coexists with groove. The result depends on what she calls “tight looseness”: deep rehearsal that allows the band to pivot as one organism when the terrain shifts.
Kyle Bruckmann. Photo: Steve Roby
For this performance, Five(ish) expanded to six musicians, each a specialist within the ecosystem. Oboist and electronic artist Kyle Bruckmann toggled between the reedy grain of the acoustic oboe and flickering synth chirps. Tenor saxophonist Aaron Bennett attacked with percussive force, carving angular lines through dense textures. Mark Clifford’s vibraphone cast metallic shimmer across the ensemble, while pianist Brett Carson and drummer Jordan Glenn generated elastic, constantly recalibrated momentum. At the center stood Mezzacappa, her bass lines grounded and tensile, often carrying the heft of industrial machinery.
Even before the first downbeat, the Lab’s intimacy set the tone. When the band name was announced, a voice from the crowd called out, “I count six!” Laughter rippled through the room. Mezzacappa snapped her fingers, launching the opening piece.
“Life is Running Out” established immediate urgency. Staccato bursts fractured into simultaneous layers, each instrument asserting its own trajectory within a shared pulse. Bruckmann’s oboe cut sharply through a synthetic haze, while Mezzacappa’s bowed bass added a serrated texture beneath the ensemble’s interlocking fragments. The effect felt meteorological—sound planes sliding past one another with deliberate friction.
Aaron Bennett. Photo: Steve Roby
The “Biome” pieces followed as studies in ecological imagination. Each segment evoked a distinct habitat through timbre and density. During “Bloom,” Glenn held a cluster of brass bells suspended from a red cord between his teeth, rocking his head so the bells rang in shimmering cycles. Around him, the ensemble sculpted environments that felt brackish, windswept, and tectonic.
Mezzacappa occasionally grounded these abstractions in vivid imagery. She described studying photographs from NASA’s Perseverance rover and translating those Martian landscapes into sound. That framing sharpened the listening experience. Bowed bass and hushed vocalizations conjured an extraterrestrial sigh, gradually coalescing into melody before thinning again into a skeletal dialogue between bass and piano. A sustained oboe tone suspended in the air until the final vibration dissolved.
Throughout the set, the ensemble’s cohesion stood out. Phrases stretched across bar lines, rhythmic layers stacked and unstacked, and motives evolved through subtle shifts in articulation and color. The musicians treated timbre as narrative material: vibraphone overtones glinted against the grain of bowed bass, and the tenor saxophone plunged into cavernous lows before rising into serrated cries.
Lisa Mezzacappa. Photo: Steve Roby
The closing piece, “The Dream, the Reality,” provided the evening’s broadest arc. It opened with the tactile scrape of bow on string and high oboe filaments hovering overhead. Gradually, the group aligned into a driving rhythmic engine. Bennett delivered a full-bodied tenor solo, plunging into resonant low notes before ascending in sharp-edged bursts. The ensemble reconvened for a unified statement that felt both hard-won and inevitable.
By the final cadence, the Lab seemed to contract around the sound. Mezzacappa’s speculative world had taken full shape—intricate, kinetic, and vividly inhabited. Five(ish) moved through its terrain with authority, revealing a band equally committed to groove, texture, and the thrill of collective risk.
Program Notes
Artist: Lisa Mezzacappa Five(ish)
Date: Sunday, February 22, 2026
Showtime: 6:00 p.m.
Venue: Joe Henderson Lab (SFJAZZ Center)
Location: San Francisco
Personnel
Lisa Mezzacappa: bass
Aaron Bennett: tenor saxophone
Kyle Bruckmann: oboe, synth
Mark Clifford: vibraphone
Brett Carson: piano
Jordan Glenn: drums and percussion
Setlist: “Life is Running Out,” “Biome III,” “Biome II (Prelude),” “Biome I,” “Biome II (Prelude),” “Bloom,” “Biome II,” “The Dream, the Reality”
Photos: Steve Roby
You can find Lisa Mezzacappa’s music on Bandcamp.
