Karen Borca
bassoon
NYC

Bassoonist/composer Karen Borca is one of the best-kept secrets in creative improvised music. She is virtually alone in many fields—for starters as a double-reed player, and specifically as a bassoonist. Karen is neither a saxophonist who branches out to double on bassoon, nor a concert instrumentalist dabbling in Jazz. To say that she is the foremost practitioner of her kind conveys only part of the story: She is a player of choice as an improvising artist. She introduced her persona as a composer and leader in the early Seventies with an eleven piece ensemble which performed at The Newport Festival Salute to Women in Jazz and quartets and quintets appearing at Soundscape, The Berlin Jazz Fest, The Tampere Jazz Happening, (both 1998), The Taktlos Festival in Switzerland, the Vision Festival (since its inception) and many other venues. She has performed and/or recorded with Cecil Taylor, Jimmy Lyons, Bill Dixon, William Parker, Andrew Cyrille, Alan Silva, Denis Charles, Frank Wright, Rob Brown, Newman Taylor-Baker to name a few. She engaged in important concert studies with John Barrows, Arthur Weisberg and the New York Woodwind Quintet. Through her awareness of the Jazz tradition among her varied roots, Karen Borca has dignified the bassoon as an impressive front-line instrument. Her playing and compositions and improvisations continue to maintain the vital freshness forever at the core of this music. Remarking on a retrospective of Lyons’s activities, Bill Shoemaker found hers to be "...the crucial catalytic voice… the most dazzling double-reed player in jazz history."

photo: Peter Gannushkin (downtownmusic.net)