Discourse that allows us to express a wide range of ideas, opinions, and analysis that can be used as an opportunity to critically examine and observe what our experience means to us beyond the given social/cultural contexts and norms that are provided us.
Trump administration weighed targeting migrant families, speeding up deportation of children
A draft plan obtained by NBC News also shows officials wanted to
specifically target parents in migrant families for increased
prosecutions.
PHOTO: Migrant Family Border. A mother and her two
children walk across the Suchiate river bridge as Central American
migrants cross the border between Guatemala and Mexico, near Ciudad
Hidalgo, Chiapas State, Mexico, on Jan. 17, 2019.Marco Ugarte / AP
by Julia Ainsley January 19, 2019 NBC News
WASHINGTON — Trump administration officials weighed speeding up the
deportation of migrant children by denying them their legal right to
asylum hearings after separating them from their parents, according to
comments on a late 2017 draft of what became the administration's family
separation policy obtained by NBC News.
The draft also shows
officials wanted to specifically target parents in migrant families for
increased prosecutions, contradicting the administration's previous
statements. In June, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen
Nielsen said the administration did "not have a policy of separating
families at the border" but was simply enforcing existing law.
The authors noted that the "increase in prosecutions would be reported
by the media and it would have a substantial deterrent effect."
Click here to read the draft and comments
The draft plan was provided to NBC News by the office of Sen. Jeff
Merkley, D.-Ore., which says it was leaked by a government
whistleblower.
Exclusive: Whistleblower exposes Trump's harsh policy on migrants. VIDEO: 06:58
In the draft memo, called "Policy Options to Respond to Border Surge of
Illegal Immigration" and dated Dec. 16, 2017, officials from the
Departments of Justice and Homeland Security lay out a blueprint of
options, some of which were later implemented and others that have not
yet been put into effect.
At the time, the number of undocumented
immigrants seeking to cross the southern border was near historic
monthly lows: 40,519 in December 2017, compared to 58,379 the same month
the year prior.
The document was circulated between high level
officials at DHS and the Justice Department, at least one of whom was
instrumental in writing the first iteration of the administration's
travel ban.
The plan, and the comments written in the margins,
provide a window into the policy discussion thinking at the time, how
far officials were willing to go to deter families seeking asylum and
what they may still be considering.
VIDEO: Thousands of migrant children separated from parents prior to 'zero tolerance' policy. Jan. 17, 2019
01:32
In one comment, the Justice Department official suggests that Customs
and Border Protection could see that children who have been separated
from their parents would be denied an asylum hearing before an
immigration judge, which is typically awarded to children who arrive at
the border alone.
Instead, the entire family would be given an
order of "expedited removal" and then separated, placing the child in
the care of HHS in U.S. Marshall's custody while both await deportation.
"If CBP issues an ER [expedited removal] for the entire family unit,
places the parents in the custody of the U.S. Marshal, and then places
the minors with HHS, it would seem that DHS could work with HHS to
actually repatriate [deport] the minors then," the official wrote.
"It would take coordination with the home countries, of course, but
that doesn't seem like too much of a cost to pay compared to the status
quo."
It is unclear from the official's comment whether the
government planned on reunifying children with their parents before they
were deported.
"It appears that they wanted to have it both ways
— to separate children from their parents but deny them the full
protections generally awarded to unaccompanied children," said Lee
Gelernt, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union who led the
class action suit on behalf of migrant parents who had been separated
from their children.
A DHS official told NBC News on the
condition of anonymity because the department does not comment on
pre-decisional documents that the draft's authors' intent was to enable
agencies to reunify families after they were separated for prosecution.
But the draft and comments do not mention plans to reunify.
The Inspector General for Health and Human Services released a report
on Thursday that said "thousands" of children were separated under the
Trump administration during an influx in separations that began in the
summer of 2017, before the zero tolerance policy. Whether those children
were reunited with their parents is unknown, the report said.
Thousands more migrant kids separated from parents under Trump than previously reported
The Department of Homeland Security disputed the "thousands" reported
by the HHS Inspector General, claiming the inspector general did not
have evidence to back up the claim. According to DHS statistics, in
fiscal year 2017, the border patrol separated 1,065, 46 due to fraud and
1,109 due to medical or security concerns.
The December 2017
draft memo states that Customs and Border Protection is "currently
executing the [separation policy] on a limited basis in the El Paso
sector."
In a statement, DHS Spokeswoman Katie Waldman said, "The
Trump administration has made clear that all legal options are on the
table to enforce the rule of law, rein in mass unchecked illegal
immigration, and defend our borders. In December of 2017, we saw the
number of apprehensions increasing as a result of the Flores Settlement
Agreement, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, and a lack of
physical barrier on the Southern Border."
"In part we were
predicting — and trying to prevent — the exact humanitarian and security
crisis we are confronted by now," said Waldman. "It would be
malpractice to not seriously examine every single avenue to gain
operational control of the border and ensure that those who are entering
our country have a legal right to be here."
The Justice Department referred questions to DHS. Officials were aware of potential backlog of children
When the administration began separating immigrant families under the
"zero tolerance" policy in May 2018, it held children in the custody of
HHS until they could be placed with a sponsor to await an asylum
hearing. Zero tolerance never placed children in expedited removal or
included systematically deporting them without their parents. Trump
reversed the policy in an executive order on June 20, 2018.
One
policy that was discussed but not implemented from the draft memo
included limiting protections for migrant children who were victims of
abuse or neglect.
The draft's authors suggested targeting
"potential abuses" in the Special Immigrant Juveniles program, which
provides green cards for immigrant children who have been abused,
abandoned or neglected by a parent. The Justice Department official
notes in a comment that children who have been abused by one parent are
often living with the other parent when they qualify and that DHS
Secretary Nielsen could refuse to award green cards in such cases.
It is not clear whether the administration rejected the idea of
targeting children in the Special Immigrant Juveniles Program or whether
the idea is still under consideration.
Other policies discussed
in the draft, however, did materialize. For example, HHS adopted a
policy that would require anyone in a household who agreed to sponsor an
unaccompanied migrant child to undergo an extensive background check.
Publicly, DHS and HHS said that this was to ensure the safety of
children. But the draft shows administrators knew the potential for
creating a backlog of children in migrant detention, which later became
reality and led to the creation of the Tornillo tent city last year.
"There would be a short term impact on HHS where sponsors may not take
custody of their children in HHS facilities, requiring HHS to keep the
UACs [unaccompanied children] in custody longer," the draft said.
The official commenting in the margins of the draft noted, "I would
suggest referring sponsors for criminal prosecution under 1324 if
information indicates the sponsor facilitated the travel of the minor
into the United States."
PHOTO: The U.S.-Mexico border fence from Playas de Tijuana on Jan. 11, 2019.
The U.S.-Mexico border fence from Playas de Tijuana on Jan. 11, 2019.Guillermo Arias / AFP - Getty Images
The Justice Department has increased its criminal prosecutions of child
smugglers under the Trump administration, but it does not prosecute
every parent who has paid for their child to be brought to the United
States.
Also, the draft outlined the administration's plan to
keep asylum seekers in Mexico. Officials from the administration are
currently in negotiations with Mexico to finalize such a deal, forcing
all asylum seekers to wait in Mexico until a judge could adjudicate
their claims, which could take months or even years due to a backlog in
the courts.
"There are litigation risks associated with this
proposal, as it would implicate refugee treaties and international law,"
the draft said. In public testimony, Nielsen has told Congress that the
policy is legal.
The officials also weighed "mandatory
detention" of asylum seekers "for the duration of the adjudication of
their asylum claims."
Releasing immigrants on bond while they
wait months or years to see an asylum judge is an issue that has plagued
both the Obama and Trump administrations. However, under the 1997
Flores court agreement, ICE is prohibited from holding children in
detention for longer than 20 days. In September 2018, the administration
announced that it was seeking to overturn the Flores agreement, but the
policy has yet to go into effect. ICE is also limited in space to hold
all immigrants awaiting asylum hearings.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Julia Ainsley is a national security reporter for NBC News.
Family Separation May Have Hit Thousands More Migrant Children Than Reported
by Miriam Jordan January 17, 2019 New York Times
PHOTO: Brenda
Garcia reunited with her 7-year-old son, K.G.G., at Dulles Airport
outside Washington in June, 34 days after they were separated by
officials after crossing the border into the United States
illegally. Credit: Ryan Christopher Jones for The New York Times
HOUSTON — The Trump administration most likely separated thousands more
children from their parents at the Southern border than was previously
believed, according to a report by government inspectors released on
Thursday.
The federal government has reported that nearly 3,000
children were forcibly separated from their parents under last year’s
“zero tolerance” immigration policy, under which nearly all adults
entering the country illegally were prosecuted, and any children
accompanying them were put into shelters or foster care.
But even
before the administration officially unveiled the zero-tolerance policy
in the spring of 2018, staff of the United States Department of Health
and Human Services, the agency that oversees the care of children in
federal custody, had noted a “sharp increase” in the number of children
separated from a parent or guardian, according to the report from the
agency’s Office of Inspector General.
As of December, the
department had identified 2,737 children who were separated from their
parents under the policy and required to be reunified by a federal court
order issued in June 2018.
But that number does not represent
the full scope of family separations. Thousands of children may have
been separated during an influx that began in 2017, before the
accounting required by the court, the report said.
Thus, the
total number of children separated from a parent or guardian by
immigration authorities is “unknown,” because of the lack of a
coordinated formal tracking system between the Office of Refugee
Resettlement, the arm of Health and Human Services that takes in the
children, and the Department of Homeland Security, which separated them
from their parents.
“This report confirms what we suspected: This
cruel family separation practice was way bigger than the administration
let on,” said Lee Gelernt, who challenged the policy in court on behalf
of the American Civil Liberties Union. “We will be back in court and
ask the judge to order the government to explain these numbers,” he
said.
The family separations were a key part of the Trump
administration’s effort to deter migrant families from trying to enter
the country at the Southwest border, where they have been arriving in
large numbers, most of them fleeing violence and deep poverty in Central
America.
While the policy was framed as a decision to prosecute
those who entered the United States illegally, it resulted in thousands
of migrant parents spending months in agonized uncertainty, unable to
communicate with their children and in many cases not knowing even where
the children were.
Infants and toddlers were among the children
who were put into foster homes or migrant children shelters, often
hundreds or thousands of miles away from where their parents were
detained. Under separate policies, the administration also made it
difficult for relatives other than the children’s parents to take the
children into their own homes.
After a review of internal
government tallies, The New York Times found last year that more than
700 migrant children had been separated from their families in the
months before the government officially announced the zero-tolerance
policy.
On June 26, 2018, a federal judge in San Diego, in
response to the A.C.L.U. lawsuit, directed the federal government to
halt the separations at the border and to reunite children with their
parents. President Trump rescinded the policy that same month.
However, the federal inspectors found that separations have continued to
occur: As of November, the report found, Health and Human Services had
received at least 118 children who had been separated from their
families since the court order.
Officials at the Department of
Homeland Security, which oversaw the family separations at the border,
have said they have separated families only when necessary, such as when
a parent is facing a serious criminal prosecution, or when authorities
have reason to believe that the adult accompanying the child is not an
appropriate guardian.
“The report vindicates what D.H.S. has long
been saying,” said Katie Waldman, a spokeswoman for the department.
“For more than a decade it was, and continues to be, standard for
apprehended minors to be separated when the adult is not the parent or
legal guardian, the child’s safety is at risk, or serious criminal
activity by the adult. We are required under the law that Congress
passed to send all unaccompanied alien children to H.H.S.”
Ann
Maxwell, the Health and Human Services Department’s assistant inspector
general for evaluation and inspections, said the separations appeared to
have been occurring for a full year before the court issued its order.
“Thousands of children were separated from parents and guardians,
referred to H.H.S. and released from H.H.S. care before the court
order,” Ms. Maxwell said in a conference call with reporters.
“The total number is unknown,” she said. “It is certainly more than
2,737, but how many more, precisely, is unknown.” Moreover, that number
may never be known: Department officials, she said, had told her office
that there were “no efforts underway to identify that. It would take
away resources from children already in care.”
In an email after
the call, Ms. Maxwell’s spokesman confirmed that inspectors believed the
number of separated children may be “thousands” more than the 2,737
reported to the court.
The inspectors provided no precise data to
support that estimate, though Ms. Maxwell said that Health and Human
Services had noted a “spike” in the frequency of children being
separated from their families, from 0.3 percent of all apprehended
families in 2016 to 3.8 percent in 2017.
Family separations have
occurred for years, but they had previously been “fairly rare,” Ms.
Maxwell said, occurring only in cases where there were concerns about
child welfare. That changed in 2017, she said.
Ms. Maxwell said
that most of the families on the list of separated families had been
reunited, pursuant to the court order. But she said the figures
continued to evolve, for several reasons. The absence of an integrated
data system to track separated families through the two federal agencies
that oversee them was one problem, she said.
Also complicating
the issue, she said, was the complex problem of determining which
children should be considered officially “separated” from their
families. That meant that the list of families entitled to reunification
was still being revised as late as December 2018, more than five months
after the court order took effect.
The Department of Health and
Human Services, in its official response, said it had accounted publicly
for all children separated from relatives at the border and then
delivered to the agency for care.
“H.H.S. faced challenges in
identifying separated children,” the agency said. “The effort undertaken
by H.H.S. was complex, fast-moving and resource-intensive.”
The
inspector general’s report, the department said, “provides a window into
the herculean work of the H.H.S. career staff to rapidly identify
children in O.R.R. care who had been separated from their parents and
reunify them.” O.R.R. refers to the resettlement office.
The
department emphasized that the inspector general found “no evidence
whatsoever” that it had lost track of children in its care. Though there
were delays in linking children to parents, partly as a result of the
Department of Homeland Security’s tracking system. When immigration
agents separated families at the border, records that could have been
used to connect parents and children were automatically deleted because
the computer system had not been modified to account for separated
families.
In its response on Thursday, the Department of Health
and Human Services said that the inspector general’s report
“corroborates what H.H.S. has said all along: H.H.S. can determine the
location and status of any child in O.R.R. care at any time by accessing
the case management records for the child, or the O.R.R. online
portal.”
Glenn Thrush contributed reporting from Washington.
A
version of this article appears in print on Jan. 17, 2019, on Page A1
of the New York edition with the headline: Many Families Split at Border
Went Untallied. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper
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...
Anthony Braxton Composes Together Past, Present and Future 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.
Composition No. 220 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
Anthony Braxton (b. June 4, 1945): Legendary, iconic, and innovative musician, composer, cultural critic, arranger, philosopher, music theorist, producer, public intellectual and teacher
"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
“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
"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
"All great artists are beyond category" —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...
New Musical Configurations: Anthony Braxton's Cultural Critique by Ronald M. Radano
Hardback/Cloth 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.
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.
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...
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.
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
Wesleyan University’s Anthony Braxton Wins $225,000 Doris Duke Artist Award
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.
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
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
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.
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:
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
Anthony Braxton (b. June 4, 1945): Legendary, iconic, and innovative
musician, composer, arranger, philosopher, ensemble leader, music theorist, producer,
public intellectual and teacher
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!
"I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it's for or against."
W.E.B. DuBois (1868-1963)
"There is but one coward on earth, and that is the coward that dare not know."
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)
"Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can't ride you unless your back is bent. "
James Baldwin (1924-1987)
"Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society."
"A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization. A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilization. A civilization that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilization."
Nina Simone (1933-2003)
"There's no other purpose, so far as I'm concerned, for us except to reflect the times, the situations around us and the things we're able to say through our art, the things that millions of people can't say. I think that's the function of an artist and, of course, those of us who are lucky leave a legacy so that when we're dead, we also live on. That's people like Billie Holiday and I hope that I will be that lucky, but meanwhile, the function, so far as I'm concerned, is to reflect the times, whatever that might be."
Amilcar Cabral (1924-1973)
"Always bear in mind that the people are not fighting for ideas, for the things in anyone's head. They are fighting to live better and in peace, to see their lives go forward, to guarantee the future of their children ....Hide nothing from the masses of our people. Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories..." .
Angela Davis (b. 1944)
"The idea of freedom is inspiring. But what does it mean? If you are free in a political sense but have no food, what's that? The freedom to starve?”
Duke Ellington (1899-1974)
“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.”
Amiri Baraka (1934-2014)
"Thought is more important than art. To revere art and have no understanding of the process that forces it into existence, is finally not even to understand what art is."
Frederick Douglass (1817-1895)
"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” --August 3, 1857
Cecil Taylor (1929-2018)
“Musical categories don’t mean anything unless we talk about the actual specific acts that people go through to make music, how one speaks, dances, dresses, moves, thinks, makes love...all these things. We begin with a sound and then say, what is the function of that sound, what is determining the procedures of that sound? Then we can talk about how it motivates or regenerates itself, and that’s where we have tradition.”
Ella Baker (1903-1986)
"Strong people don't need strong leaders"
Paul Robeson (1898-1976)
"The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or for slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative."
John Coltrane (1926-1967)
"I want to be a force for real good. In other words, I know there are bad forces. I know that there are forces out here that bring suffering to others and misery to the world, but I want to be the opposite force. I want to be the force which is truly for good."
Miles Davis (1926-1991)
"Jazz is the big brother of Revolution. Revolution follows it around."
C.L.R. James (1901-1989)
"All development takes place by means of self-movement, not organization by external forces. It is within the organism itself (i.e. within the society) that there must be realized new motives, new possibilities."
Frantz Fanon (1925-1961)
"Now, political education means opening minds, awakening them, and allowing the birth of their intelligence as [Aime] Cesaire said, it is 'to invent souls.' To educate the masses politically does not mean, cannot mean, making a political speech. What it means is to try, relentlessly and passionately, to teach the masses that everything depends on them."
Edward Said (1935-2003)
“I take criticism so seriously as to believe that, even in the midst of a battle in which one is unmistakably on one side against another, there should be criticism, because there must be critical consciousness if there are to be issues, problems, values, even lives to be fought for."
Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937)
“The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned. There must be pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will.”
Susan Sontag (1933-2004)
"Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager."
Kofi Natambu, editor of The Panopticon Review, is a writer, poet, cultural critic, and political journalist whose poetry, essays, criticism, reviews, and journalism have appeared in many literary magazines, journals, newspapers, and anthologies. He is the author of a biography MALCOLM X: His Life & Work (Alpha Books) and two books of poetry: THE MELODY NEVER STOPS (Past Tents Press) and INTERVALS (Post Aesthetic Press). He was the founder and editor of SOLID GROUND: A NEW WORLD JOURNAL, a national quarterly magazine of the arts, culture, and politics and the editor of a literary anthology NOSTALGIA FOR THE PRESENT (Post Aesthetic Press). Natambu has read his work throughout the country and given many lectures and workshops at academic and arts institutions. He has taught American literature, literary theory and criticism, cultural history and criticism, film studies, political science, creative writing, philosophy, critical theory, and music history and criticism (Jazz, Blues, R&B, Hip Hop) at many universities and colleges. He was also a curator in the Education Department of Detroit’s Museum of African American History. Born in Detroit, Michigan, Natambu currently lives in Berkeley, California with his wife Chuleenan.
