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: