David Borgo

DAVID BORGO is an Associate Professor of Music at UC San Diego where he teaches in the Integrative Studies (IS) and Jazz and Music of the African Diaspora (JMAD) Programs. He has a B.M. degree in Jazz Studies from Indiana University and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Ethnomusicology from UCLA. As a saxophonist, David won first prize at the International John Coltrane Festival (1994) and he has toured widely both in the U.S. and abroad, including featured performances in Sweden, Holland, Armenia, Hong Kong, Macau, and Mexico City.

David has released seven CDs and one DVD under his own name and his book, Sync or Swarm: Improvising Music in a Complex Age (Continuum 2005) won the Alan Merriam Prize in 2006 from the Society for Ethnomusicology as the most distinguished book published during the previous year. David's other scholarly work appears in Jazz Perspectives, Black Music Research Journal, Journal of Popular Music Studies, American Music, Journal of American History, Journal of Consciousness Studies, Parallax, Open Space, and in the forthcoming edited volume Music as Performance: New Perspectives Across the Disciplines (Michigan University Press, Nicholas Cook and Richard Pettengill, eds.).

David has presented research at conferences organized by the Society for Ethnomusicology, The Sonneck Society for American Music, The International Association for the Study of Popular Music, The International Society for Improvised Music, The International Association of Jazz Educators, and the College Music Society, as well as at The Guelph Jazz Colloquium, The Improvising Across Borders conference at UCSD, The Leeds International Jazz Education Conference and the Conference on Interdisciplinary Musicology in Graz, Austria.

He currently performs with his electro-acoustic duo, KaiBorg (kaiborg.com), which explores the intersections between live audio and video processing and free improvisation, and with his sextet Kronomorfic (kronomorfic.com), which explores polymetric time.