Karen Borca Trio, Quartet & Quintet - Good News Blues

The Free Jazz Collective 0

By Martin Schray

Already the first notes of this album are something special. They are reminiscent of a saxophone, however they are clearly different. The rather low notes are raw and woody, even abrupt. The vibrations of the reed are clearly audible. But the sound is never muffled or blurred, it retains a clear presence at any volume. In other registers, it’s sonorous, sometimes even slender and sharp, which is particularly advantageous in solo passages. We are talking about the bassoon and its master in free jazz: Karen Borca.

Born on September 5, 1948 in Green Bay, Wisconsin, she studied music at the University of Wisconsin. While there, she met Cecil Taylor, who taught at the university during the 1970/1971 academic year. It was, as Ed Hazell puts it in the liner notes of this album, "the single most important event in her career." She studied with him, played in some of his bands and ensembles - first and foremost the Cecil Taylor Unit - and was his assistant while he worked in the Black Music Program at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. She was also an assistant to Taylor’s longtime collaborator, saxophonist Jimmy Lyons, while he was artist-in-residence at Bennington College in Vermont in 1974. Finally, she married Lyons and played in his ensemble until the saxophonist’s death in 1986.

Since then, she has performed as a side woman and with her own ensembles at various great festivals with musicians like William Parker, Bill Dixon, Sabir Mateen, Pheeroan akLaff, Paul Murphy, Alan Silva and Jackson Krall. However, in spite of all the kudos she has got from fellow musicians, she has never released an album as a leader and presenting her own music until this album here, which NoBusiness has put together from two Vision Festival performances from 1998 and 2005.

Good News Blues are four original recordings with alto saxophonist Rob Brown, bassists William Parker, Reggie Workman and Todd Nicholson and drummers Paul Murphy, Susie Ibarra and Newman Taylor-Baker. The title track opening the album is a trio with William Parker and Paul Murphy. A good decision, because none of the four tracks pushes Borca’s sound as strongly to the fore as this one. “Her low notes are nice and big and fat; the middle of the horn is robust and fulsome; and her high notes are clothed in a vibrato that gives them a singing quality. Sometimes her sound is sensuous with a soft luster. At other times it’s gritty and growling, a rough edged abstraction of the blues“ (again Ed Hazell in the liner notes). She also uses special trills and surprising stops, which control the further improvisation depending on length and expressiveness.

In the next pieces (two trios with Rob Brown, William Parker and Susie Ibarra), a different structure of the music is noticeable, and it’s here that Taylor’s influence is most evident. Both begin with a hard bop-like head, held together primarily by bassoon and saxophone. Then the wind players digress individually into their solos, but they complement each other excellently, which has to do with the fact that Borca has found a second Jimmy Lyons in Rob Brown. “The charts changed a lot after I started up with Rob. I got back into the way Jimmy and I reacted to one another. (…) I started specifically writing for two voices. Sometimes the voices were separate and I juxtaposed lines, sometimes in unison“, she said.

The quartet with Brown, Reggie Workman, Todd Nicholson and Newman Taylor-Baker uses the compositional structure of the trios again, but the two double basses (arco and pizzicato) display a different dimension both in sound and texture. On the one hand, they are more subtle and fragile than in the pieces before, because the whole thing is also like a finely woven piece of cloth, when the wind instruments circle around each other in a very elegant way. On the other hand, the solos are very boisterous because bassoon and sax seem to wrestle with each other, which is a pleasure to listen to.

Good News Blues is not only a nice opportunity to get to know Karen Borca as a musician and to discover the bassoon as a jazz instrument. It’s simply an excellent portrayal of a musician who deserves to be more in the limelight. Perhaps this will happen with this release.

Good News Bluesis available on CD and as a download. You can listen to “Good News Blues“ and order the album here: