All,
Kofi
https://www.nytimes.com/…/ar…/anthony-braxton-composer.html…
All,
While doing personal research on this extensive tribute and retrospective in honor of Anthony Braxton's 68th birthday on June 4 I ran across this very good news item (see below). So hearty congratulations are due Brother Braxton who is not only an outstanding multi-instrumentalist, musician and composer but a very fine person as well. For once the well worn accolade/cliche "it couldn't happen to a nicer or more deserving guy" actually applies in a number of different ways. To say I'm sincerely happy for him and all that he has thus far accomplished in an extraordinary career and life would be an understatement. Well done Anthony...
Kofi
Wesleyan University’s Anthony Braxton Wins $225,000 Doris Duke Artist Award
Anthony Braxton, the John Spencer Camp Professor of Music at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, received a 2013 Doris Duke Artist Award. The award program, established in 2011, supports performing artists in contemporary dance, theatre, jazz, and related interdisciplinary work. The award comes with a $225,000 honorarium.
https://soundprojections.blogspot.com/…/sound-projections-o…
Saturday, November 1, 2014
Anthony Braxton (b. June 4, 1945):
Legendary, iconic, and innovative musician, composer,
arranger, philosopher, music theorist, producer, public intellectual and teacher
FULL DISCLOSURE: I am a huge Anthony Braxton fan and I must also
honestly admit almost damn near a slavish critical acolyte of his
extraordinary work (OUCH!...I know, huh?). Always have been. Always
will be... Take it away AB...
https://www.nytimes.com/…/ar…/anthony-braxton-composer.html…
Anthony Braxton Composes Together Past, Present and Future
by Seth Colter Walls
January 11, 2019
New York Times
by Seth Colter Walls
January 11, 2019
New York Times
Anthony Braxton has spent much of the last four years on “Trillium L,”
his newest opera. He does not know if it will ever be performed. But he
is determined to finish it.CreditCreditCody O'Loughlin for The New York
Times
Anthony Braxton retired from academia in 2013, but at 73, he is far
from idle. That much is clear when I recently walked into his apartment
in Connecticut, a couple of dozen miles away from Wesleyan University,
where he taught for more than two decades.
After shaking my hand
and taking my coat, this composer and saxophonist — a MacArthur “genius”
grant winner, an N.E.A. Jazz Master and an eminence in improvisation
and contemporary composition — showed me into a small but comfortable
study, stacked with reams of large-format score pages.
This was
“Trillium L,” the next opera in his long-gestating cycle of works for
the stage. Each act of a “Trillium” opera tells a different story, while
using the same cast of singers, who rotate roles. Playing with stock
genres — including elements of gangster noir, futuristic dystopia and
cutthroat boardroom intrigue — has given Mr. Braxton the chance to
explore ideas regarding cultural progress (or lack thereof). But gonzo,
satirical humor often leavens the fundamental seriousness, in both sound
and word.
A previous four-act opera in the series, “Trillium J,”
made a memorable impression when it was performed at Roulette, in
Brooklyn, in 2014. (It is available in a variety of audio and video
formats.) Since then, Mr. Braxton has completed “Trillium X,” which his
Tri-Centric Foundation, devoted to supporting his work, hopes to record
soon.
PHOTO: Mr. Braxton and the (very) large-format score for
his next opera, “Trillium L.”CreditCody O'Loughlin for The New York
Times
He has spent much of the last four years on “Trillium L,”
writing the libretto and coming up with rhythms for the singers and
“guide tones” — essentially a floor of drone pitches — that will
undergird the orchestral writing. The meat of the orchestration will
come soon, now that those basic parameters have been set.
“The first story is about Ashton Downs,” he said, turning over the initial pages of the score. “My new hero.”
Having glanced at the lengthy libretto, I mentioned that this character
seems like a striking addition to the Braxton operatic canon: a secret
agent gifted in karate.
“He’s gonna beat the spit out of James
Bond, in the future,” Mr. Braxton joked, using a saltier word. “That’s
when I’ll make my money.”
“By the way,” he added, “this is a
five-day opera.” He smiled knowingly when I mentioned that “Sonntag aus
Licht” — the final opera by one of his heroes, Karlheinz Stockhausen —
occasionally takes two days to perform. (There may be an aspect of
cheerful one-upmanship going on here.)
Mr. Braxton admitted that
he did not know whether “Trillium L” would ever be performed. But he is
determined to finish it, and soon.
PHOTO: The writing desk in Mr. Braxton’s study in Connecticut.CreditCody O'Loughlin for The New York Times
Other ambitious projects are closer to being realized. Later this
month, Mr. Braxton’s label is releasing a 12-album set of his
“Syntactical Ghost Trance Music.” Given the title “GTM (Syntax) 2017,”
the set offers a revelatory new perspective on a series of works that
once occupied him.
Originally inspired by classes Mr. Braxton
took on Native American ritual music, his early “Ghost Trance Music”
pieces — like Composition No. 181, from 1995 — featured purposely
wandering, seemingly unending single-line melodies that unfurled with a
pulsing, meditative quality.
“I discovered there’s a trance music
coming from every direction, and every ethnic group,” he said. “And I
found myself feeling that not only did I love this music, but it was
relevant for me. I had come to a point where ‘intellectual interesting’
was not what I was looking for.”
In later “Ghost Trance” pieces,
rat-a-tat subdivisions of select beats started to interfere with this
even-keel patterning. (Mr. Braxton described this as “pulses with
abruption.”) By the time of Composition No. 340, in the mid-2000s, these
abruptions had multiplied.
Graphic notation elements, including
some vivid, color-coded schemes, became nearly as prominent as the
melody. Along with some of Mr. Braxton’s other conceptual strategies —
like “secondary material” at the end of a composition that could be
inserted throughout a performance — he increasingly emphasized the
possibility of miasmatic swirl.
Stay on top of the latest in pop and jazz with reviews, interviews, podcasts and more from The New York Times music critics.
PHOTO: A page from Mr. Braxton’s Composition No. 340 gives a glimpse of his color-coded notation.CreditTri-Centric Foundation
Yet even at its most raucous, the “Ghost Trance” catalog radiates joy
and good humor. In the new box set, 12 vocalists tackle “Ghost Trance”
styles from a decade-long compositional span — giving a relatively fleet
tour of their variety. (The ensemble will perform at Roulette on Jan.
25.)
“For me the ‘Syntactical Ghost Trance’ compositions give
insight into the expansion of the system, moving from sonics into
signals into ritual,” Mr. Braxton said. “It involves people suddenly
coming together in communities. The art of the relationship. How to deal
with each other.”
Several of the singers are veterans of past
“Trillium” performances, and it shows. When realizing some of the more
extreme qualities of Mr. Braxton’s writing — like the hailstorm of
sci-fi-style syllables that make up the “syntax” of these particular
“Ghost Trance” pieces — the ensemble’s nimbleness and warmth suggest a
highly caffeinated updating of Gregorian chant. And the vocalists’
collective understanding of Mr. Braxton’s flexible performance
instructions makes the set an exciting document not only of “Ghost
Trance Music,” but of his processes in general.
As in his widely
celebrated, jazz-inspired quartet music from the 1980s, Mr. Braxton is
keen to have different compositions layered atop one another. “One of
the areas that interests me is taking stable logics and changing it into
mutable logics,” he said. “Taking mutable logics and changing it into
stable logics. Improvisation becomes composition. Composition becomes
improvisation.”
During a new performance of Composition No. 220,
the vocal troupe responds to this invitation by inserting the bebop-like
melody from Composition No. 85, from 1978.
Not long after, that vintage melody slips underneath new Composition No. 220 motifs.
Not long after, that vintage melody slips underneath new Composition No. 220 motifs.
Composition No. 220
Tri-Centric Foundation
Composition No. 85
Tri-Centric Foundation and Andrew Voigt
Tri-Centric Foundation
Composition No. 85
Tri-Centric Foundation and Andrew Voigt
As a result, music from different decades intermingles amiably — and
gives a sense of the vast interpretive possibilities that subsequent
generations of artists might yet bring to Mr. Braxton’s catalog. The
rush of invention here captures an idea from his “system notes” for
“Ghost Trance Music”: “past, present and future as one unit.”
As
he drove us to a nearby Ruby Tuesday for dinner, Mr. Braxton emphasized
that the Tri-Centric Foundation is not devoted only to his work. He
mentioned a recent orchestral recording by the saxophonist Ingrid
Laubrock, a frequent collaborator of his, and noted with pride that an
earlier performance of some of that material was presented by the
Tri-Centric Orchestra.
Close associates of Mr. Braxton run the
foundation and administer his label, New Braxton House. You can’t find
the label on any streaming service. But the entirety of his
self-released material has recently appeared on the Bandcamp platform,
where impulse buyers can pick among individual projects, or acquire the
whole digital catalog at a 25-percent discount.
That price
naturally changes every time Mr. Braxton adds an 11-plus-hour recording
to the mix. But at present, you can acquire more than 100 hours of his
work for around $700. (That includes solo-saxophone sets,
electroacoustic music, orchestral recordings and several 4-act
“Trillium” operas — as well as nearly a dozen hours of Mr. Braxton’s
ecstatic 1990s dive into the music of Charlie Parker.)
The
Tri-Centric team is currently looking for additional donors — and album
purchasers — to help with the cost of making more of Mr. Braxton’s
scores and writings available. A raft of performances is being prepared
to honor his 75th birthday, in 2020. And Tri-Centric also has ambitions
to produce more recordings of various projects, including the “Trillium”
operas.
Mr. Braxton wants it all to go on, even after his
writing ends. “I have real hope that New Braxton House can somehow fight
for its life,” he said. But he quickly added: “I am not ready to
retire. And so I’ve got some cards up my sleeve.”
Keeping his eyes on the road ahead of him, he said, “This dog is not finished.”
A version of this article appears in print on Jan. 12, 2019, on Page
AR8 of the New York edition with the headline: A MacArthur ‘Genius’
Composes for the Future. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper
Saturday, November 1, 2014
Anthony Braxton (b. June 4, 1945): Legendary, iconic, and innovative musician, composer, cultural critic, arranger, philosopher, music theorist, producer, public intellectual and teacher
FROM THE PANOPTICON REVIEW ARCHIVES
(Orginally posted on June 5, 2013):
Wednesday, June 5, 2013
"Going Outside the Categories That Are Assigned To Me": The Profound
& Visionary Life, Art, and Work of Anthony Braxton
"I am viewed as the Negro who has gone outside of the categories assigned to me." —Anthony Braxton
"I am interested in the study of music and the discipline of music
and the experience of music and music as an esoteric mechanism to
continue my real intentions." —Anthony Braxton
"I'm seeking to have an art that is engaged as a way for saying, 'Hurray for unity'."
—Anthony Braxton
—Anthony Braxton
“For me the most basic assumption that dictated my early attempts
to respond to creative music commentary was the mistaken belief that
western journalists had some fundamental understanding of black
creativity—or even western creativity—but this assumption was seriously
in error.”
―Anthony Braxton, The Tri-Axium Writings
―Anthony Braxton, The Tri-Axium Writings
"I know I’m an African-American, and I know I play the saxophone,
but I’m not a jazz musician. I’m not a classical musician, either. My
music is like my life: It’s in between these areas."
—Anthony Braxton
—Anthony Braxton
"All great artists are beyond category"
—Duke Ellington
—Duke Ellington
All,
The aesthetic, social, and cultural history of music generally over the
past century in the (so-called) 'Western world' not only represents an
enormously complex, complicated, and contentious creativity and
innovation but is rooted in and deeply dependent upon a vast array of
generic and idiosyncratic styles, traditions, genres, idioms,
methodologies, and expressive identities. These structural, spiritual,
and analytical modes of music making encompass a very broad and
expansive territory of human concerns, issues, and expectations within
the larger society, as well as profound individual emotional and
psychological needs and desires that are simultaneously embodied and
represented by these (creative) musical acts in public concert and
collaboration with others (both like-minded and opposed). These
conscious and subconscious attempts to engage, enhance, critique,
celebrate, and transform society and culture via the immense
environmental forcefield and sustained focused power of sonic
intervention and expression in all of its many permutations and
elliptical methods (whether they be encrypted or encoded in the formal
"traditional/conventional" vocabularies and systems of melody, harmony,
and rhythm or via other paths of producing and reproducing sound
constructs), constitute what is "meant" by the term "music" in our time
(zone).
Thus the 'classical' and 'popular music' traditions,
styles, conceptions and forms of composition and improvisation (be they
described/defined by the imposed advertising and thus commercial labels
of "Jazz", "blues", rhythm and blues", "pop", "gospel", "funk", "hiphop"
etc. et al) have served as a largely deceptive yet accepted means of
identifying and classifying what sound formations can and "should be"
used to convey these powerful sonic messages within the institutional
structures and strictures established by the self appointed arbiters of
musical taste and consumption. However there has always been throughout
this highly volatile, contradictory, and conflicted history a
significant number of sonic pioneers, adventurers, and creative
activists who have openly challenged this status quo and have educated
us all to the power, beauty, and necessity of asserting alternative
notions of what we can and choose to do with our collective (and
individual) sonic legacies and inheritances. No matter what specific or
general "fields" these 'planters of sound' happen to harvest we not
only know their names (they are indeed legion!) but we absorb, inhabit,
embrace, and greatly benefit from their creative and visceral gifts
embodied in the art and science of their sound. In the U.S. and beyond
they have come from every cultural, "ethnic", spiritual. and gender
enclave on earth and have been instrumental (get it?) in openly
confronting and transforming our very lives. Many sterling examples
abound: Armstrong, Ellington, Coleman, Ives, Stockhausen, Henderson,
Morton, Schoenberg, Monk, Glass, Stravinsky, Stitt, Gordon, Silver,
Washington, Holiday, Basie, Sinatra, Hendrix, Parker, Sun Ra,
Fitzgerald, Vaughan, Carter (Elliot, Benny, and Betty), Franklin,
Mayfield, Marley, Fela, Jackson (Mahalia and Michael), Partch, Varese,
Gershwin, Hindemith, Bartok, Dylan, Wilson, Cowell, Prince, Berry,
Davis, Coltrane, Powell, Rollins, Blakey, Shorter, Tatum, Webern,
Copland, Hancock, Williams, Stone, Webster, Young, Robeson, Gaye,
Wonder, Taylor, Robinson, Warwick, Johnson, Bacharach, Wolf, Hooker,
Hopkins, Waters, James (Elmore and Etta), Khan, Mitchell (Blue and
Roscoe), Smith, Abrams, Ayler, Mingus, Dolphy, Gillespie, Xenakis,
Cage, Kirk, Brown (James and Clifford), Shepp, Roach, Lincoln, etc. et
al...
Thus it is no surprise that one of the major names in this
grand pantheon (and has been now for nearly 50 years!) is Mr. Anthony
Braxton who tirelessly works and creates within an immense omniverse of
influences, inheritances, and legacies culled from a colossal living
archive of sound in all its many dimensions and in all the worlds he and
we inhabit and live in. We owe Anthony and his many legendary
forebears, contemporaries, colleagues, and peers a very deep and lasting
debt that can only truly be repaid by listening...Happy birthday Mr.
Braxton and to the rest of us: ENJOY...
Kofi
ANTHONY BRAXTON
(B. JUNE 4, 1945)
New Musical Configurations: Anthony Braxton's Cultural Critique
by Ronald M. Radano
by Ronald M. Radano
Hardback/Cloth
336 Pages
University Of Chicago Press, 1993
336 Pages
University Of Chicago Press, 1993
"New Musical Figurations" exemplifies a dramatically new way of
configuring jazz music and history. By relating biography to the
cultural and musical contours of contemporary American life, Ronald M.
Radano observes jazz practice as part of the complex interweaving of
postmodern culture--a culture that has eroded conventional categories
defining jazz and the jazz musician. Radano accomplishes all this by
analyzing the creative life of Anthony Braxton, one of the most
emblematic figures of this cultural crisis.
Author: Ronald M. Radano
336 pages | 5 halftones, 19 line drawings | 6 x 9 | © 1993
336 pages | 5 halftones, 19 line drawings | 6 x 9 | © 1993
New Musical Figurations exemplifies a dramatically new way of
configuring jazz music and history. By relating biography to the
cultural and musical contours of contemporary American life, Ronald M.
Radano observes jazz practice as part of the complex interweaving of
postmodern culture—a culture that has eroded conventional categories
defining jazz and the jazz musician. Radano accomplishes all this by
analyzing the creative life of Anthony Braxton, one of the most
emblematic figures of this cultural crisis.
Born in 1945, Braxton
is not only a virtuoso jazz saxophonist but an innovative theoretician
and composer of experimental art music. His refusal to conform to the
conventions of official musical culture has helped unhinge the very
ideologies on which definitions of "jazz," "black music," "popular
music," and "art music" are founded.
New Musical Figurations
gives the richest view available of this many-sided artist. Radano
examines Braxton’s early years on the South Side of Chicago, whose
vibrant black musical legacy inspired him to explore new avenues of
expression. Here is the first detailed history of Braxton’s central role
in the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the
principal musician-run institution of free jazz in the United States.
After leaving Chicago, Braxton was active in Paris and New York,
collaborating with Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Frederic Rzewski, and
other composers affiliated with the experimental-music movement. From
1974 to 1981, he gained renown as a popular jazz performer and recording
artist. Since then he has taught at Mills College and Wesleyan
University, given lectures on his theoretical musical system, and
written works for chamber groups as well as large, opera-scale pieces.
The neglect of radical, challenging figures like Braxton in standard
histories of jazz, Radano argues, mutes the innovative voice of the
African-American musical tradition. Refreshingly free of technical
jargon, New Musical Figurations is more than just another variation on
the same jazz theme. Rather, it is an exploratory work as rich in
theoretical vision as it is in historical detail.
IN CELEBRATION OF THE LIFE, WORK, AND CAREER OF MASTER MUSICIAN AND COMPOSER ANTHONY BRAXTON ON HIS 68th BIRTHDAY!
http://www.jbhe.com/2013/05/wesleyan-universitys-anthony-braxton-wins-225000-doris-duke-artist-award/
http://www.jbhe.com/2013/05/wesleyan-universitys-anthony-braxton-wins-225000-doris-duke-artist-award/
All,
While doing personal research on this extensive tribute and retrospective in honor of Anthony Braxton's 68th birthday on June 4 I ran across this very good news item (see below). So hearty congratulations are due Brother Braxton who is not only an outstanding multi-instrumentalist, musician and composer but a very fine person as well. For once the well worn accolade/cliche "it couldn't happen to a nicer or more deserving guy" actually applies in a number of different ways. To say I'm sincerely happy for him and all that he has thus far accomplished in an extraordinary career and life would be an understatement. Well done Anthony...
Kofi
https://soundprojections.blogspot.com/…/sound-projections-o…
Saturday, November 1, 2014
Anthony Braxton (b. June 4, 1945): Legendary, iconic, and innovative musician, composer, arranger,philosopher, music theorist, producer, public intellectual and teacher
2014 NEA Jazz Masters Awards Ceremony & Concert, Part 2
National Endowment for the Arts
Published on March 12, 2014
2014 NEA Jazz Masters Jamey Aebersold, Anthony Braxton, Richard Davis, and Keith Jarrett were honored at the NEA Jazz Masters Awards Ceremony & Concert at Lincoln Center on January 13, 2014. Hosted by Wynton Marsalis and Soledad O'Brien, the event included brief tribute videos, remarks by the awardees about their careers and influences, and performances by current and previously-named NEA Jazz Masters along with guest musicians.
This segment's speakers included: NEA Jazz Master Muhal Richard Abrams on 2014 honoree Anthony Braxton and Braxton on his career and creative philosophy. Poet and former NEA deputy A.B. Spellman introduced the tribute to the seven NEA Jazz Masters who died this past year. Performances included renditions of Anthony Braxton's "Trillium J" and NEA Jazz Master Frank Wess's "Placitude."
http://arts.gov/honors/jazz/jmCMS/master.php…
2014 NEA Jazz Master
Anthony Braxton
Born June 4, 1945 in Chicago, Ilinois
Saxophonist, Clarinetist, Flautist, Composer, Educator, Author
Published on January 6, 2014
"For me, the recognition of my place in creative American music is quite a surprise--welcome surprise, that comes at the right time in my life. To be named an NEA Jazz Master recipient opens the door of reconciliation to the whole of my musical and cultural family, and completes my "inner nature and balance" in the most positive way. This is so because no matter the nomenclature, I have never separated myself from the great men and women whose creative work changed and elevated my life--and reason for wanting to live. The NEA Jazz Master family has profoundly shaped the dynamics of American and world culture--it doesn't get any better than this family. The story of creative music is the story of America and the story of composite human vibrational dynamics. The discipline of creative music is one of the greatest gifts that the cosmic forces have given us."
"My music occupies a space in between defined idioms." So stated Anthony Braxton, succinctly capturing the nature of his compositions, as complex and enigmatic as the diagrams he creates for their titles. While he might not consider the music he currently makes as "jazz," certainly the improvised and rhythmic nature of the music he began playing 50 or more years ago still influence him, and his performances on his "In the Tradition" recordings demonstrate his ability to play the standards beautifully.
Braxton began playing music as a youth growing up in Chicago. He then attended the Chicago School of Music from 1959-1963, and went on to Roosevelt University to study philosophy and composition. Braxton joined the U.S. Army in 1963 and played saxophone in an Army band; upon his discharge in 1966, he returned to Chicago where he joined the newly formed Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). In 1968, he recorded For Alto, a double-album of unaccompanied saxophone, which is considered a landmark jazz solo instrumental recording.
In 1970, after a short-lived stint with Barry Altschul, Chick Corea, and Dave Holland in the avant-garde group Circle, Braxton began leading his own bands in New York City, recording in a variety of settings, from duos of saxophone and Moog synthesizer to full orchestras. His music was moving away from even traditional jazz avant-garde and moving toward its own idiosyncratic voice. In the 1980s and 1990s, Braxton's regular performing quartet included Marilyn Crispell, Mark Dresser, and Gerry Hemingway, although he continued to record and perform with a variety of musicians both in and out of the jazz genre.
For the past 20 years, Braxton has been focusing on large-scale musical projects, such as the Ghost Trance Music he began working on in the mid-1990s to create a "melody that doesn't end" with performers determining what parts to play. His Falling River Music uses large, colorful drawings to direct the musicians, but again, lets the performers determine their own way through the compositions. Diamond Curtain Wall Music takes the Falling River Music further using interactive electronics. Braxton also released an increasing number of works for large orchestras and his Trillium operas cycles.
He has taught at Mills College and currently is professor of music at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, teaching music composition, music history, and improvisation. He also authored multiple volumes explaining his theories and pieces. In 2010, he revived his dormant nonprofit Tri-Centric Foundation (originally created in 1994) to support the dissemination of his work. Among his awards, he received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1994 and was honored with the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award for his lifetime achievements in jazz in 2013.
Selected Discography:
For Alto, Delmark, 1968
The Complete Arista Recordings of Anthony Braxton, Mosaic, 1974-1980
The Complete Remastered Recordings on Black Saint & Soul Note, Black Saint, 1978-1994
9 Compositions (Iridium) 2006, Firehouse 12, 2006
Trillium E, New Braxton House, 2010
NEA 2014 Jazz Masters: Interview with Anthony Braxton
National Endowment for the Arts s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZLEi65z7YA
http://www.jazzdiscography.com/Artists/Braxton/index.php
Anthony Braxton Project
This is a collaborative attempt to document all Anthony Braxton appearances, whether recorded or not. Comments, additions, corrections via email to braxtonproject at yahoo.com
Please visit the official Anthony Braxton website
Anthony Braxton is widely and critically acclaimed as a seminal figure in the music of the late 20th and early 21st century. His work, both as saxophonist and composer, has broken new conceptual and technical ground in the trans-African and trans-European (aka "jazz" and American Experimental) musical traditions in North America; traditions defined by master improvisers such as Warne Marsh, John Coltrane, Paul Desmond, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, and Braxton and his own peers in the historic Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians; and by American composers such as Charles Ives, Harry Partch, and John Cage. Braxton has developed a unique and personal musical language through a synthesis of those American traditions with 20th-century European art music as defined by Schoenberg, Stockhausen, Xenakis, Varese and others. Braxton’s extensions of instrumental technique, timbre, meter and rhythm, voicing and ensemble make-up, harmony and melody, and improvisation and notation have revolutionized modern American music.
Braxton's five decades worth of recorded output is kaleidoscopic and prolific, with well over 150 recordings to his credit. He has won and continues to win prestigious awards and critical praise, including the MacArthur “genius grant” Fellowship. Books, anthology chapters, scholarly studies, reviews and interviews and other media and academic attention to him and his work have also accumulated steadily and increasingly throughout the years. His own self-published writings about the musical traditions from which he works and their historical and cultural contexts (Tri-Axium Writings 1-3) and his five-volume Composition Notes A-E are unparalleled by artists from the oral and unmatched by those in the literate tradition.
Braxton is a tenured professor at Wesleyan University, one of the world's centers of world music. His teaching career began at Mills College in Oakland, California, and has become as much a part of his creative life as his own work. It includes training and leading performance ensembles and private tutorials in his own music, computer and electronic music, and history courses in the music of his major musical influences, from the Western Medieval composer Hildegard von Bingen to contemporary masters like Cage and Coleman.
Braxton's name continues to stand for the broadest integration of oft-conflicting poles in the current cultural debates about the nature and place of the Western and African-American musical traditions in America, poles such as “creative freedom” and “responsibility”, discipline and energy, and vision of the future and respect for tradition. The music of his newest ensembles brings to that debate a voice that is fresh and strong, still as creative as ever even as it takes on the authority of a seasoned master. 2005 was a watershed year, as Braxton celebrated his 60th birthday and the AACM celebrated its 40th anniversary, and in performances throughout the world, Braxton was again recognized as one of the preeminent figures in contemporary creative music.
Chapter One
1962-1969
Chapter Two
1969-1970
Chapter Three
1970-1971
Chapter Four
1971-1979 [draft]
Appendices
Index of compositions
Index of issues
Index of personnel
Listing of abbreviations used
While this is the most comprehensive and accurate chronology of Anthony Braxton ever produced, there still may be omissions and errors. Please help if you can.
This project results from the collective efforts of the Anthony Braxton Project, coordinated by Jonathan Piper.
Photo courtesy Jason Guthartz.
Thanks to contributors:
David Beardsley, Kirby Bell, Bart Borgmans, Tom Bowden, Frank Büchmann-Møller, Jean-Philippe Burg, Jan Carlsson, Bhreandain Clugston, Marilyn Crispell, Andrew Raffo Dewar, Andreas Dietz, William Fielder, Michael Fitzgerald, Kevin Frenette, Franz Fuchs, Jason Guthartz, Patrick Herwarth, Timo Hoyer, Larry Kart, Bob Lambert, Dirk de Leeuw, George Lewis, John Litweiler, Alberto Lofoco, Rick Lopez, Ronald Lyles, Terry Martin, Francesco Martinelli, Martin Milgrim, Chuck Nessa, AgustÃn Pérez, Patrick Pohlmann, Michael Rosenstein, Henning Schenck, John Sharpe, Damon Short, Leo Smith, Jens Tilsner, Jeroen de Valk, Uwe Weiler, David Wight, Nils Winther, Russell Woessner
and Anthony Braxton.
Sources:
Walter Bruyninckx: 85 Years of Recorded Jazz
Safford Chamberlain: An Unsung Cat, Lanham, MD, Scarecrow Press, 2001.
Michael Cuscuna & Michel Ruppli: The Blue Note Label, Westport, CT, Greenwood Press, 2001.
John Gray: Fire Music: A Bibliography of the New Jazz, 1959-1990, Westport, CT, Greenwood Press, 1991.
Graham Lock: Forces In Motion, New York, Da Capo Press, 1988. (GL)
Tom Lord: The Jazz Discography, v. 5.0 2004, v. 6.0 2005, Lord Music (Lord CDROM)
Francesco Martinelli: Anthony Braxton - A Discography, Bandecchi e Vivaldi, Pontedera, Italy, 2000. (FM)
Erik Raben: Jazz Records, 1942-1980,
Ronald M. Radano: New Musical Figurations: Anthony Braxton's Cultural Critique, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1993.
Michel Ruppli: The Atlantic Label, Westport, CT, Greenwood Press, .
Hans Wachtmeister: A Discography & Bibliography Of Anthony Braxton, Stocksund, Sweden, Blue Anchor, 1982. (HW)
Peter Niklas Wilson: Anthony Braxton
Cadence (Cad)
The Chicago Defender
The Chicago Tribune (CT)
Coda
Down Beat (db)
Elyria Chronicle-Telegram
Jazz & Pop (J&P)
Jazz Journal (JJ)
The Los Angeles Times (LAT)
The New York Times (NYT)
Oakland Tribune
The Washington Post (WP)
Wire
All-Music Guide
Anthony Braxton Discography by Jason Guthartz
The Chicago Jazz Archive at the University of Chicago
Moers Festival
Rutgers Institute of Jazz Studies
U.S. Library of Congress
VIDEO: 2014 NEA Jazz Masters Awards Ceremony and Concert, Part 2
Saturday, November 1, 2014
Anthony Braxton (b. June 4, 1945): Legendary, iconic, and innovative musician, composer, arranger,philosopher, music theorist, producer, public intellectual and teacher
2014 NEA Jazz Masters Awards Ceremony & Concert, Part 2
National Endowment for the Arts
Published on March 12, 2014
2014 NEA Jazz Masters Jamey Aebersold, Anthony Braxton, Richard Davis, and Keith Jarrett were honored at the NEA Jazz Masters Awards Ceremony & Concert at Lincoln Center on January 13, 2014. Hosted by Wynton Marsalis and Soledad O'Brien, the event included brief tribute videos, remarks by the awardees about their careers and influences, and performances by current and previously-named NEA Jazz Masters along with guest musicians.
This segment's speakers included: NEA Jazz Master Muhal Richard Abrams on 2014 honoree Anthony Braxton and Braxton on his career and creative philosophy. Poet and former NEA deputy A.B. Spellman introduced the tribute to the seven NEA Jazz Masters who died this past year. Performances included renditions of Anthony Braxton's "Trillium J" and NEA Jazz Master Frank Wess's "Placitude."
http://arts.gov/honors/jazz/jmCMS/master.php…
2014 NEA Jazz Master
Anthony Braxton
Born June 4, 1945 in Chicago, Ilinois
Saxophonist, Clarinetist, Flautist, Composer, Educator, Author
Published on January 6, 2014
"For me, the recognition of my place in creative American music is quite a surprise--welcome surprise, that comes at the right time in my life. To be named an NEA Jazz Master recipient opens the door of reconciliation to the whole of my musical and cultural family, and completes my "inner nature and balance" in the most positive way. This is so because no matter the nomenclature, I have never separated myself from the great men and women whose creative work changed and elevated my life--and reason for wanting to live. The NEA Jazz Master family has profoundly shaped the dynamics of American and world culture--it doesn't get any better than this family. The story of creative music is the story of America and the story of composite human vibrational dynamics. The discipline of creative music is one of the greatest gifts that the cosmic forces have given us."
"My music occupies a space in between defined idioms." So stated Anthony Braxton, succinctly capturing the nature of his compositions, as complex and enigmatic as the diagrams he creates for their titles. While he might not consider the music he currently makes as "jazz," certainly the improvised and rhythmic nature of the music he began playing 50 or more years ago still influence him, and his performances on his "In the Tradition" recordings demonstrate his ability to play the standards beautifully.
Braxton began playing music as a youth growing up in Chicago. He then attended the Chicago School of Music from 1959-1963, and went on to Roosevelt University to study philosophy and composition. Braxton joined the U.S. Army in 1963 and played saxophone in an Army band; upon his discharge in 1966, he returned to Chicago where he joined the newly formed Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). In 1968, he recorded For Alto, a double-album of unaccompanied saxophone, which is considered a landmark jazz solo instrumental recording.
In 1970, after a short-lived stint with Barry Altschul, Chick Corea, and Dave Holland in the avant-garde group Circle, Braxton began leading his own bands in New York City, recording in a variety of settings, from duos of saxophone and Moog synthesizer to full orchestras. His music was moving away from even traditional jazz avant-garde and moving toward its own idiosyncratic voice. In the 1980s and 1990s, Braxton's regular performing quartet included Marilyn Crispell, Mark Dresser, and Gerry Hemingway, although he continued to record and perform with a variety of musicians both in and out of the jazz genre.
For the past 20 years, Braxton has been focusing on large-scale musical projects, such as the Ghost Trance Music he began working on in the mid-1990s to create a "melody that doesn't end" with performers determining what parts to play. His Falling River Music uses large, colorful drawings to direct the musicians, but again, lets the performers determine their own way through the compositions. Diamond Curtain Wall Music takes the Falling River Music further using interactive electronics. Braxton also released an increasing number of works for large orchestras and his Trillium operas cycles.
He has taught at Mills College and currently is professor of music at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, teaching music composition, music history, and improvisation. He also authored multiple volumes explaining his theories and pieces. In 2010, he revived his dormant nonprofit Tri-Centric Foundation (originally created in 1994) to support the dissemination of his work. Among his awards, he received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1994 and was honored with the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award for his lifetime achievements in jazz in 2013.
Selected Discography:
For Alto, Delmark, 1968
The Complete Arista Recordings of Anthony Braxton, Mosaic, 1974-1980
The Complete Remastered Recordings on Black Saint & Soul Note, Black Saint, 1978-1994
9 Compositions (Iridium) 2006, Firehouse 12, 2006
Trillium E, New Braxton House, 2010
NEA 2014 Jazz Masters: Interview with Anthony Braxton
National Endowment for the Arts s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZLEi65z7YA
http://www.jazzdiscography.com/Artists/Braxton/index.php
Anthony Braxton Project
This is a collaborative attempt to document all Anthony Braxton appearances, whether recorded or not. Comments, additions, corrections via email to braxtonproject at yahoo.com
Please visit the official Anthony Braxton website
Anthony Braxton is widely and critically acclaimed as a seminal figure in the music of the late 20th and early 21st century. His work, both as saxophonist and composer, has broken new conceptual and technical ground in the trans-African and trans-European (aka "jazz" and American Experimental) musical traditions in North America; traditions defined by master improvisers such as Warne Marsh, John Coltrane, Paul Desmond, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, and Braxton and his own peers in the historic Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians; and by American composers such as Charles Ives, Harry Partch, and John Cage. Braxton has developed a unique and personal musical language through a synthesis of those American traditions with 20th-century European art music as defined by Schoenberg, Stockhausen, Xenakis, Varese and others. Braxton’s extensions of instrumental technique, timbre, meter and rhythm, voicing and ensemble make-up, harmony and melody, and improvisation and notation have revolutionized modern American music.
Braxton's five decades worth of recorded output is kaleidoscopic and prolific, with well over 150 recordings to his credit. He has won and continues to win prestigious awards and critical praise, including the MacArthur “genius grant” Fellowship. Books, anthology chapters, scholarly studies, reviews and interviews and other media and academic attention to him and his work have also accumulated steadily and increasingly throughout the years. His own self-published writings about the musical traditions from which he works and their historical and cultural contexts (Tri-Axium Writings 1-3) and his five-volume Composition Notes A-E are unparalleled by artists from the oral and unmatched by those in the literate tradition.
Braxton is a tenured professor at Wesleyan University, one of the world's centers of world music. His teaching career began at Mills College in Oakland, California, and has become as much a part of his creative life as his own work. It includes training and leading performance ensembles and private tutorials in his own music, computer and electronic music, and history courses in the music of his major musical influences, from the Western Medieval composer Hildegard von Bingen to contemporary masters like Cage and Coleman.
Braxton's name continues to stand for the broadest integration of oft-conflicting poles in the current cultural debates about the nature and place of the Western and African-American musical traditions in America, poles such as “creative freedom” and “responsibility”, discipline and energy, and vision of the future and respect for tradition. The music of his newest ensembles brings to that debate a voice that is fresh and strong, still as creative as ever even as it takes on the authority of a seasoned master. 2005 was a watershed year, as Braxton celebrated his 60th birthday and the AACM celebrated its 40th anniversary, and in performances throughout the world, Braxton was again recognized as one of the preeminent figures in contemporary creative music.
Chapter One
1962-1969
Chapter Two
1969-1970
Chapter Three
1970-1971
Chapter Four
1971-1979 [draft]
Appendices
Index of compositions
Index of issues
Index of personnel
Listing of abbreviations used
While this is the most comprehensive and accurate chronology of Anthony Braxton ever produced, there still may be omissions and errors. Please help if you can.
This project results from the collective efforts of the Anthony Braxton Project, coordinated by Jonathan Piper.
Photo courtesy Jason Guthartz.
Thanks to contributors:
David Beardsley, Kirby Bell, Bart Borgmans, Tom Bowden, Frank Büchmann-Møller, Jean-Philippe Burg, Jan Carlsson, Bhreandain Clugston, Marilyn Crispell, Andrew Raffo Dewar, Andreas Dietz, William Fielder, Michael Fitzgerald, Kevin Frenette, Franz Fuchs, Jason Guthartz, Patrick Herwarth, Timo Hoyer, Larry Kart, Bob Lambert, Dirk de Leeuw, George Lewis, John Litweiler, Alberto Lofoco, Rick Lopez, Ronald Lyles, Terry Martin, Francesco Martinelli, Martin Milgrim, Chuck Nessa, AgustÃn Pérez, Patrick Pohlmann, Michael Rosenstein, Henning Schenck, John Sharpe, Damon Short, Leo Smith, Jens Tilsner, Jeroen de Valk, Uwe Weiler, David Wight, Nils Winther, Russell Woessner
and Anthony Braxton.
Sources:
Walter Bruyninckx: 85 Years of Recorded Jazz
Safford Chamberlain: An Unsung Cat, Lanham, MD, Scarecrow Press, 2001.
Michael Cuscuna & Michel Ruppli: The Blue Note Label, Westport, CT, Greenwood Press, 2001.
John Gray: Fire Music: A Bibliography of the New Jazz, 1959-1990, Westport, CT, Greenwood Press, 1991.
Graham Lock: Forces In Motion, New York, Da Capo Press, 1988. (GL)
Tom Lord: The Jazz Discography, v. 5.0 2004, v. 6.0 2005, Lord Music (Lord CDROM)
Francesco Martinelli: Anthony Braxton - A Discography, Bandecchi e Vivaldi, Pontedera, Italy, 2000. (FM)
Erik Raben: Jazz Records, 1942-1980,
Ronald M. Radano: New Musical Figurations: Anthony Braxton's Cultural Critique, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1993.
Michel Ruppli: The Atlantic Label, Westport, CT, Greenwood Press, .
Hans Wachtmeister: A Discography & Bibliography Of Anthony Braxton, Stocksund, Sweden, Blue Anchor, 1982. (HW)
Peter Niklas Wilson: Anthony Braxton
Cadence (Cad)
The Chicago Defender
The Chicago Tribune (CT)
Coda
Down Beat (db)
Elyria Chronicle-Telegram
Jazz & Pop (J&P)
Jazz Journal (JJ)
The Los Angeles Times (LAT)
The New York Times (NYT)
Oakland Tribune
The Washington Post (WP)
Wire
All-Music Guide
Anthony Braxton Discography by Jason Guthartz
The Chicago Jazz Archive at the University of Chicago
Moers Festival
Rutgers Institute of Jazz Studies
U.S. Library of Congress
Filed in Honors and Awards on May 17, 2013
Anthony Braxton, the John Spencer Camp Professor of Music at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, received a 2013 Doris Duke Artist Award. The award program, established in 2011, supports performing artists in contemporary dance, theatre, jazz, and related interdisciplinary work. The award comes with a $225,000 honorarium.
Professor
Braxton is a composer, saxophonist, and educator. He won a MacArthur
Foundation genius award in 1994. During his long career, he has released
more than 100 albums.
https://soundprojections.blogspot.com/…/sound-projections-o…
Saturday, November 1, 2014
Anthony Braxton (b. June 4, 1945):
Legendary, iconic, and innovative musician, composer,
arranger, philosopher, music theorist, producer, public intellectual and teacher
Max Roach & Anthony Braxton - "Birth"
"The music in this album is a result of our belief in a continuum that links the present with the past. Our spontaneous improvisations are true to those well defined principles basic to African American culture. Thank you for listening." --Max Roach and Anthony Braxton, 1978
Max Roach & Anthony Braxton - 'Birth And Rebirth' (1978)
Max Roach & Anthony Braxton - "Birth"
(Composition and duo improvisations by Anthony Braxton and Max Roach)
From the album 'Max Roach featuring Anthony Braxton'
Black Saint Records, 1978
Milan, Italy
A GREAT RECORDING BY TWO BONA FIDE GENIUSES OF THE MUSIC
Anthony Braxton (b. June 4, 1945)
Max Roach (1924-2007)
Track listing;
All compositions by Max Roach and Anthony Braxton
"Birth" - 9:40
"Magic and Music" - 6:36
"Tropical Forest" - 5:05
"Dance Griot" - 5:06
"Spirit Possession" - 6:44
"Soft Shoe" - 2:57
"Rebirth" - 7:16
Recorded at Ricordi Studios in Milano, Italy on September 7, 1978
Personnel:
Anthony Braxton - alto saxophone, soprano saxophone, sopranino saxophone, clarinet
Max Roach - drums
"The music in this album is a result of our belief in a continuum that links the present with the past. Our spontaneous improvisations are true to those well defined principles basic to African American culture. Thank you for listening." --Max Roach and Anthony Braxton, 1978
Max Roach & Anthony Braxton - "Birth"
(Composition and duo improvisations by Anthony Braxton and Max Roach)
From the album 'Max Roach featuring Anthony Braxton'
Black Saint Records, 1978
Milan, Italy
A GREAT RECORDING BY TWO BONA FIDE GENIUSES OF THE MUSIC
Anthony Braxton (b. June 4, 1945)
Max Roach (1924-2007)
Track listing;
All compositions by Max Roach and Anthony Braxton
"Birth" - 9:40
"Magic and Music" - 6:36
"Tropical Forest" - 5:05
"Dance Griot" - 5:06
"Spirit Possession" - 6:44
"Soft Shoe" - 2:57
"Rebirth" - 7:16
Recorded at Ricordi Studios in Milano, Italy on September 7, 1978
Personnel:
Anthony Braxton - alto saxophone, soprano saxophone, sopranino saxophone, clarinet
Max Roach - drums
https://soundprojections.blogspot.com/…/sound-projections-o…
Saturday, November 1, 2014
Anthony Braxton (b. June 4, 1945): Legendary, iconic, and innovative musician, composer, arranger, philosopher, music theorist, producer, public intellectual and teacher
“Jazz is the freest musical expression we have yet seen. To me, then, jazz means simply freedom of musical speech! And it is precisely because of this freedom that so many varied forms of jazz exist. The important thing to remember, however, is that not one of these forms represents jazz by itself. Jazz simply means the freedom to have many forms.”
--Duke Ellington, 1947
“For me the most basic assumption that dictated my early attempts to respond to creative music commentary was the mistaken belief that western journalists had some fundamental understanding of black creativity—or even western creativity—but this assumption was seriously in error.”
―Anthony Braxton, The Tri-Axium Writings, 1985
https://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/…/going-outside-categ…
http://www.pointofdeparture.org/PoD37/PoD37Braxton.html
All,
This is a great piece about "Jazz"/Jazz if only because it actually forces the reader to THINK for a change and to REFLECT about what the music is, has been, and could be--a process known historically as--wait for it-- "listening to the music." Just like Anthony Braxton (and every other great and innovative musician IN the "Jazz"/Jazz tradition) ya really gotta love that truly creative impulse in ALL of its (multi)dimensions (in another parallel context the legendary Amiri Baraka brilliantly identified this process as "the Changing Same")... WORD!
Kofi
Braxton & Jazz: IN the Tradition
by Kevin Whitehead
[Lightly adapted from a talk given at Wesleyan University, 16 September 2005, as part of “Anthony Braxton at 60: A Celebration”]
Today I want to talk about Anthony Braxton’s relationship to the jazz tradition, a loaded topic which calls for a few disclaimers up front.
The “Braxton at 60” concert series, concentrating on his compositional output, makes it clear his interests stretch well beyond jazz, which barely figures in the programming. As Braxton once said to Steve Lake, “Jazz is only a very small part of what I do.” He prefers his music to be looked at in totality, and not separated into discrete genres.
By talking about him in a jazz context I don’t seek to discount or ignore his activities in other musical areas, or reduce him to a jazz musician only. I accept Ronald Radano’s view that Braxton has developed his music along twin paths as a jazz-oriented improviser and experimental composer, two areas that frequently overlap. Musical genres are convenient handles for talking about tendencies, but to think any music must conform to a single clear-cut category is to confuse the handle for the suitcase. As Braxton would say, don’t confuse the “isms” for the “is.”
As some jazz watchdogs have given him a frosty reception at times, let’s start by reviewing the cases of other musicians who’ve found themselves in similar predicaments, starting in 1943. Duke Ellington had premiered his suite Black, Brown and Beige on a program at Carnegie Hall, and critic John Hammond slammed the concert in the pages of Jazz magazine. A compressed version of his comments: “During the last 10 years [Duke] has... introduced complex harmonies solely for effect and has experimented with material farther and farther away from dance music. … But the more complicated his music becomes the less feeling his soloists are able to impart to their work. … It was unfortunate that Duke saw fit to tamper with the blues form in order to produce music of greater significance. By becoming more complex he has robbed jazz of most of its basic virtue and lost contact with his audience.”
Now, it’s a bit shocking that John Hammond couldn’t hear any blues content in Black, Brown and Beige, but he wasn’t the only one to have difficulty with Ellington’s suites. Few commentators perceived any cohesion in them, and the jazz literature had to wait 30 years for Brian Priestley and Alan Cohen’s analysis of BBB which highlighted its thematic unity on several levels. (You can find their article, and Hammond’s review, in the Duke Ellington Reader, edited by Mark Tucker, an excellent sourcebook on Ellington’s expansive art and its problematic reception. By the way that anthology also makes it clear that Duke had his critical supporters from the beginning. The myth of critics always missing the point needs deflating, but not here today.)
Ellington’s response to such criticism typically took one of two forms. The first was to sidestep the whole issue by taking jazz out of the equation: as in his famous retort, “There are only two kinds of music, good and the other kind.” Or, “I don’t write jazz, I write Negro folk music,” which is not much of an evasion.
His other response was to argue for a broader view of jazz than his critics applied. In a 1947 interview found in the Reader, Ellington calls jazz “The freest musical expression we have yet seen. To me, then, jazz means simply freedom of musical speech! And it is precisely because of this freedom that so many varied forms of jazz exist. The important thing to remember, however, is that not one of these forms represents jazz by itself. Jazz simply means the freedom to have many forms.”
This was a more constructive rejoinder, I’d argue, if only because Duke’s frequent appearances at jazz festivals and album titles like Jazz Party in Stereo make it clear he never really broke with jazz. Indeed a key part of his musical mission was to expand the resources available to jazz improvisers, and to composers seeking to harness their energy.
The jazz-watchdog files also contain cases where musicians who made a reputation in jazz are criticized just for playing other kinds of music. The way Herbie Hancock’s ‘70s funk was assailed by jazz fans as treasonous is a good example. As I’ve said before, for some folks jazz is like the mafia: once you’re in there’s no getting out, and don’t ever go against the family – as if jazz existed to restrict rather than expand a musician’s creative options.
In extreme cases, the minders of jazz purity may simply cancel the offending musician’s jazz credentials. (We’ll get back to this.) In this regard there are striking parallels between the Dixieland revival of the 1940s and the rise of neo-bop neo-conservative musicians in the 1980s. In both cases, recent developments in the music were discounted as outside the scope of the Real and True Jazz, and said musicians went back 15 or 20 years in search of appropriate stylistic models – even if ‘40s Dixieland doesn’t sound much like King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, and Wynton Marsalis’ fine early quintet with its pre-plotted rhythmic change-ups misses the daring of the spontaneously mutating arrangements of Miles Davis’s mid-‘60s quintet.
Faced with charges of stylistic illegitimacy, some musicians retreat from the battle, just to avoid a fight. Charlie Parker told Down Beat in 1949 that “‘bop is something totally separate and apart’ from the older tradition.” Which is a funny comment from a guy who liked to quote the classic “High Society” clarinet solo all the old New Orleans players knew.
II
Anyone who’s followed Braxton’s reception in jazz will recognize the thumping parallels laid out here: a broad-ranging and ambitious musician is accused of being unfaithful to jazz principles or his African-American roots.
But in Braxton’s case there’s a new wrinkle. Here we have the singular case of a musician widely perceived as a driving force behind jazz in the 1970s, recognized as a leader in every sense, who a decade or so later was branded a heretic, without having changed the basic thrust of his music in the meantime. It’s a case of moving the goal posts after the receiver has spiked the ball.
As Braxton told me in 1993, and has told many others in similar terms, “I’m not a jazz musician. I could not have done my work without the great continuum of trans-African music, the restructural music, all the way up to Ornette Coleman.” But: “By 1979, or even before, I started to move away from that term, when I began to understand that they were redefining the music in a way that would not include me. So I accepted it, because I was tired of the controversy. I only wanted the right to do my music.”
Fair enough. But today I want to reintegrate Braxton into the jazz continuum. I mean, I’m a jazz person, and I want him for us. Why not? He still plays jazz when he wants to, and jazz has been enriched and influenced by his contributions, so it’s a no-brainer.
Jazz is after all a good fit for his musical appetites, for instance a strong desire to improvise with others. It’s part of what he sees as music’s function, to bring people together in a socially positive context.
Braxton is a superb free improviser, thanks in part to his ability to remember what his collaborators play and to develop it as thematic material. (Listen to his duets with German pianist Georg Graewe – Duo Amsterdam ‘91 on Okkadisk – to hear him with another musician who can play that game.) Still, Braxton’s drawn less to unstructured play than to the idea of “navigating through form,” mostly cyclical forms of his own devising. And jazz is a perfect vehicle for mediating between the impulse to improvise and to compose, on cyclical frameworks. And given that Braxton is an African-American from the south side of Chicago, where jazz musicians were handy role models for creative youngsters, you can understand the attraction.
One obvious point of departure is the album of jazz standards In the Tradition, recorded for SteepleChase in 1974 when Braxton was hastily recruited to replace Dexter Gordon on a quartet date with Gordon’s swinging rhythm section with Tete Montoliu, NHØP and Tootie Heath. It was Braxton’s decision to play standards for ease of communication – a strange thing, back then, for a musician who already had a rep for being the outest of the outcats (although he’d recorded a couple of standards already). Braxton showed it was possible to honor bebop phraseology while approaching it from a direction you didn’t expect – for example wailing (and swinging) through the Charlie Parker vehicle “Ornithology” on contrabass clarinet.
One important aspect of Braxton’s personality and musical persona is, he’s a very funny guy. His pieces, and his use of extremely low and high-pitched instruments often carry a whiff of breezy jocularity that’s easy to overlook in serious discussions of his music. (And of course that jocularity is something he shares with such American masters as Armstrong, Fats Waller and Dizzy Gillespie.)
Anyway, the album In the Tradition was a pacesetter. Its title became a catchphrase for experimental improvisers honoring and testing themselves on classic jazz material; Arthur Blythe made one such record that even had the same name. And Braxton himself has returned to standards programs often since then, including programs targeting specific composers like Monk and Andrew Hill.
“Ornithology” is credited to Bird on the LP sleeve; it’s more often credited to trumpeter Benny Harris. So like Miles Davis’s “Donna Lee” it’s one of those typical Parker tunes attributed to someone else – that is to say, built around Parker’s language as an improviser. For Bird, as for Monk, or Steve Lacy, the composition and the improvisation should make a tightly integrated package – you don’t just play the tune and ignore it when you solo over the chords. Or to put it another way, new sorts of written lines will inspire improvised responses that address those written heads on their own terms.
And Braxton has always been interested in material that spurs improvisers into new ways to be creative, and integrate the composed and improvised. You can look in vain in his five books of Composition Notes published in the late 1980s for any mention of a tune’s chord changes – the usual means of organizing improvisation on a jazz theme. Generalizing about his composing is tricky, given the hundreds of pieces he’s written, but it’s safe to say Braxton’s pieces for improvisers focus more on the shape of the line than an underlying harmonic scheme.
III
When commentators reach for adjectives to describe Braxton’s music, the first word that comes up is “angular,” that is to say, sharp-angled, that is to say, often characterized by quick sequences of wide intervals. A classic example is “Composition 6F” (aka “73 degrees A Kelvin”) recorded a couple of times with the Braxton/Corea/Holland/Altschul quartet Circle in 1970. As Braxton’s detractors have helpfully pointed out, this approach parallels certain tendencies in 20th century composed music; one might hear kinship with, say, the short last movement of the Webern “Concerto for Nine Instruments (Opus 24)” from 1934.
But “Composition 6F” doesn’t really sound like that, and the ear tells you why immediately. Even when Webern adopts a peppy Stravinskyian beat, there’s none of the propulsive rhythmic energy and focus that are at the root of Braxton’s piece. Indeed, as Braxton says in the Composition Notes, the akilter rhythm pattern is what really matters, not the melodic contour; he even proposed a revised version of the score that would specify the rhythms but not the pitches. And the specific function of that written line is to put the players into a unique vibrational space for improvising – in the same rhythmic zone as the composed line.
“Composition 6F” was the first piece in his Kelvin series of repetitive music structures one might roughly characterize as minimalist – minimalism being a style of composed music whose influence in jazz has been far greater than is generally acknowledged. (There’s a good doctoral thesis in that for someone.) But the particular sort of momentum “6F” has – a saw tooth rhythm, with a few quick sextuplets or other ‘tuplets thrown in to push things off kilter for a second – is typical of many Braxton pieces, including far more recent ones in the Ghost Trance sequence, like “Composition 245” as heard on Delmark’s Four Compositions (GTM) 2000.
A certain kind of hectic momentum is a major part of Braxton’s esthetic, and one not necessarily incompatible with swing. Take for example 1975’s “Composition 52,” as played by a Braxton quartet with Anthony Davis, Mark Helias and Edward Blackwell on Six Compositions Quartet (1982) (Antilles). One thing I particularly like about that record is that there are pieces like “52” where Davis on piano is clearly playing on chord changes, at least sometimes. Until I started working on this talk I underestimated the attraction of playing on chords to Braxton, and indeed one of the notable things about his many standards programs is how gleefully he enters into that particular game.
In “Composition 52,” we may note in his improvising the serrated rhythms and angles, and some of regular syncopations of ragtime amid the ‘tuplety subdivisions of the ground beat. That’s typical Braxton, and there’s no mistaking its rhythmic sophistication or drive. That he values momentum may be inferred from a few of the master drummers he’s employed or recorded with, including Blackwell, Heath, Steve McCall, Philly Joe Jones, Max Roach, and Victor Lewis.
When even non-wind players enter the realm of pieces like “Composition 6F” and “52,” they are apt to favor breath-like phrasing. The robotic music comes alive, which of course is the point: improvisation breathes life into formal structures. And jazz from early on has sought increasingly challenging material to test and inspire the improviser – even if it means breaking with long-established practice. (Not for nothing does Braxton cite Ornette Coleman’s example.) Braxton’s lines all but preclude a solo made of old-school licks learned at Berklee.
And his innovations go way beyond the shape or rhythm of a line. Some of his pieces call for musicians to isolate certain registers, or specific attacks or strategies at different times. Even when he uses familiar devices, he flips them on their backs or sides. A piece may emulate bop phrasing or celebrate Count Basie or evoke the good feeling he got as a kid spying his father at a Chicago street parade in the middle of a work-school day. But the source material is always transformed – as with Ellington, come to think of it. Like Duke he paints a picture of the community in action: an ideal community with room and tolerance for collective and individual initiatives.
In the Composition Notes, Braxton lays out unconventional strategies for improvisation built into many pieces: a call for drummer and bassist to play opposing rhythms, or for a soloist to play in deliberate opposition to the ensemble – encouraging you to hear the music in several layers or dimensions at once: the Charles Ives principle, as I hope it’s known in Connecticut. Even in solo saxophone pieces he’ll create the illusion of spatial distance, juxtaposing very loud and very soft passages, as if coming from different points in space: a self-contained call-and-response sequence. Or he’ll ask a soloist to improvise up to a written theme rather than away from it – so the composition seems to flower from the improvising, rather like the way Charlie Parker’s tunes sound like they began as improvisations on familiar chords. (“Ornithology” takes off from a line Bird played with Jay McShann.)
In time Braxton’s regular collaborators internalized such procedures and could apply them to any material in the band’s book. One reason why many of us cherish his 1986-1994 quartet – the one with Marilyn Crispell, Mark Dresser and Gerry Hemingway – was that they really knew the rules of the game.
Incidentally around the same time, a similar process was going on independently in Holland, with Misha Mengelberg and ICP. The musicians would take procedures Misha instructed them to use on certain pieces, and then apply them on their own initiative in any appropriate spot. The whole band would then pick up on that, so the boss’s esthetic becomes a self-sustaining musical system – a perpetuum mobile. ICP really perfected this in the 1980s, but Braxton was already working toward and through such ideas in the ‘70s.
IV
Not long after making In the Tradition Braxton signed with Arista records, a major major label at the time, for whom he made a series of nine high-profile albums, which include memorable time studies for quartets; “Composition 58,” a big band march that sounds like John Phillip Sousa having a breakdown over a skipping record which remains one of Braxton’s best-loved compositions; an even better march for quartet with George Lewis on trombone (“6C,” recorded live in Berlin in 1976); a duet with Muhal Richard Abrams on Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag”; a saxophone quartet for which Braxton kindly brought together three-quarters of what would soon be the World Saxophone Quartet, who never remembered to thank him for it. He also got to record “Composition 82” for four orchestras, and “95” for two pianos, so he didn’t only get to document only the jazzy stuff.
In the 1970s Braxton was also on the road a lot, playing festivals, and getting his live music documented. Beginning with his late-‘70s concert recordings you can hear his genius for assembling a set of music, using the various collage structures and multi-dimensional opposition strategies just mentioned. Say what you will about Braxton’s swing micro-timing, he’s a master of macro-timing. The way a good drummer makes a single bar swing with internal surges and hesitations, Braxton can make the overarching structure of a whole set swing like that one bar. And on the micro-level, the various layers of activity from moment to moment provide a vibrant listening experience that little in jazz can equal. With his Crispell/Dresser/Hemingway quartet in particular, he got into complex layering of independently written pieces that fit together as aspects of one giant mega-composition, analogous perhaps to the way the seemingly disparate parts of Ellington’s suites fit together.
The composer has stressed how the multiple levels on which these performances work can help us deal with modern life in which we’re bombarded by more and more sensory input. To be able to follow a quartet performance where, say, the pianist is playing a totally notated composition, the saxophonist is improvising a solo line, perhaps off another tune, and the bass player and drummer are playing two different “pulse tracks” – dynamic, syncopated rhythmic patterns – to be able to follow that is not so different from listening to your iPod while flipping through the cable channels as you check your email while waiting for your phone to ring.
In Braxton’s (or Mengelberg’s) collage structures and constellations of events and mutable forms, one may recognize certain ideas creeping in from the classical avant-garde of the ‘50s and ‘60s, the whole big Earle Brown to Stockhausen mix. But then it’s only natural that Braxton’s varied musical influences and tastes infiltrate each other. By the late 1960s, he was already melding separate musical disciplines in open soundscapes. As Braxton points out, we all have cosmopolitan backgrounds, and are under the sway of many influences from diverse cultures, which open up new ranges of possibilities – which is where he runs into 1943 John Hammond-type objections from certain listeners, for opening up the possibilities too much.
I speak mainly of Wynton Marsalis and his allies Stanley Crouch and Tom Piazza – not so many people, really, although they’ve certainly been diligent about trashing Braxton over the years.
You can understand the predicament Braxton’s music created for educated young musicians who’d polished the whole jazz school bop-to-Brecker skill set till it shone like the good silverware. Braxton was raising a whole other set of options that required a very different conceptual toolbox. That was bound to make people uncomfortable. I don’t think that’s grounds to vilify a musician who never sought to do anyone any harm, but if you were looking to hype a derivative composer like Wynton as modern jazz’s big thinker, you may find it necessary to brush back the competition.
So, as mentioned earlier, they raised what amounts to the old Dixieland argument against bebop: these strange new procedures are not what real jazz is about. But this position rests on an absurd premise: that jazz should be kept pure, when it had evolved and taken shape as a mutt form.
Starting around 1900 the music’s creators applied the improvisational impulse to any material within earshot: hymns, street cries, field hollers, march and social dance and blues forms, the classical themes that ragtime and jazz pianists would extemporize on, barnyard animal impressions, handclap patterns harking back to West African polyrhythms, Islamic isorhythms, modified Congolese beats arriving via Cuba – and myriad echoes of Sousa-type concert bands, with their a cappella breaks and virtuoso solos in contrasting hot and sweet styles, and said solos’ operatic high-note endings. Also the syncopated songs of Tin Pan Alley which often embedded quotes from other tunes, the exquisite vocal timing of black vaudeville comic Bert Williams, the rhythms of trains and the sounds of new technology.
Think of Jelly Roll Morton’s car horns on “Sidewalk Blues,” Armstrong faking the sound of a skipping record on “I’m Not Rough,” and the nasal speech-like brass solos on Ellington’s early classics, resembling a remote voice heard over a telephone. Braxtonian multi-dimensionalism was already part of the music by 1926 and ‘7.
That’s why I call jazz a mutt. The hound can really run, but no amount of wishful thinking or ethnic cleansing can transform a mutt into a pure breed. To suggest that jazz, to honor its heritage, limit itself to only certain specific episodes from its own past is absurd – like asking a jury to disregard a witness’s earlier remark. As Braxton put it in 2001: “Every music is still relevant – whatever the projection.”
V
No one has to tell Braxton about the richness of the jazz tradition – he teaches it at Wesleyan. His eight CDs of standard tunes for quartet, recorded in 2003 and released in two boxes on Leo, demonstrate his broad tastes in jazz material: tunes from the 1920s, bossa novas, and pieces by Cole Porter, Wayne Shorter, Monk, Coltrane, Joe Henderson, Eddie Harris – and the unfashionable Dave Brubeck, whom Braxton has long championed, a musician whose endearingly clunky timing turns some jazz fans off.
Every Braxtonian has heard the objection that he’s not the swingingest jazz musician, and I’ll concede as much. But if someone else swinging harder than you cancels your jazz credentials, there’d only be one jazz musician left: Billy Higgins? Jelly Roll Morton may not have been the swingingest cat of the 1920s, but we recognize him as a jazz master for his restructuralist tendencies. His Red Hot Peppers records of 1926 had the conceptual daring to reformulate much of what jazz was and had been constructed from, adding lowbrow humor and the sounds of the modern city.
Braxton’s compositional language began with his saxophone language, in which I’ve always heard the sharp-angled, against-the-grain improvising of Eric Dolphy, who recorded a few solo pieces in that time before Braxton made solo recitals fashionable. The leaps that bookend Dolphy’s 1963 solo take on Victor Young’s “Love Me” make the parallel explicit.
Anyone who, say, attended last night’s solo concert knows Braxton can play the heck out of the saxophone. To quote from something I wrote last year, “Like all great jazz musicians he understands that timing, timbre and note-choices are intimately connected: how slowing the rhythm ever so slightly, sputtering that note, and placing it just off center pitch, all work to give it triple impact. His tone may be aggressive or growling one moment, parched or disarmingly vulnerable the next.”
“He may stomp on the offbeat like a ragtime pianist. Sometimes his line will attack the rhythm head-on; sometimes it’ll slide backwards over the pulse, moon-walking on ice; sometimes he’ll divide a fast phrase into complex groupings ... or speed up in the middle of an already speedy phrase.” His accentual patterns are more complex than the alternating strong-weak strong-weak accents of your average sure-fire swinger.
The jittery nature of his improvising is one thing that bugs folks who like their swing nice and round all the time, but that’s no reason to ignore everything else going on, in terms of thinking on one’s feet, and improvising complex phrases while honoring the tune – all that good stuff his detractors claim to be for. The idea that jazz’s rhythmic development is already complete, and 4/4 swing is the only way to fly is ridiculous: how can the development of a living music ever be finished?
Braxton’s influence as a saxophonist since the 1970s has been much greater than the jazz folks give credit for. I was going to compile a list of saxophonists who bear his influence, but let me just mention one: in Greg Osby’s up and down beat-parsing and shifting accents, one can hear a lot of Braxton creeping through. (That’s true of Osby’s old ally Steve Coleman too.) The connection to the ‘80s M-BASE saxophonists is particularly interesting because Osby hears how those accentual patterns relate to hip-hop. (You can hear all this come together in his “Concepticus in C” from Zone.) But then jazz usually comes to grips with pop music of its time, one way or another.
You could even talk about a Dolphy-Braxton-Osby rhythmic continuum, if you like – Greg’s low opinion of Dolphy notwithstanding. Osby’s style is on one level a more limber version of the master’s angularity.
So anyway, I say, as long as Braxton has done so much to add new tools to the improviser’s and bandleader’s arsenal, since he’s such a keen student of the music and such a striking horn player, since he’s a fundamental influence on many of today’s players (not least his many successful former students from Mills and Wesleyan), let’s make it official and reaffirm his connection to the jazz fold he never really left – even as he remains free to operate outside of jazz.
There’s another reason for that reaffirmation, which we writers don’t talk about enough. The jazz wars of the early ‘90s, where the gatekeepers decided to purge Braxton from the ranks? Those guys lost that war. At Lincoln Center, they finally let in Misha Mengelberg and recently paid tribute to ‘60s Coltrane, if not Anthony Braxton. And many of the so-called young lions who were assumed to share Marsalis’ outlook have shown that their interests are considerably more broad – look, for example, to funk records by Roy Hargrove or Terence Blanchard or Branford Marsalis, or Christian McBride’s salute to Steely Dan. It sometimes appears the only jazz musicians who haven’t flirted with funk are Wynton Marsalis and Anthony Braxton.
Turning back the clock is always a loser’s game, except at the end of daylight savings. That’s how the jazz wars played out in the ‘40s, and in the ‘90s. The music will keep changing as long as it’s alive; and in the last 35 or 40 years no one has pumped more oxygen into jazz than Braxton. For that, jazz might be a little more grateful.
Nobody can really speak for jazz, but as long as some people make the attempt, and since I have the podium, Anthony Braxton, jazz welcomes you back. Like you never even left. Even if you reject it, you can’t change that. Mr. Braxton: Thank you for your music sir.
© Kevin Whitehead 2011
Saturday, November 1, 2014
Anthony Braxton (b. June 4, 1945): Legendary, iconic, and innovative musician, composer, arranger, philosopher, music theorist, producer, public intellectual and teacher
“Jazz is the freest musical expression we have yet seen. To me, then, jazz means simply freedom of musical speech! And it is precisely because of this freedom that so many varied forms of jazz exist. The important thing to remember, however, is that not one of these forms represents jazz by itself. Jazz simply means the freedom to have many forms.”
--Duke Ellington, 1947
“For me the most basic assumption that dictated my early attempts to respond to creative music commentary was the mistaken belief that western journalists had some fundamental understanding of black creativity—or even western creativity—but this assumption was seriously in error.”
―Anthony Braxton, The Tri-Axium Writings, 1985
https://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/…/going-outside-categ…
http://www.pointofdeparture.org/PoD37/PoD37Braxton.html
All,
This is a great piece about "Jazz"/Jazz if only because it actually forces the reader to THINK for a change and to REFLECT about what the music is, has been, and could be--a process known historically as--wait for it-- "listening to the music." Just like Anthony Braxton (and every other great and innovative musician IN the "Jazz"/Jazz tradition) ya really gotta love that truly creative impulse in ALL of its (multi)dimensions (in another parallel context the legendary Amiri Baraka brilliantly identified this process as "the Changing Same")... WORD!
Kofi
Braxton & Jazz: IN the Tradition
by Kevin Whitehead
ANTHONY BRAXTON
[Lightly adapted from a talk given at Wesleyan University, 16 September 2005, as part of “Anthony Braxton at 60: A Celebration”]
Today I want to talk about Anthony Braxton’s relationship to the jazz tradition, a loaded topic which calls for a few disclaimers up front.
The “Braxton at 60” concert series, concentrating on his compositional output, makes it clear his interests stretch well beyond jazz, which barely figures in the programming. As Braxton once said to Steve Lake, “Jazz is only a very small part of what I do.” He prefers his music to be looked at in totality, and not separated into discrete genres.
By talking about him in a jazz context I don’t seek to discount or ignore his activities in other musical areas, or reduce him to a jazz musician only. I accept Ronald Radano’s view that Braxton has developed his music along twin paths as a jazz-oriented improviser and experimental composer, two areas that frequently overlap. Musical genres are convenient handles for talking about tendencies, but to think any music must conform to a single clear-cut category is to confuse the handle for the suitcase. As Braxton would say, don’t confuse the “isms” for the “is.”
As some jazz watchdogs have given him a frosty reception at times, let’s start by reviewing the cases of other musicians who’ve found themselves in similar predicaments, starting in 1943. Duke Ellington had premiered his suite Black, Brown and Beige on a program at Carnegie Hall, and critic John Hammond slammed the concert in the pages of Jazz magazine. A compressed version of his comments: “During the last 10 years [Duke] has... introduced complex harmonies solely for effect and has experimented with material farther and farther away from dance music. … But the more complicated his music becomes the less feeling his soloists are able to impart to their work. … It was unfortunate that Duke saw fit to tamper with the blues form in order to produce music of greater significance. By becoming more complex he has robbed jazz of most of its basic virtue and lost contact with his audience.”
Now, it’s a bit shocking that John Hammond couldn’t hear any blues content in Black, Brown and Beige, but he wasn’t the only one to have difficulty with Ellington’s suites. Few commentators perceived any cohesion in them, and the jazz literature had to wait 30 years for Brian Priestley and Alan Cohen’s analysis of BBB which highlighted its thematic unity on several levels. (You can find their article, and Hammond’s review, in the Duke Ellington Reader, edited by Mark Tucker, an excellent sourcebook on Ellington’s expansive art and its problematic reception. By the way that anthology also makes it clear that Duke had his critical supporters from the beginning. The myth of critics always missing the point needs deflating, but not here today.)
Ellington’s response to such criticism typically took one of two forms. The first was to sidestep the whole issue by taking jazz out of the equation: as in his famous retort, “There are only two kinds of music, good and the other kind.” Or, “I don’t write jazz, I write Negro folk music,” which is not much of an evasion.
His other response was to argue for a broader view of jazz than his critics applied. In a 1947 interview found in the Reader, Ellington calls jazz “The freest musical expression we have yet seen. To me, then, jazz means simply freedom of musical speech! And it is precisely because of this freedom that so many varied forms of jazz exist. The important thing to remember, however, is that not one of these forms represents jazz by itself. Jazz simply means the freedom to have many forms.”
This was a more constructive rejoinder, I’d argue, if only because Duke’s frequent appearances at jazz festivals and album titles like Jazz Party in Stereo make it clear he never really broke with jazz. Indeed a key part of his musical mission was to expand the resources available to jazz improvisers, and to composers seeking to harness their energy.
The jazz-watchdog files also contain cases where musicians who made a reputation in jazz are criticized just for playing other kinds of music. The way Herbie Hancock’s ‘70s funk was assailed by jazz fans as treasonous is a good example. As I’ve said before, for some folks jazz is like the mafia: once you’re in there’s no getting out, and don’t ever go against the family – as if jazz existed to restrict rather than expand a musician’s creative options.
In extreme cases, the minders of jazz purity may simply cancel the offending musician’s jazz credentials. (We’ll get back to this.) In this regard there are striking parallels between the Dixieland revival of the 1940s and the rise of neo-bop neo-conservative musicians in the 1980s. In both cases, recent developments in the music were discounted as outside the scope of the Real and True Jazz, and said musicians went back 15 or 20 years in search of appropriate stylistic models – even if ‘40s Dixieland doesn’t sound much like King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, and Wynton Marsalis’ fine early quintet with its pre-plotted rhythmic change-ups misses the daring of the spontaneously mutating arrangements of Miles Davis’s mid-‘60s quintet.
Faced with charges of stylistic illegitimacy, some musicians retreat from the battle, just to avoid a fight. Charlie Parker told Down Beat in 1949 that “‘bop is something totally separate and apart’ from the older tradition.” Which is a funny comment from a guy who liked to quote the classic “High Society” clarinet solo all the old New Orleans players knew.
II
Anyone who’s followed Braxton’s reception in jazz will recognize the thumping parallels laid out here: a broad-ranging and ambitious musician is accused of being unfaithful to jazz principles or his African-American roots.
But in Braxton’s case there’s a new wrinkle. Here we have the singular case of a musician widely perceived as a driving force behind jazz in the 1970s, recognized as a leader in every sense, who a decade or so later was branded a heretic, without having changed the basic thrust of his music in the meantime. It’s a case of moving the goal posts after the receiver has spiked the ball.
As Braxton told me in 1993, and has told many others in similar terms, “I’m not a jazz musician. I could not have done my work without the great continuum of trans-African music, the restructural music, all the way up to Ornette Coleman.” But: “By 1979, or even before, I started to move away from that term, when I began to understand that they were redefining the music in a way that would not include me. So I accepted it, because I was tired of the controversy. I only wanted the right to do my music.”
Fair enough. But today I want to reintegrate Braxton into the jazz continuum. I mean, I’m a jazz person, and I want him for us. Why not? He still plays jazz when he wants to, and jazz has been enriched and influenced by his contributions, so it’s a no-brainer.
Jazz is after all a good fit for his musical appetites, for instance a strong desire to improvise with others. It’s part of what he sees as music’s function, to bring people together in a socially positive context.
Braxton is a superb free improviser, thanks in part to his ability to remember what his collaborators play and to develop it as thematic material. (Listen to his duets with German pianist Georg Graewe – Duo Amsterdam ‘91 on Okkadisk – to hear him with another musician who can play that game.) Still, Braxton’s drawn less to unstructured play than to the idea of “navigating through form,” mostly cyclical forms of his own devising. And jazz is a perfect vehicle for mediating between the impulse to improvise and to compose, on cyclical frameworks. And given that Braxton is an African-American from the south side of Chicago, where jazz musicians were handy role models for creative youngsters, you can understand the attraction.
One obvious point of departure is the album of jazz standards In the Tradition, recorded for SteepleChase in 1974 when Braxton was hastily recruited to replace Dexter Gordon on a quartet date with Gordon’s swinging rhythm section with Tete Montoliu, NHØP and Tootie Heath. It was Braxton’s decision to play standards for ease of communication – a strange thing, back then, for a musician who already had a rep for being the outest of the outcats (although he’d recorded a couple of standards already). Braxton showed it was possible to honor bebop phraseology while approaching it from a direction you didn’t expect – for example wailing (and swinging) through the Charlie Parker vehicle “Ornithology” on contrabass clarinet.
One important aspect of Braxton’s personality and musical persona is, he’s a very funny guy. His pieces, and his use of extremely low and high-pitched instruments often carry a whiff of breezy jocularity that’s easy to overlook in serious discussions of his music. (And of course that jocularity is something he shares with such American masters as Armstrong, Fats Waller and Dizzy Gillespie.)
Anyway, the album In the Tradition was a pacesetter. Its title became a catchphrase for experimental improvisers honoring and testing themselves on classic jazz material; Arthur Blythe made one such record that even had the same name. And Braxton himself has returned to standards programs often since then, including programs targeting specific composers like Monk and Andrew Hill.
“Ornithology” is credited to Bird on the LP sleeve; it’s more often credited to trumpeter Benny Harris. So like Miles Davis’s “Donna Lee” it’s one of those typical Parker tunes attributed to someone else – that is to say, built around Parker’s language as an improviser. For Bird, as for Monk, or Steve Lacy, the composition and the improvisation should make a tightly integrated package – you don’t just play the tune and ignore it when you solo over the chords. Or to put it another way, new sorts of written lines will inspire improvised responses that address those written heads on their own terms.
And Braxton has always been interested in material that spurs improvisers into new ways to be creative, and integrate the composed and improvised. You can look in vain in his five books of Composition Notes published in the late 1980s for any mention of a tune’s chord changes – the usual means of organizing improvisation on a jazz theme. Generalizing about his composing is tricky, given the hundreds of pieces he’s written, but it’s safe to say Braxton’s pieces for improvisers focus more on the shape of the line than an underlying harmonic scheme.
III
When commentators reach for adjectives to describe Braxton’s music, the first word that comes up is “angular,” that is to say, sharp-angled, that is to say, often characterized by quick sequences of wide intervals. A classic example is “Composition 6F” (aka “73 degrees A Kelvin”) recorded a couple of times with the Braxton/Corea/Holland/Altschul quartet Circle in 1970. As Braxton’s detractors have helpfully pointed out, this approach parallels certain tendencies in 20th century composed music; one might hear kinship with, say, the short last movement of the Webern “Concerto for Nine Instruments (Opus 24)” from 1934.
But “Composition 6F” doesn’t really sound like that, and the ear tells you why immediately. Even when Webern adopts a peppy Stravinskyian beat, there’s none of the propulsive rhythmic energy and focus that are at the root of Braxton’s piece. Indeed, as Braxton says in the Composition Notes, the akilter rhythm pattern is what really matters, not the melodic contour; he even proposed a revised version of the score that would specify the rhythms but not the pitches. And the specific function of that written line is to put the players into a unique vibrational space for improvising – in the same rhythmic zone as the composed line.
“Composition 6F” was the first piece in his Kelvin series of repetitive music structures one might roughly characterize as minimalist – minimalism being a style of composed music whose influence in jazz has been far greater than is generally acknowledged. (There’s a good doctoral thesis in that for someone.) But the particular sort of momentum “6F” has – a saw tooth rhythm, with a few quick sextuplets or other ‘tuplets thrown in to push things off kilter for a second – is typical of many Braxton pieces, including far more recent ones in the Ghost Trance sequence, like “Composition 245” as heard on Delmark’s Four Compositions (GTM) 2000.
A certain kind of hectic momentum is a major part of Braxton’s esthetic, and one not necessarily incompatible with swing. Take for example 1975’s “Composition 52,” as played by a Braxton quartet with Anthony Davis, Mark Helias and Edward Blackwell on Six Compositions Quartet (1982) (Antilles). One thing I particularly like about that record is that there are pieces like “52” where Davis on piano is clearly playing on chord changes, at least sometimes. Until I started working on this talk I underestimated the attraction of playing on chords to Braxton, and indeed one of the notable things about his many standards programs is how gleefully he enters into that particular game.
In “Composition 52,” we may note in his improvising the serrated rhythms and angles, and some of regular syncopations of ragtime amid the ‘tuplety subdivisions of the ground beat. That’s typical Braxton, and there’s no mistaking its rhythmic sophistication or drive. That he values momentum may be inferred from a few of the master drummers he’s employed or recorded with, including Blackwell, Heath, Steve McCall, Philly Joe Jones, Max Roach, and Victor Lewis.
When even non-wind players enter the realm of pieces like “Composition 6F” and “52,” they are apt to favor breath-like phrasing. The robotic music comes alive, which of course is the point: improvisation breathes life into formal structures. And jazz from early on has sought increasingly challenging material to test and inspire the improviser – even if it means breaking with long-established practice. (Not for nothing does Braxton cite Ornette Coleman’s example.) Braxton’s lines all but preclude a solo made of old-school licks learned at Berklee.
And his innovations go way beyond the shape or rhythm of a line. Some of his pieces call for musicians to isolate certain registers, or specific attacks or strategies at different times. Even when he uses familiar devices, he flips them on their backs or sides. A piece may emulate bop phrasing or celebrate Count Basie or evoke the good feeling he got as a kid spying his father at a Chicago street parade in the middle of a work-school day. But the source material is always transformed – as with Ellington, come to think of it. Like Duke he paints a picture of the community in action: an ideal community with room and tolerance for collective and individual initiatives.
In the Composition Notes, Braxton lays out unconventional strategies for improvisation built into many pieces: a call for drummer and bassist to play opposing rhythms, or for a soloist to play in deliberate opposition to the ensemble – encouraging you to hear the music in several layers or dimensions at once: the Charles Ives principle, as I hope it’s known in Connecticut. Even in solo saxophone pieces he’ll create the illusion of spatial distance, juxtaposing very loud and very soft passages, as if coming from different points in space: a self-contained call-and-response sequence. Or he’ll ask a soloist to improvise up to a written theme rather than away from it – so the composition seems to flower from the improvising, rather like the way Charlie Parker’s tunes sound like they began as improvisations on familiar chords. (“Ornithology” takes off from a line Bird played with Jay McShann.)
In time Braxton’s regular collaborators internalized such procedures and could apply them to any material in the band’s book. One reason why many of us cherish his 1986-1994 quartet – the one with Marilyn Crispell, Mark Dresser and Gerry Hemingway – was that they really knew the rules of the game.
Incidentally around the same time, a similar process was going on independently in Holland, with Misha Mengelberg and ICP. The musicians would take procedures Misha instructed them to use on certain pieces, and then apply them on their own initiative in any appropriate spot. The whole band would then pick up on that, so the boss’s esthetic becomes a self-sustaining musical system – a perpetuum mobile. ICP really perfected this in the 1980s, but Braxton was already working toward and through such ideas in the ‘70s.
IV
Not long after making In the Tradition Braxton signed with Arista records, a major major label at the time, for whom he made a series of nine high-profile albums, which include memorable time studies for quartets; “Composition 58,” a big band march that sounds like John Phillip Sousa having a breakdown over a skipping record which remains one of Braxton’s best-loved compositions; an even better march for quartet with George Lewis on trombone (“6C,” recorded live in Berlin in 1976); a duet with Muhal Richard Abrams on Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag”; a saxophone quartet for which Braxton kindly brought together three-quarters of what would soon be the World Saxophone Quartet, who never remembered to thank him for it. He also got to record “Composition 82” for four orchestras, and “95” for two pianos, so he didn’t only get to document only the jazzy stuff.
In the 1970s Braxton was also on the road a lot, playing festivals, and getting his live music documented. Beginning with his late-‘70s concert recordings you can hear his genius for assembling a set of music, using the various collage structures and multi-dimensional opposition strategies just mentioned. Say what you will about Braxton’s swing micro-timing, he’s a master of macro-timing. The way a good drummer makes a single bar swing with internal surges and hesitations, Braxton can make the overarching structure of a whole set swing like that one bar. And on the micro-level, the various layers of activity from moment to moment provide a vibrant listening experience that little in jazz can equal. With his Crispell/Dresser/Hemingway quartet in particular, he got into complex layering of independently written pieces that fit together as aspects of one giant mega-composition, analogous perhaps to the way the seemingly disparate parts of Ellington’s suites fit together.
The composer has stressed how the multiple levels on which these performances work can help us deal with modern life in which we’re bombarded by more and more sensory input. To be able to follow a quartet performance where, say, the pianist is playing a totally notated composition, the saxophonist is improvising a solo line, perhaps off another tune, and the bass player and drummer are playing two different “pulse tracks” – dynamic, syncopated rhythmic patterns – to be able to follow that is not so different from listening to your iPod while flipping through the cable channels as you check your email while waiting for your phone to ring.
In Braxton’s (or Mengelberg’s) collage structures and constellations of events and mutable forms, one may recognize certain ideas creeping in from the classical avant-garde of the ‘50s and ‘60s, the whole big Earle Brown to Stockhausen mix. But then it’s only natural that Braxton’s varied musical influences and tastes infiltrate each other. By the late 1960s, he was already melding separate musical disciplines in open soundscapes. As Braxton points out, we all have cosmopolitan backgrounds, and are under the sway of many influences from diverse cultures, which open up new ranges of possibilities – which is where he runs into 1943 John Hammond-type objections from certain listeners, for opening up the possibilities too much.
I speak mainly of Wynton Marsalis and his allies Stanley Crouch and Tom Piazza – not so many people, really, although they’ve certainly been diligent about trashing Braxton over the years.
You can understand the predicament Braxton’s music created for educated young musicians who’d polished the whole jazz school bop-to-Brecker skill set till it shone like the good silverware. Braxton was raising a whole other set of options that required a very different conceptual toolbox. That was bound to make people uncomfortable. I don’t think that’s grounds to vilify a musician who never sought to do anyone any harm, but if you were looking to hype a derivative composer like Wynton as modern jazz’s big thinker, you may find it necessary to brush back the competition.
So, as mentioned earlier, they raised what amounts to the old Dixieland argument against bebop: these strange new procedures are not what real jazz is about. But this position rests on an absurd premise: that jazz should be kept pure, when it had evolved and taken shape as a mutt form.
Starting around 1900 the music’s creators applied the improvisational impulse to any material within earshot: hymns, street cries, field hollers, march and social dance and blues forms, the classical themes that ragtime and jazz pianists would extemporize on, barnyard animal impressions, handclap patterns harking back to West African polyrhythms, Islamic isorhythms, modified Congolese beats arriving via Cuba – and myriad echoes of Sousa-type concert bands, with their a cappella breaks and virtuoso solos in contrasting hot and sweet styles, and said solos’ operatic high-note endings. Also the syncopated songs of Tin Pan Alley which often embedded quotes from other tunes, the exquisite vocal timing of black vaudeville comic Bert Williams, the rhythms of trains and the sounds of new technology.
Think of Jelly Roll Morton’s car horns on “Sidewalk Blues,” Armstrong faking the sound of a skipping record on “I’m Not Rough,” and the nasal speech-like brass solos on Ellington’s early classics, resembling a remote voice heard over a telephone. Braxtonian multi-dimensionalism was already part of the music by 1926 and ‘7.
That’s why I call jazz a mutt. The hound can really run, but no amount of wishful thinking or ethnic cleansing can transform a mutt into a pure breed. To suggest that jazz, to honor its heritage, limit itself to only certain specific episodes from its own past is absurd – like asking a jury to disregard a witness’s earlier remark. As Braxton put it in 2001: “Every music is still relevant – whatever the projection.”
V
No one has to tell Braxton about the richness of the jazz tradition – he teaches it at Wesleyan. His eight CDs of standard tunes for quartet, recorded in 2003 and released in two boxes on Leo, demonstrate his broad tastes in jazz material: tunes from the 1920s, bossa novas, and pieces by Cole Porter, Wayne Shorter, Monk, Coltrane, Joe Henderson, Eddie Harris – and the unfashionable Dave Brubeck, whom Braxton has long championed, a musician whose endearingly clunky timing turns some jazz fans off.
Every Braxtonian has heard the objection that he’s not the swingingest jazz musician, and I’ll concede as much. But if someone else swinging harder than you cancels your jazz credentials, there’d only be one jazz musician left: Billy Higgins? Jelly Roll Morton may not have been the swingingest cat of the 1920s, but we recognize him as a jazz master for his restructuralist tendencies. His Red Hot Peppers records of 1926 had the conceptual daring to reformulate much of what jazz was and had been constructed from, adding lowbrow humor and the sounds of the modern city.
Braxton’s compositional language began with his saxophone language, in which I’ve always heard the sharp-angled, against-the-grain improvising of Eric Dolphy, who recorded a few solo pieces in that time before Braxton made solo recitals fashionable. The leaps that bookend Dolphy’s 1963 solo take on Victor Young’s “Love Me” make the parallel explicit.
Anyone who, say, attended last night’s solo concert knows Braxton can play the heck out of the saxophone. To quote from something I wrote last year, “Like all great jazz musicians he understands that timing, timbre and note-choices are intimately connected: how slowing the rhythm ever so slightly, sputtering that note, and placing it just off center pitch, all work to give it triple impact. His tone may be aggressive or growling one moment, parched or disarmingly vulnerable the next.”
“He may stomp on the offbeat like a ragtime pianist. Sometimes his line will attack the rhythm head-on; sometimes it’ll slide backwards over the pulse, moon-walking on ice; sometimes he’ll divide a fast phrase into complex groupings ... or speed up in the middle of an already speedy phrase.” His accentual patterns are more complex than the alternating strong-weak strong-weak accents of your average sure-fire swinger.
The jittery nature of his improvising is one thing that bugs folks who like their swing nice and round all the time, but that’s no reason to ignore everything else going on, in terms of thinking on one’s feet, and improvising complex phrases while honoring the tune – all that good stuff his detractors claim to be for. The idea that jazz’s rhythmic development is already complete, and 4/4 swing is the only way to fly is ridiculous: how can the development of a living music ever be finished?
Braxton’s influence as a saxophonist since the 1970s has been much greater than the jazz folks give credit for. I was going to compile a list of saxophonists who bear his influence, but let me just mention one: in Greg Osby’s up and down beat-parsing and shifting accents, one can hear a lot of Braxton creeping through. (That’s true of Osby’s old ally Steve Coleman too.) The connection to the ‘80s M-BASE saxophonists is particularly interesting because Osby hears how those accentual patterns relate to hip-hop. (You can hear all this come together in his “Concepticus in C” from Zone.) But then jazz usually comes to grips with pop music of its time, one way or another.
You could even talk about a Dolphy-Braxton-Osby rhythmic continuum, if you like – Greg’s low opinion of Dolphy notwithstanding. Osby’s style is on one level a more limber version of the master’s angularity.
So anyway, I say, as long as Braxton has done so much to add new tools to the improviser’s and bandleader’s arsenal, since he’s such a keen student of the music and such a striking horn player, since he’s a fundamental influence on many of today’s players (not least his many successful former students from Mills and Wesleyan), let’s make it official and reaffirm his connection to the jazz fold he never really left – even as he remains free to operate outside of jazz.
There’s another reason for that reaffirmation, which we writers don’t talk about enough. The jazz wars of the early ‘90s, where the gatekeepers decided to purge Braxton from the ranks? Those guys lost that war. At Lincoln Center, they finally let in Misha Mengelberg and recently paid tribute to ‘60s Coltrane, if not Anthony Braxton. And many of the so-called young lions who were assumed to share Marsalis’ outlook have shown that their interests are considerably more broad – look, for example, to funk records by Roy Hargrove or Terence Blanchard or Branford Marsalis, or Christian McBride’s salute to Steely Dan. It sometimes appears the only jazz musicians who haven’t flirted with funk are Wynton Marsalis and Anthony Braxton.
Turning back the clock is always a loser’s game, except at the end of daylight savings. That’s how the jazz wars played out in the ‘40s, and in the ‘90s. The music will keep changing as long as it’s alive; and in the last 35 or 40 years no one has pumped more oxygen into jazz than Braxton. For that, jazz might be a little more grateful.
Nobody can really speak for jazz, but as long as some people make the attempt, and since I have the podium, Anthony Braxton, jazz welcomes you back. Like you never even left. Even if you reject it, you can’t change that. Mr. Braxton: Thank you for your music sir.
© Kevin Whitehead 2011
https://www.rollingstone.com/…/anthony-braxton-forces-moti…/
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Anthony Braxton’s Big Ideas: Why ‘Forces in Motion’ Is an Essential American Music Book
Graham Lock’s newly reissued 1988 study of the sui generis composer is an invaluable account of realizing creative dreams in the face of racism and myopia
by Hank Shteamer
September 4, 2018
Rolling Stone
“I know I’m an African-American, and I know I play the saxophone, but I’m not a jazz musician,” Anthony Braxton told me in 2007. “I’m not a classical musician, either. My music is like my life: It’s in between these areas.”
Born in 1945 on Chicago’s South Side, the brilliant and unstoppably prolific composer, improviser and multi-instrumentalist has spent the past 50-plus years constructing one of the most impressive bodies of work in all of American music — a vast, diverse and utterly personal output, inspired by countless genres but circumscribed by none. He’s written and recorded hundreds of compositions, in settings ranging from solo saxophone to 100 tubas or four orchestras playing simultaneously, and idioms ranging from opera to cutting-edge electro-acoustics and meticulously plotted avant-jazz. He spent years teaching at both Wesleyan University and Mills College, and in 2014, despite his tenuous relationship with the jazz establishment (more on that later), he was named an NEA Jazz Master. At 73, Braxton still performs all over the world, and even has his own foundation.
But as shown in Forces in Motion: Anthony Braxton and the Meta-reality of Creative Music, a remarkable 1988 book by Graham Lock that combines extensive interviews with Braxton and a travelogue of the artist’s 1985 U.K. tour, Braxton’s eye-popping c.v. is only part of his story. At every step along his journey, due to racist thinking and restrictive artistic conventions, he’s had to fight for his right to embrace and express the full range of his musical interests. That struggle lies at the heart of Forces, and even if you’ve never heard a note of Braxton’s music, the book, out now in a newly expanded 30th anniversary edition, is essential reading — one of the most thorough and honest accounts you’ll find of what it means to make truly uncompromising art in America. It’s also, thanks to Lock’s conversational, unpretentious style and Braxton’s penchant for witty self-deprecation, a thoroughly approachable and at times even laugh-out-loud funny invitation into the aesthetic world of a man whose work can be as exhilarating as it is rigorous.
Braxton paints a bleak picture of the environment where he grew up. Of his brother Juno, who would die at age 42, he says, “I see him as a casualty of the South Side of Chicago.” And it wasn’t just his own family members who were in trouble. “[M]aybe ten to fifteen years after grammar school, I’d say seventy percent of the young men and women I grew up with were either dead or in jail,” he tells Lock. According to Braxton, “I think the only thing that saved me was music.”
A stint playing in various Army bands, including one stationed in Korea, offered Braxton a ticket out. While enlisted, he would discover the work of serialist composer Arnold Schoenberg, who became a key influence, and drove his barracks-mates “crazy” when he would blast free-jazz records by John Coltrane and Albert Ayler.
In the mid-Sixties, after returning home, he discovered the AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians), a budding coalition of African-American musical avant-gardists that had formed on the South Side. Through the group, he would meet lifelong friends, kindred spirits, sometime collaborators and fellow future world-renowned giants of outside-the-box music including Leo Smith (a 2013 Pulitzer finalist now known as Wadada), Roscoe Mitchell (co-founder of the legendary, still-extant Art Ensemble of Chicago, which waves the flag for “Great Black Music: Ancient to the Future”) and the late Muhal Richard Abrams.
But even within such a stimulating community, Braxton started to bristle at the social codes that seemed to restrict the scope of his creative interests. “[M]y work and Leo’s would be viewed as not as ‘black’ as some of the musics that were reaching into Africa,” he explains in Forces. “It was in this period that controversy began to ensnarl me, even in the AACM; because I was not interested only in Africa, I was interested in Africa and in Europe and in Asia.”
The idea that Braxton’s aesthetics ought to be determined by his race would haunt him for decades — later via critics who questioned his devotion to notated music or insisted that his work didn’t conform to some arbitrary definition of “swing.”
After recording For Alto, a landmark, resolutely ungeneric 1969 solo saxophone album that contained dedications to both jazz piano iconoclast Cecil Taylor and radical composer and theorist John Cage, he made his way to Paris in search of a more receptive environment for his music. He found greater acceptance there, but also faced familiar resistance. “I did a lot of concerts in Paris,” he tells Lock, “though again I would constantly run into the wall of definition which said ‘No performances of notated music for you, nigger!'”
In the Seventies and early Eighties, Braxton was eventually able to record some of his notated works, including a famously ambitious piece for four orchestras and one for two pianos, as part of an auspicious deal with Arista. And by the time of the 1985 tour chronicled in Forces, he was working with a band — including pianist Marilyn Crispell, bassist Mark Dresser and drummer Gerry Hemingway — that was capable of representing his borderless musical vision. “I needed musicians who were knowledgeable about world musics,” he tells Lock of assembling the group, “musicians who could function in bebop, who could execute notated music no matter how complex, people who can technically take care of business.”
Braxton structured the group’s sets as unbroken medleys of various pieces — identified by an arcane titling system using numbers, letters and diagrams, the subject of an entertaining Forces chapter involving an elusive Braxton and an increasingly exasperated Lock — in which composition and improvisation were seamlessly intertwined. Musical reference points speed by: whimsical marches; manic avant-bebop; precisely plotted 3-D chamber music; sensitive, exploratory improvisation; and more, accented by the players’ jaw-dropping virtuosity, not least Braxton’s own darting, indefatigable, shockingly agile reed playing. Lock’s expressive descriptions of the gigs provide an invaluable eyewitness account of a sui generis musical system coming into full flower. (Crucially, as the author points out in the introduction to Forces, his stance isn’t one of a dispassionate critic, but rather, to use a phrase Braxton himself would later coin, of a “friendly experiencer”: “My sole intention here has been to learn about Braxton’s music.”)
“The second set begins with 69C,” Lock writes of the group’s November 26th concert in Coventry (one of several shows from the ’85 U.K. tour that were later released by Leo Records, along with audio excerpts from Lock and Braxton’s conversations), “sopranino chirping crazy figures around the rhythm section’s staccato beat, the interactions becoming more tangled until Marilyn’s solo sprints clear, flying free. Gerry’s notated solo sets flurries, patters, and the drama of a sudden, solitary thwack into pools of silence; then a quiet alto whistle leads into 69F, here taking in a dreamlike quality via a floating interplay of call and response that switches, with a burst of thundery percussion, into 69B‘s skittering rhythms.”
Reading about these epic and painstaking performances, and savoring the recorded evidence, you’re reminded that at every step, Braxton’s response to adversity has been not not to wallow, but to work. Here he is speaking to Lock of the challenge of executing his large-scale compositions in the Eighties:
“For an African-American, you know, a young man … I was thirty, thirty-one, with visions of a piece for four orchestras, a three-record set: how many projects like that do you see released? … I’ve always been ambitious in the sense of having ideas and wanting to get them executed. I was profoundly inspired by Stockhausen’s Carré and Gruppen, by Xenakis’ Polytope — there was no way I was not going to enter that region. If I’d waited for somebody to give me $100,000 for a project, I would still be waiting and the piece would not be written. I decided the only way to keep evolution going was to not think in terms of somebody helping me, I just had to do it myself. I mean, I specialize in not getting projects out! But I’ll be damned if I’m not going to write the project just because they’re not going to give me a performance or a record. If nobody ever performed it, it’s fine by me! Well, I don’t mean it’s fine … but I am prepared to accept that, I’m prepared to write twelve operas and never get one performance. And the thing is, you can’t complain if you don’t write it. So first I’ll write my twelve operas, then I’ll complain.”
A similar kind of drive led him to compose The Tri-Axium Writings, his own extensive multi-volume treatise on his aesthetic and philosophical systems, which Lock quotes throughout Forces. “It gave me no pleasure to have to spend ten years working out my terms so I could do the philosophical writings,” Braxton says. “I just wanted to be involved in music, I had not planned to write at all. I thought the job of writing was supposed to be left to the writers and journalists. It was only after reading 500,000 dumb reviews that I found myself thinking, hmmm … I disagree with the critics who even like my music! So it was like — I don’t have any choice, I don’t see my viewpoint out there, so here I come!”
“I had not planned to write at all … It was only after reading 500,000 dumb reviews that I found myself thinking, hmmm … I disagree with the critics who even like my music!” —Anthony Braxton in Graham Lock’s Forces in Motion
In one telling series of Tri-Axium excerpts, Braxton handily dismantles white writers’ preoccupation with physicality when it comes to the evaluation of African-American music. In his view, black performance is too often reduced to what he calls “the reality of the sweating brow,” a criterion “not so much dependent on the actual music but instead ‘how’ the actual ‘doing’ of the music looks” or “the idea that there is only one type of black person, and also that there is only one level of ‘involvement’ by black people.” He’s equally eloquent and perceptive when it comes to to the unfair marginalization of women in avant-garde music, or of white musicians (such as Braxton’s own early saxophone idol Paul Desmond) in tight-knit jazz circles.
While there’s plenty of amply justified polemic in Forces, that’s only one facet of what Lock presents. He also beautifully captures Braxton’s sense of humor, whether the artist is defending his commitment to eating at McDonald’s (“You guys must be secret millionaires,” Braxton says of Lock and the vegetarian Hemingway. “I have to eat cheap”), teasing Hemingway for his half-baked tour-van diatribes on acid rain, mocking his own timid saxophone style in the years before he absorbed Coltrane’s influence (“Before that the percussionist had to go to brushes when Braxton played”) or discussing his kids’ recreational habits (“My children are very involved in choo choo trains”).
Lock’s original account ends at the conclusion of the 1985 tour, but a new postscript drives home the fact that during the ensuing decades, Anthony Braxton has never slowed down. His Eighties quartet would eventually disband, though they reunited on select occasions into the Nineties; an excellent 1991 studio session has just been reissued. Braxton would also begin staffing ensembles with his Wesleyan students, some of whom, including guitarist Mary Halvorson, saxophonist Steve Lehman and cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum, have gone on to prolific, influential and highly acclaimed careers of their own. He would finally perform and record some of his Trillium operas. He started a series of labels (one of which now offers a wealth of Braxton downloads via Bandcamp) to chronicle his work. He performed and recorded a wealth of jazz standards (including a good chunk of the Charlie Parker repertoire), often switching to piano for these projects. He would invent entire new compositional and performance systems, including the hypnotic, Native American–inspired Ghost Trance Music; Echo Echo Mirror House Music, in which the performers take the stage equipped with iPods stocked with recordings from Braxton’s discography, resulting in a dense time-traveling sound collage; and Zim Music, which combines graphic scores with traditional notation. (For a more detailed inventory, see Braxton expert and Rolling Stone contributor Seth Colter Walls’ 2016 guide to Braxton’s many musical systems.) He’s performed at high-profile festivals all over the world. And currently, his Tri-Centric foundation is gearing up for a 75th birthday celebration in 2020.
Forces in Motion is a testament to just how much Braxton had to overcome to achieve his current elder-statesman status. To just how often, and how persistently, he had to assert his right to explore any musical tradition he pleased, without compromise. To the fact that for some musicians, looking to forge their own universe outside the comfortable confines of genre, or predetermined cultural expectations, making art can be akin to doing battle. (For much more on the issue of race in the experimental-music community, see A Power Stronger Than Itself, composer and Braxton collaborator George E. Lewis’ fascinating 2008 book on the history of the AACM.) But the book is also a manual on how to preserve a sense of wonder. “[A]s a young man,” Braxton tells Lock of the early AACM days, “you don’t care so much about food — the most important thing was the cause. Not to mention that I was so damn excited by the music — just as I’m so damn excited by the music right now.”
At one point in the book, Lock is playfully probing the limits of Braxton’s musical conception, seeing just how far it goes. They get to talking about Braxton’s notions of “planet level musics” and still more ambitious concepts. Lock queries him about his intention to write music that would be literally intergalactic:
L: It might be thought a little impractical to talk about plans for compositions that link star systems.
B: No, I don’t think it’s impractical. It’s impractical maybe to give the actual year [laughs]. …
L: So you still think it could happen?
B: Oh, it’s not a question of it could happen.
L: You’re going to write the pieces?
B: Of course I’m going to write the pieces. There are much bigger ideas than that!
http://store.doverpublications.com/0486824098.html
Forces in Motion: Anthony Braxton and the Meta-reality of Creative Music: Interviews and Tour Notes
by Graham Lock
Dover Publications, 2018
[Publication date: July 18, 2018]
Home
Music
Music Features
Anthony Braxton’s Big Ideas: Why ‘Forces in Motion’ Is an Essential American Music Book
Graham Lock’s newly reissued 1988 study of the sui generis composer is an invaluable account of realizing creative dreams in the face of racism and myopia
by Hank Shteamer
September 4, 2018
Rolling Stone
Graham Lock's newly reissued 'Forces in Motion' chronicles composer
Anthony Braxton's struggle to realize his creative dreams. Frans Schellekens/Getty Images
“I know I’m an African-American, and I know I play the saxophone, but I’m not a jazz musician,” Anthony Braxton told me in 2007. “I’m not a classical musician, either. My music is like my life: It’s in between these areas.”
Born in 1945 on Chicago’s South Side, the brilliant and unstoppably prolific composer, improviser and multi-instrumentalist has spent the past 50-plus years constructing one of the most impressive bodies of work in all of American music — a vast, diverse and utterly personal output, inspired by countless genres but circumscribed by none. He’s written and recorded hundreds of compositions, in settings ranging from solo saxophone to 100 tubas or four orchestras playing simultaneously, and idioms ranging from opera to cutting-edge electro-acoustics and meticulously plotted avant-jazz. He spent years teaching at both Wesleyan University and Mills College, and in 2014, despite his tenuous relationship with the jazz establishment (more on that later), he was named an NEA Jazz Master. At 73, Braxton still performs all over the world, and even has his own foundation.
But as shown in Forces in Motion: Anthony Braxton and the Meta-reality of Creative Music, a remarkable 1988 book by Graham Lock that combines extensive interviews with Braxton and a travelogue of the artist’s 1985 U.K. tour, Braxton’s eye-popping c.v. is only part of his story. At every step along his journey, due to racist thinking and restrictive artistic conventions, he’s had to fight for his right to embrace and express the full range of his musical interests. That struggle lies at the heart of Forces, and even if you’ve never heard a note of Braxton’s music, the book, out now in a newly expanded 30th anniversary edition, is essential reading — one of the most thorough and honest accounts you’ll find of what it means to make truly uncompromising art in America. It’s also, thanks to Lock’s conversational, unpretentious style and Braxton’s penchant for witty self-deprecation, a thoroughly approachable and at times even laugh-out-loud funny invitation into the aesthetic world of a man whose work can be as exhilarating as it is rigorous.
Braxton paints a bleak picture of the environment where he grew up. Of his brother Juno, who would die at age 42, he says, “I see him as a casualty of the South Side of Chicago.” And it wasn’t just his own family members who were in trouble. “[M]aybe ten to fifteen years after grammar school, I’d say seventy percent of the young men and women I grew up with were either dead or in jail,” he tells Lock. According to Braxton, “I think the only thing that saved me was music.”
A stint playing in various Army bands, including one stationed in Korea, offered Braxton a ticket out. While enlisted, he would discover the work of serialist composer Arnold Schoenberg, who became a key influence, and drove his barracks-mates “crazy” when he would blast free-jazz records by John Coltrane and Albert Ayler.
In the mid-Sixties, after returning home, he discovered the AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians), a budding coalition of African-American musical avant-gardists that had formed on the South Side. Through the group, he would meet lifelong friends, kindred spirits, sometime collaborators and fellow future world-renowned giants of outside-the-box music including Leo Smith (a 2013 Pulitzer finalist now known as Wadada), Roscoe Mitchell (co-founder of the legendary, still-extant Art Ensemble of Chicago, which waves the flag for “Great Black Music: Ancient to the Future”) and the late Muhal Richard Abrams.
But even within such a stimulating community, Braxton started to bristle at the social codes that seemed to restrict the scope of his creative interests. “[M]y work and Leo’s would be viewed as not as ‘black’ as some of the musics that were reaching into Africa,” he explains in Forces. “It was in this period that controversy began to ensnarl me, even in the AACM; because I was not interested only in Africa, I was interested in Africa and in Europe and in Asia.”
The idea that Braxton’s aesthetics ought to be determined by his race would haunt him for decades — later via critics who questioned his devotion to notated music or insisted that his work didn’t conform to some arbitrary definition of “swing.”
After recording For Alto, a landmark, resolutely ungeneric 1969 solo saxophone album that contained dedications to both jazz piano iconoclast Cecil Taylor and radical composer and theorist John Cage, he made his way to Paris in search of a more receptive environment for his music. He found greater acceptance there, but also faced familiar resistance. “I did a lot of concerts in Paris,” he tells Lock, “though again I would constantly run into the wall of definition which said ‘No performances of notated music for you, nigger!'”
In the Seventies and early Eighties, Braxton was eventually able to record some of his notated works, including a famously ambitious piece for four orchestras and one for two pianos, as part of an auspicious deal with Arista. And by the time of the 1985 tour chronicled in Forces, he was working with a band — including pianist Marilyn Crispell, bassist Mark Dresser and drummer Gerry Hemingway — that was capable of representing his borderless musical vision. “I needed musicians who were knowledgeable about world musics,” he tells Lock of assembling the group, “musicians who could function in bebop, who could execute notated music no matter how complex, people who can technically take care of business.”
Braxton structured the group’s sets as unbroken medleys of various pieces — identified by an arcane titling system using numbers, letters and diagrams, the subject of an entertaining Forces chapter involving an elusive Braxton and an increasingly exasperated Lock — in which composition and improvisation were seamlessly intertwined. Musical reference points speed by: whimsical marches; manic avant-bebop; precisely plotted 3-D chamber music; sensitive, exploratory improvisation; and more, accented by the players’ jaw-dropping virtuosity, not least Braxton’s own darting, indefatigable, shockingly agile reed playing. Lock’s expressive descriptions of the gigs provide an invaluable eyewitness account of a sui generis musical system coming into full flower. (Crucially, as the author points out in the introduction to Forces, his stance isn’t one of a dispassionate critic, but rather, to use a phrase Braxton himself would later coin, of a “friendly experiencer”: “My sole intention here has been to learn about Braxton’s music.”)
“The second set begins with 69C,” Lock writes of the group’s November 26th concert in Coventry (one of several shows from the ’85 U.K. tour that were later released by Leo Records, along with audio excerpts from Lock and Braxton’s conversations), “sopranino chirping crazy figures around the rhythm section’s staccato beat, the interactions becoming more tangled until Marilyn’s solo sprints clear, flying free. Gerry’s notated solo sets flurries, patters, and the drama of a sudden, solitary thwack into pools of silence; then a quiet alto whistle leads into 69F, here taking in a dreamlike quality via a floating interplay of call and response that switches, with a burst of thundery percussion, into 69B‘s skittering rhythms.”
Reading about these epic and painstaking performances, and savoring the recorded evidence, you’re reminded that at every step, Braxton’s response to adversity has been not not to wallow, but to work. Here he is speaking to Lock of the challenge of executing his large-scale compositions in the Eighties:
“For an African-American, you know, a young man … I was thirty, thirty-one, with visions of a piece for four orchestras, a three-record set: how many projects like that do you see released? … I’ve always been ambitious in the sense of having ideas and wanting to get them executed. I was profoundly inspired by Stockhausen’s Carré and Gruppen, by Xenakis’ Polytope — there was no way I was not going to enter that region. If I’d waited for somebody to give me $100,000 for a project, I would still be waiting and the piece would not be written. I decided the only way to keep evolution going was to not think in terms of somebody helping me, I just had to do it myself. I mean, I specialize in not getting projects out! But I’ll be damned if I’m not going to write the project just because they’re not going to give me a performance or a record. If nobody ever performed it, it’s fine by me! Well, I don’t mean it’s fine … but I am prepared to accept that, I’m prepared to write twelve operas and never get one performance. And the thing is, you can’t complain if you don’t write it. So first I’ll write my twelve operas, then I’ll complain.”
A similar kind of drive led him to compose The Tri-Axium Writings, his own extensive multi-volume treatise on his aesthetic and philosophical systems, which Lock quotes throughout Forces. “It gave me no pleasure to have to spend ten years working out my terms so I could do the philosophical writings,” Braxton says. “I just wanted to be involved in music, I had not planned to write at all. I thought the job of writing was supposed to be left to the writers and journalists. It was only after reading 500,000 dumb reviews that I found myself thinking, hmmm … I disagree with the critics who even like my music! So it was like — I don’t have any choice, I don’t see my viewpoint out there, so here I come!”
“I had not planned to write at all … It was only after reading 500,000 dumb reviews that I found myself thinking, hmmm … I disagree with the critics who even like my music!” —Anthony Braxton in Graham Lock’s Forces in Motion
In one telling series of Tri-Axium excerpts, Braxton handily dismantles white writers’ preoccupation with physicality when it comes to the evaluation of African-American music. In his view, black performance is too often reduced to what he calls “the reality of the sweating brow,” a criterion “not so much dependent on the actual music but instead ‘how’ the actual ‘doing’ of the music looks” or “the idea that there is only one type of black person, and also that there is only one level of ‘involvement’ by black people.” He’s equally eloquent and perceptive when it comes to to the unfair marginalization of women in avant-garde music, or of white musicians (such as Braxton’s own early saxophone idol Paul Desmond) in tight-knit jazz circles.
While there’s plenty of amply justified polemic in Forces, that’s only one facet of what Lock presents. He also beautifully captures Braxton’s sense of humor, whether the artist is defending his commitment to eating at McDonald’s (“You guys must be secret millionaires,” Braxton says of Lock and the vegetarian Hemingway. “I have to eat cheap”), teasing Hemingway for his half-baked tour-van diatribes on acid rain, mocking his own timid saxophone style in the years before he absorbed Coltrane’s influence (“Before that the percussionist had to go to brushes when Braxton played”) or discussing his kids’ recreational habits (“My children are very involved in choo choo trains”).
Lock’s original account ends at the conclusion of the 1985 tour, but a new postscript drives home the fact that during the ensuing decades, Anthony Braxton has never slowed down. His Eighties quartet would eventually disband, though they reunited on select occasions into the Nineties; an excellent 1991 studio session has just been reissued. Braxton would also begin staffing ensembles with his Wesleyan students, some of whom, including guitarist Mary Halvorson, saxophonist Steve Lehman and cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum, have gone on to prolific, influential and highly acclaimed careers of their own. He would finally perform and record some of his Trillium operas. He started a series of labels (one of which now offers a wealth of Braxton downloads via Bandcamp) to chronicle his work. He performed and recorded a wealth of jazz standards (including a good chunk of the Charlie Parker repertoire), often switching to piano for these projects. He would invent entire new compositional and performance systems, including the hypnotic, Native American–inspired Ghost Trance Music; Echo Echo Mirror House Music, in which the performers take the stage equipped with iPods stocked with recordings from Braxton’s discography, resulting in a dense time-traveling sound collage; and Zim Music, which combines graphic scores with traditional notation. (For a more detailed inventory, see Braxton expert and Rolling Stone contributor Seth Colter Walls’ 2016 guide to Braxton’s many musical systems.) He’s performed at high-profile festivals all over the world. And currently, his Tri-Centric foundation is gearing up for a 75th birthday celebration in 2020.
Forces in Motion is a testament to just how much Braxton had to overcome to achieve his current elder-statesman status. To just how often, and how persistently, he had to assert his right to explore any musical tradition he pleased, without compromise. To the fact that for some musicians, looking to forge their own universe outside the comfortable confines of genre, or predetermined cultural expectations, making art can be akin to doing battle. (For much more on the issue of race in the experimental-music community, see A Power Stronger Than Itself, composer and Braxton collaborator George E. Lewis’ fascinating 2008 book on the history of the AACM.) But the book is also a manual on how to preserve a sense of wonder. “[A]s a young man,” Braxton tells Lock of the early AACM days, “you don’t care so much about food — the most important thing was the cause. Not to mention that I was so damn excited by the music — just as I’m so damn excited by the music right now.”
At one point in the book, Lock is playfully probing the limits of Braxton’s musical conception, seeing just how far it goes. They get to talking about Braxton’s notions of “planet level musics” and still more ambitious concepts. Lock queries him about his intention to write music that would be literally intergalactic:
L: It might be thought a little impractical to talk about plans for compositions that link star systems.
B: No, I don’t think it’s impractical. It’s impractical maybe to give the actual year [laughs]. …
L: So you still think it could happen?
B: Oh, it’s not a question of it could happen.
L: You’re going to write the pieces?
B: Of course I’m going to write the pieces. There are much bigger ideas than that!
http://store.doverpublications.com/0486824098.html
Forces in Motion: Anthony Braxton and the Meta-reality of Creative Music: Interviews and Tour Notes
by Graham Lock
Dover Publications, 2018
[Publication date: July 18, 2018]
https://sep.yimg.com/…/I/yhst-137970348157658_2542_20520552…
A #1 New Release in Jazz Music on Amazon!
"Absolutely essential reading." — The Wire
One of modern music's towering figures, composer and multi-instrumentalist Anthony Braxton has redefined critical concepts of jazz and the wider world of creative music. The Chicago native's works range from an early piece for 100 tubas to proposed compositions for orchestras on different planets. A modern classic, Forces in Motion follows Braxton's lauded quartet on a 1985 tour of England, noting his opinions of his musical predecessors — including Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, and Karlheinz Stockhausen — as well as his thoughts on racism and poverty.
For this new 30th anniversary edition, Graham Lock provides a new chapter, detailing later encounters with Braxton and the quartet; Anthony Braxton has penned a new Afterword as well. In addition to inside views of the mind of a musical visionary, this book offers an entertaining chronicle of a touring band. Braxton's subjects run the gamut from chess and hamburgers to astrology, feminism, and ancient Egypt. Above all, it offers a captivating view of the frustrations and rewards that result from an artist's dedication of his life to creative music.
"This book should be required reading for anyone interested in my music," Anthony Braxton has observed. "Graham Lock writes from the perceptual plane of insight and dedication — coupled with a keen wit and a dynamic intellect. This is serious writing and thinking. I could not have been more fortunate.”
"Remarkable. One of the most thorough and honest accounts you'll find of what it means to make truly uncompromising art in America. It's also, thanks to Lock's conversational, unpretentious style and Braxton's penchant for witty self-deprecation, a thoroughly approachable and at times even laugh-out-loud funny invitation into the aesthetic world of a man whose work can be as exhilarating as it is rigorous." — Rolling Stone
A #1 New Release in Jazz Music on Amazon!
"Absolutely essential reading." — The Wire
One of modern music's towering figures, composer and multi-instrumentalist Anthony Braxton has redefined critical concepts of jazz and the wider world of creative music. The Chicago native's works range from an early piece for 100 tubas to proposed compositions for orchestras on different planets. A modern classic, Forces in Motion follows Braxton's lauded quartet on a 1985 tour of England, noting his opinions of his musical predecessors — including Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, and Karlheinz Stockhausen — as well as his thoughts on racism and poverty.
For this new 30th anniversary edition, Graham Lock provides a new chapter, detailing later encounters with Braxton and the quartet; Anthony Braxton has penned a new Afterword as well. In addition to inside views of the mind of a musical visionary, this book offers an entertaining chronicle of a touring band. Braxton's subjects run the gamut from chess and hamburgers to astrology, feminism, and ancient Egypt. Above all, it offers a captivating view of the frustrations and rewards that result from an artist's dedication of his life to creative music.
"This book should be required reading for anyone interested in my music," Anthony Braxton has observed. "Graham Lock writes from the perceptual plane of insight and dedication — coupled with a keen wit and a dynamic intellect. This is serious writing and thinking. I could not have been more fortunate.”
"Remarkable. One of the most thorough and honest accounts you'll find of what it means to make truly uncompromising art in America. It's also, thanks to Lock's conversational, unpretentious style and Braxton's penchant for witty self-deprecation, a thoroughly approachable and at times even laugh-out-loud funny invitation into the aesthetic world of a man whose work can be as exhilarating as it is rigorous." — Rolling Stone
https://soundprojections.blogspot.com/…/sound-projections-o…
Saturday, November 1, 2014
Anthony Braxton (b. June 4, 1945):
Legendary, iconic, and innovative musician, composer, arranger, philosopher, ensemble leader, music theorist, producer, public intellectual and teacher
http://arts.gov/honors/jazz/jmCMS/master.php…
2014 NEA Jazz Master
Anthony Braxton
Born June 4, 1945 in Chicago, Ilinois
Saxophonist, Clarinetist, Flautist, Composer, Educator, Author
Published on January 6, 2014
"For me, the recognition of my place in creative American music is quite a surprise--welcome surprise, that comes at the right time in my life. To be named an NEA Jazz Master recipient opens the door of reconciliation to the whole of my musical and cultural family, and completes my "inner nature and balance" in the most positive way. This is so because no matter the nomenclature, I have never separated myself from the great men and women whose creative work changed and elevated my life--and reason for wanting to live. The NEA Jazz Master family has profoundly shaped the dynamics of American and world culture--it doesn't get any better than this family. The story of creative music is the story of America and the story of composite human vibrational dynamics. The discipline of creative music is one of the greatest gifts that the cosmic forces have given us."
"My music occupies a space in between defined idioms." So stated Anthony Braxton, succinctly capturing the nature of his compositions, as complex and enigmatic as the diagrams he creates for their titles. While he might not consider the music he currently makes as "jazz," certainly the improvised and rhythmic nature of the music he began playing 50 or more years ago still influence him, and his performances on his "In the Tradition" recordings demonstrate his ability to play the standards beautifully.
Braxton began playing music as a youth growing up in Chicago. He then attended the Chicago School of Music from 1959-1963, and went on to Roosevelt University to study philosophy and composition. Braxton joined the U.S. Army in 1963 and played saxophone in an Army band; upon his discharge in 1966, he returned to Chicago where he joined the newly formed Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). In 1968, he recorded For Alto, a double-album of unaccompanied saxophone, which is considered a landmark jazz solo instrumental recording.
In 1970, after a short-lived stint with Barry Altschul, Chick Corea, and Dave Holland in the avant-garde group Circle, Braxton began leading his own bands in New York City, recording in a variety of settings, from duos of saxophone and Moog synthesizer to full orchestras. His music was moving away from even traditional jazz avant-garde and moving toward its own idiosyncratic voice. In the 1980s and 1990s, Braxton's regular performing quartet included Marilyn Crispell, Mark Dresser, and Gerry Hemingway, although he continued to record and perform with a variety of musicians both in and out of the jazz genre.
For the past 20 years, Braxton has been focusing on large-scale musical projects, such as the Ghost Trance Music he began working on in the mid-1990s to create a "melody that doesn't end" with performers determining what parts to play. His Falling River Music uses large, colorful drawings to direct the musicians, but again, lets the performers determine their own way through the compositions. Diamond Curtain Wall Music takes the Falling River Music further using interactive electronics. Braxton also released an increasing number of works for large orchestras and his Trillium operas cycles.
He has taught at Mills College and currently is professor of music at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, teaching music composition, music history, and improvisation. He also authored multiple volumes explaining his theories and pieces. In 2010, he revived his dormant nonprofit Tri-Centric Foundation (originally created in 1994) to support the dissemination of his work. Among his awards, he received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1994 and was honored with the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award for his lifetime achievements in jazz in 2013.
Selected Discography:
For Alto, Delmark, 1968
The Complete Arista Recordings of Anthony Braxton, Mosaic, 1974-1980
The Complete Remastered Recordings on Black Saint & Soul Note, Black Saint, 1978-1994
9 Compositions (Iridium) 2006, Firehouse 12, 2006
Trillium E, New Braxton House, 2010
NEA 2014 Jazz Masters: Interview with Anthony Braxton
National Endowment for the Arts:
Saturday, November 1, 2014
Anthony Braxton (b. June 4, 1945):
Legendary, iconic, and innovative musician, composer, arranger, philosopher, ensemble leader, music theorist, producer, public intellectual and teacher
http://arts.gov/honors/jazz/jmCMS/master.php…
2014 NEA Jazz Master
Anthony Braxton
Born June 4, 1945 in Chicago, Ilinois
Saxophonist, Clarinetist, Flautist, Composer, Educator, Author
Published on January 6, 2014
"For me, the recognition of my place in creative American music is quite a surprise--welcome surprise, that comes at the right time in my life. To be named an NEA Jazz Master recipient opens the door of reconciliation to the whole of my musical and cultural family, and completes my "inner nature and balance" in the most positive way. This is so because no matter the nomenclature, I have never separated myself from the great men and women whose creative work changed and elevated my life--and reason for wanting to live. The NEA Jazz Master family has profoundly shaped the dynamics of American and world culture--it doesn't get any better than this family. The story of creative music is the story of America and the story of composite human vibrational dynamics. The discipline of creative music is one of the greatest gifts that the cosmic forces have given us."
"My music occupies a space in between defined idioms." So stated Anthony Braxton, succinctly capturing the nature of his compositions, as complex and enigmatic as the diagrams he creates for their titles. While he might not consider the music he currently makes as "jazz," certainly the improvised and rhythmic nature of the music he began playing 50 or more years ago still influence him, and his performances on his "In the Tradition" recordings demonstrate his ability to play the standards beautifully.
Braxton began playing music as a youth growing up in Chicago. He then attended the Chicago School of Music from 1959-1963, and went on to Roosevelt University to study philosophy and composition. Braxton joined the U.S. Army in 1963 and played saxophone in an Army band; upon his discharge in 1966, he returned to Chicago where he joined the newly formed Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). In 1968, he recorded For Alto, a double-album of unaccompanied saxophone, which is considered a landmark jazz solo instrumental recording.
In 1970, after a short-lived stint with Barry Altschul, Chick Corea, and Dave Holland in the avant-garde group Circle, Braxton began leading his own bands in New York City, recording in a variety of settings, from duos of saxophone and Moog synthesizer to full orchestras. His music was moving away from even traditional jazz avant-garde and moving toward its own idiosyncratic voice. In the 1980s and 1990s, Braxton's regular performing quartet included Marilyn Crispell, Mark Dresser, and Gerry Hemingway, although he continued to record and perform with a variety of musicians both in and out of the jazz genre.
For the past 20 years, Braxton has been focusing on large-scale musical projects, such as the Ghost Trance Music he began working on in the mid-1990s to create a "melody that doesn't end" with performers determining what parts to play. His Falling River Music uses large, colorful drawings to direct the musicians, but again, lets the performers determine their own way through the compositions. Diamond Curtain Wall Music takes the Falling River Music further using interactive electronics. Braxton also released an increasing number of works for large orchestras and his Trillium operas cycles.
He has taught at Mills College and currently is professor of music at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, teaching music composition, music history, and improvisation. He also authored multiple volumes explaining his theories and pieces. In 2010, he revived his dormant nonprofit Tri-Centric Foundation (originally created in 1994) to support the dissemination of his work. Among his awards, he received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1994 and was honored with the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award for his lifetime achievements in jazz in 2013.
Selected Discography:
For Alto, Delmark, 1968
The Complete Arista Recordings of Anthony Braxton, Mosaic, 1974-1980
The Complete Remastered Recordings on Black Saint & Soul Note, Black Saint, 1978-1994
9 Compositions (Iridium) 2006, Firehouse 12, 2006
Trillium E, New Braxton House, 2010
NEA 2014 Jazz Masters: Interview with Anthony Braxton
National Endowment for the Arts:
"My music occupies a space in between defined idioms." So stated Anthony Braxton, succinctly…
Woodstock Jazz Festival - 1981
Woodstock, NY
Sponsored, Produced and presented by the Creative Music Studio (CMS)
Featuring the following musicians and composers:
The shows headliners were Jack Dejohnette, Chick Corea, Pat Metheny, Anthony Braxton, Lee Konitz, and Miroslav Vitouš.
Other musicians include Dewey Redman, Julius Hemphill, Nana Vasconcelos, Baikida Carroll, Collin Walcott, Aiyb Dieng, Ed Blackwell, Howard Johnson and Marilyn Crispell.
**NOTE: Check out a then 36 year old Anthony Braxton featured in this video first talking with Lee Konitz and then playing John Coltrane's classic tune "Impressions" with various other musicians from 22:37-34:31. PRICELESS!
The Woodstock Jazz Festival was held in 1981 in Woodstock, New York. It was a celebration of the tenth anniversary of the Creative Music Studio, founded in 1971 by Karl Berger and Ornette Coleman.
It has been released several times on DVD. It was released on CD in two volumes by Knitting Factory Records.
Setlist:
"Arrival"
"Left Jab"
"We Are"
"Solo" - Nana Vasconcelos
"Broadway Blues"
"The Song is You"
"Impressions"
"Stella by Starlight"
"All Blues"
References:
New York Times review
Allmusic review
**NOTE: Check out a then 36
year old Anthony Braxton featured in this video first talking with Lee
Konitz and then playing John Coltrane's classic tune "Impressions" with
various other musicians from 22:37-34:31. PRICELESS!
FULL CONCERT is 59 minutes and 37 seconds long and begins@https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WyeEySgwps&feature=youtu.be
Woodstock, NY
Sponsored, Produced and presented by the Creative Music Studio (CMS)
Featuring the following musicians and composers:
The shows headliners were Jack Dejohnette, Chick Corea, Pat Metheny, Anthony Braxton, Lee Konitz, and Miroslav Vitouš.
Other musicians include Dewey Redman, Julius Hemphill, Nana Vasconcelos, Baikida Carroll, Collin Walcott, Aiyb Dieng, Ed Blackwell, Howard Johnson and Marilyn Crispell.
**NOTE: Check out a then 36 year old Anthony Braxton featured in this video first talking with Lee Konitz and then playing John Coltrane's classic tune "Impressions" with various other musicians from 22:37-34:31. PRICELESS!
The Woodstock Jazz Festival was held in 1981 in Woodstock, New York. It was a celebration of the tenth anniversary of the Creative Music Studio, founded in 1971 by Karl Berger and Ornette Coleman.
It has been released several times on DVD. It was released on CD in two volumes by Knitting Factory Records.
Setlist:
"Arrival"
"Left Jab"
"We Are"
"Solo" - Nana Vasconcelos
"Broadway Blues"
"The Song is You"
"Impressions"
"Stella by Starlight"
"All Blues"
References:
New York Times review
Allmusic review
