Architect Ken Boroson made his mark in New Haven designing stunning buildings like the renovated Truman School. Now he has picked up a lifelong hobby and turned his mid-life crisis into a new CD.
Boroson spent 15 months and $10,000 putting together The Music Within, 13 tracks, ranging from rock to pop to blues to jazz, about middle age. The CD went on sale this week at Cutler’s and Exile on Main Street and online at cdbaby. You can hear sample tracks here.
These mid-life rock excursions may be becoming a trend for New Haven professionals. Another architect, Eric Epstein, has put together his own CD with some fellow musicians, as is attorney Steve Mednick.
“Three months after I hit 50, the songs erupted. It’s like I didn’t have a choice,” Boroson said. “I felt there was something buried within me that suddenly emerged. Something about turning 50 made that happen.”
Putting songs on a digital recording, for public consumption, can be a scary endeavor for someone with an established reputation in another field. “I felt extraordinarily vulnerable when this came out,” he said in a conversation outside his Erector Square studio. “I wanted to put them all in the basement. You don’t want people to think you’re a flake. It’s a hobby that’s important to me.”
And it’s not all that different from designing buildings, Boroson argued. You embellish a basic jazz chord progression with improvisional riffs the way you embellish a basic building design with ornamental touches; in both cases you take the original structure to a higher level. “Music feeds your creative thinking in a different way,” he said. “There is a huge correlation between music and architecture.”
The Folk Side
He showed what he meant with a trip to the Clinton Avenue School in Fair Haven, one of the city schools he redesigned. He dubbed the main entrance the building’s “acoustic side.” That’s why he’s posing there in the picture with his 30 year-old Guild F50.
The entrance retains the school’s original brick feel with a second-story sea moss-green aluminum triple-arch “tree of knowledge.” The edges along this side of the building are straight in keeping with the original design. Boroson compared it to a traditional song with a a basic set of verses and an “ornamental” bridge , a flair at the center.
“This is the electric side, with the bent notes,” Boroson said of the building’s new second entrance, in the rear. He’s bending the strings of his Godin electric in this photo.
This entrance opens onto a playground and a park. A sidewalk leads to a future community center in the the under-renovation Quinnipiac Terrace complex across the street.
The brick walls of this side of the building bend and curve along one side (with the music room, natch). Boroson designed a row of steel I‑beams, again in the image of trees. Like an electric blues, it adds steel and a freer edge to a traditional basic structure. “This is supposed to be a walk in the park,” he said. “It’s more playful. When you’re on the playground, you play tag or baseball.”
Of, if you’re Ken Boroson, you and friends start jamming at around 12 years old. And you rediscover the joy of that playing in your middle age. Boroson doesn’t plan to stop now. He’s at work on a follow-up CD. Planned title: Down Time. The themes: “This [federal] administration, anxiety and heartache.”