David Borgo is a saxophonist/composer/improviser, ethnomusicologist, and an Associate Professor in the Integrative Studies Program at UCSD. He has a B.M. in Jazz Studies from Indiana University (1990) and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Ethnomusicology from UCLA (1996, 1999).

Borgo won first prize at the 1994 International John Coltrane Festival and he has performed throughout the United States, Europe, Asia and Latin America. He has released five CDs and one DVD as a leader - With and Against (Resurgent Music), Massanetta Springs (Circumvention Music), Reverence for Uncertainty (Circumvention Music), Ubuntu (Cadence Jazz Records), Initial Conditions (Circumvention Music) and Chance, Discovery and Design (Circumvention Music DVD) - and he is a featured collaborator on many others. Borgo's most recent project is an electro-acoustic duo with trumpeter/laptop performer Jeff Kaiser called KaiBorg (kaiborg.com). The duo has performed at STEIM (Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music) in Amsterdam and The University of Göteborg and The Brotz Club in Sweden, and closer to home at the UCHRI "State of the Arts" Festival, The Northwest Electro-Acoustic Music Organization (NWEAMO) Festival, Palomar College Concert Hour, and the Conrad Prebys Music Center at UCSD. A newly recorded CD by the KaiBorg duo will be released soon.

Borgo's book, Sync or Swarm: Improvising Music in a Complex Age, was published by Continuum (hardcover 2005, paperback 2006) and won the Alan P. Merriam Prize in 2006 from the Society for Ethnomusicology as the most distinguished English-language book published during the previous year. Sync or Swarm looks through the lens of contemporary science to illuminate the process and practice of improvising music and explores the ability of improvisation to offer a visceral engagement with the emerging scientific notions of chaos and complexity. Borgo approaches his topic from a systems perspective, as individual chapters expand outward in scope: from the perspective of a solo improviser (English saxophonist Evan Parker); to that of a group interacting in performance and over time (the Sam Rivers Trio); to the network dynamics that bind together performers, listeners, educators, and promoters into a musical community. Each chapter is paired with a different aspect of the emerging sciences, including perspectives from the study of embodied cognition, nonlinear dynamics, self-organizing systems, social networks, and situated and distributed learning.

Borgo's other scholarly work appears in Jazz Perspectives, Black Music Research Journal, American Music, Journal of American History, Journal of Consciousness Studies, Parallax, The Pacific Review of Ethnomusicology, The Society for American Music Bulletin, and Open Space, and he has contributed chapters to the edited volumes Playing Changes: New Jazz Studies (Duke University Press), Algebra, Meaning, and Computation (Springer-Verlag), and Music as Performance: New Perspectives Across the Disciplines (University of Michigan Press).