Jazz
YB Music · 28 August 2026
“Quieto, Por Favor”, the closing track, starts with Borgani singing a running eighth-note theme in unison with Lucas Sales’s alto sax. Eight bars later the second voice, Marina Marchi, and Marlon Cordeiro’s tenor come in with improvised counterpoint while the opening melody repeats; at bar seventeen both saxes take the theme and Borgani moves off to a legato line. All of that happens in four minutes and ten seconds.
The line-up never changes across the record: two voices and two saxophones, soprano-alto-alto-tenor, with no rhythm section and nothing holding down the harmony. The vocal lines are wordless.
“Colorida” (5:27) is where the written and the improvised share the space best: the soloists improvise over roughly thirty-two-bar segments in a mixed metre of sevens and threes, and the score runs to fourteen pages. “Coro” (2:51), by contrast, is written from top to bottom and takes three.
Four instruments this close in timbre and nobody keeping the pulse make it hard, twenty minutes in, to tell who is carrying the line and who is accompanying it, and the album’s two interludes (one for saxes, one for voices) split the palette instead of widening it. The two pieces that stay with you are the last two, and getting there means crossing twenty-eight minutes of a texture that has already shown everything it has by the first track.
Eight tracks, thirty-seven and a half minutes, out on 28 August on YB Music. Borgani lives in São Paulo, took her master’s at the New England Conservatory and is doing postgraduate work at EMESP Tom Jobim with Tiago Costa, Rodrigo Lima and Nelson Ayres. It’s her first album.
Rating: 7/10
Text by Aina Torrents