You have almost certainly never heard a bassoon do what Michael Rabinowitz makes it do. Not because the instrument can't — it spans three octaves, drops below the baritone saxophone, climbs into tenor range, and its double reed can articulate with a staccato sharp enough to cut glass. But for most of the last century, the bassoon lived in orchestral chairs and film scores, waiting patiently for someone to ask it to improvise. Rabinowitz asked. He's been asking since the late seventies, and by now, the question has been answered so thoroughly that he stands alone as the first musician in jazz history to devote an entire career exclusively to improvising on the instrument.
He picked up the bassoon at sixteen. There were no models for what he wanted to do with it — a handful of doublers like Illinois Jacquet had played jazz on bassoon between other horns, but nobody had committed to it completely. So Rabinowitz taught himself the language by imitating saxophone players, trumpet players, trombonists, translating their phrasing through a double reed that behaves nothing like any of those instruments. He studied at SUNY Purchase, came out in the late seventies, and walked into a New York scene that had no category for him. He made one.
The résumé that followed reads like a dare. Wynton Marsalis. Red Rodney. Joe Lovano. Chris Potter. Dave Douglas. Anthony Braxton. Elvis Costello. He co-founded the Charles Mingus Orchestra — a large ensemble that, like Mingus himself, has always treated unusual instrumentation as a philosophical position rather than a gimmick. He has played the Hollywood Bowl, Tanglewood, Newport, Montreal, Berlin, and the JVC Jazz Festival. He led his own quartet, Bassoon in the Wild, through the Frick Museum and the Vanderbilt Planetarium and the stages of downtown New York. He earned a Chamber Music America grant for a transatlantic collaboration with French oboist Jean-Luc Fillon. And he released seven albums as a leader, composing most of the material himself — music that moves from bebop to free improvisation to something that has no name yet because he's still inventing it.
His most recent record, Next Chapter, arrived on his own Blue Ridge Bassoon Records label — a name that quietly signals where his center of gravity has shifted. The album captures the quartet he assembled at Django in New York City: pianist Matt King, bassist Andy McKee, and drummer Tommy Campbell, four musicians who found an intuitive chemistry almost immediately and have been deepening it since.
There is a strange and beautiful logic to hearing this instrument in a room like Little Jumbo — a space built for sounds that don't quite fit anywhere else, where the weird art watches from the walls and the cocktails are crafted with the same attention to detail that Rabinowitz brings to every phrase. The bassoon's voice is ancient and knowing, comic and mournful in the same breath, capable of a warmth that fills a small room the way sunlight fills a jar. This is music that could not exist anywhere else in the world, played by a musician who spent five decades proving that the instrument everyone overlooked was the one with the most left to say. Free, as always.