"and the music is unstoppable..." (Preview)

A subscriber post on Substack, on the great bassoonist Karen Borca.

Outside the by-now better-known names of free jazz, Borca’s work offers few external hooks or ways into the music: no Sun Ra theatricality, no Cecil Taylor ritual, no Archie Shepp radical traditionalism. It is a music that speaks for itself, and that demands a commitment of understanding on the part of the listener that moves beyond the merely illustrative. The music does not illustrate something: it is that thing itself. It asks the listener to dig as deep as the musicians dig, to stay with it, to sharpen their faculties on its sharpening invention. But to do so, to stick with it, is one of the richest rewards this music offers.

Borca’s music is work, in all its sense: playing as labor and as invention, the work of intense involvement with the material of sound and its transformation, dancing on the edge, dancing in your head; the work required by the listener to join the dance and be spun up too in it; work as in a product, a body of work, meaningful evidence offered up to the world as to the impact and beauty and grace and power of a person’s art, their contribution to the world. And as work, it seems to sing of the negation of work as exploitation and the emergence of some other form of situation, of invention, the rearrangement of the self in the multiple networks of the social, following the line, worrying it, seeing where it might lead. Work. Good news. And yes, the blues.

We can study this, we can listen to it, we can thrill to it, we can learn from it.