Anthony Braxton
Anthony Braxton is an American experimental composer, educator, music theorist, improviser, and multi-instrumentalist who is best known for playing saxophones, particularly the alto sax. He grew up on the South Side of Chicago and was a key early member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. He received great acclaim for his 1969 double-LP record For Alto, the first full-length album of solo saxophone music.
A prolific composer with a vast body of cross-genre work, the MacArthur Fellow and NEA Jazz Master has released hundreds of recordings and compositions. During six years that he was signed to Arista Records, the diversity of his output encompassed work with many members of the AACM including duets with co-founder and first president Muhal Richard Abrams; collaborations with electronic musician Richard Teitelbaum; a saxophone quartet with Julius Hemphill, Oliver Lake and Hamiet Bluiett; compositions for four orchestras; and the ensemble arrangements of Creative Orchestra Music 1976, which was named the 1977 DownBeat Critics' Poll Album of the Year. Many of Braxton's projects are ongoing including the Diamond Curtain Wall works, in which Braxton implements audio programming language SuperCollider; the Ghost Trance Music series, inspired by his studies of the Native American Ghost Dance; and Echo Echo Mirror House Music, in which musicians "play" iPods containing the bulk of Braxton's oeuvre. He released the first six operas in a series called the Trillium Opera Complex.
Braxton identifies as a "trans-idiomatic" composer and has repeatedly opposed the idea of a rigid dichotomy between improvisation and composition. He has written extensively about the "language music" system that forms the basis for his work and developed a philosophy of "world creativity" in his Tri-Axium Writings.
Braxton taught at Mills College in Oakland, California from 1985 to 1990 and was Professor of Music at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut from 1990 until his retirement at the end of 2013. He is the artistic director of Tri-Centric Foundation, a nonprofit he founded in 1994 to support the preservation and production of works by Braxton and other artists "in pursuit of 'trans-idiomatic' creativity".
Early life
Braxton was born in Chicago to Julia Samuels Braxton, from Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Clarence Dunbar Braxton Sr., from Greenville, Mississippi; His father worked for the Burlington and Quincy Railroad. His parents divorced when he was young, and his mother remarried Lawrence Fouche, a worker at Ford Motor Company. He grew up living with his mother, stepfather, and three brothers, but still saw his father regularly. He grew up in a poorer district on the South Side, where he attended Betsy Ross Grammar School and had a paper route delivering The Chicago Defender.Anthony Braxton sang in a church choir and had an early love of rock music, with Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers and Bill Haley & His Comets among his favorites, but as a child he was more excited by rocketships, television, and technology. As was the case after World War I, post-WWII Chicago faced increased rates of white mob violence against Black people, and Braxton heard about incidents including the Cicero race riot of 1951, protests at the White City Roller Rink near his home, and the lynching of Chicagoan Emmett Till, who was killed when Braxton was 10.
Education and military service
In his early teens, Braxton took his at-home explorations of technology and electronics to Chicago Vocational High School, where drafting courses and time in shop studying wiring schematics set the course for his future compositional diagrams.After high school Braxton attended Wilson Junior College in Chicago for one semester, but was unable to continue his studies due to financial difficulties; he instead applied and was admitted to the United States Fifth Army Band in 1963. He was initially stationed in Highland Park, Illinois, where he could continue studies with Jack Gell at the Chicago School of Music, but he later traveled to South Korea with The Eighth Army Band. While in South Korea he met a number of improvising musicians and even led his own group, although many in the barracks did not appreciate the more esoteric works in his collection, and he purchased headphones due to rules restricting his listening time.
After a few years Braxton left the army and returned to Chicago; he later studied philosophy and music composition at Roosevelt University in the city, however he did not complete his degree.
Career
Shortly after returning to Chicago, Braxton's cousin told him about the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians and he attended a concert. After the performance he met Roscoe Mitchell, who invited him to practise with, and later join, the group.Braxton played over ten instruments on his 1968 debut, 3 Compositions of New Jazz, the influences for which he identified as Paul Desmond, Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy, Jackie McLean, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Miles Davis, James Brown, and the Chicago Transit Authority. The album's trio arrangement included Leroy Jenkins and Wadada Leo Smith, with Muhal Richard Abrams joining on the B-side recordings.
In 1969, Braxton recorded the double LP For Alto. There had been occasional unaccompanied saxophone recordings, but For Alto was the first full-length album for unaccompanied saxophone. The work has been described as "one of the greatest solo saxophone records ever made, and maybe one of the greatest recordings ever issued" and "an album of solo free improvisation that still remains a paragon of technical, aesthetic and emotional excellence". The album influenced other artists like Steve Lacy, Joe McPhee, and Evan Parker, who went on to record their own solo albums. Tracks on For Alto were dedicated to Cecil Taylor and John Cage, among others.
Braxton was initially pessimistic about making a living as a working musician and began hustling chess, but in 1970 he joined pianist Chick Corea's trio with Dave Holland and Barry Altschul to form the short-lived avant garde quartet Circle. After Corea left to form the fusion band Return to Forever, Holland and Altschul remained with Braxton for much of the 1970s as part of a quartet that variously included Kenny Wheeler, George E. Lewis, and Ray Anderson. The core trio plus saxophonist Sam Rivers recorded Holland's Conference of the Birds. In 1970, Muse released his album Creative Construction Company, with the group of the same name, consisting of Richard Davis, Steve McCall, Muhal Richard Abrams, Wadada Leo Smith, and Leroy Jenkins —the album was released in the late 1970s by the Italian label, Vedette, under the title, Muhal. Creative Orchestra Music 1976 was inspired by jazz and marching band traditions. Braxton also recorded duets with George Lewis and Richard Teitelbaum in the 1970s.
Braxton's regular group in the 1980s and early 1990s was a quartet with Marilyn Crispell, Mark Dresser and Gerry Hemingway. In 1981, he performed at the Woodstock Jazz Festival in Woodstock, New York to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Creative Music Studio. In 1994, Braxton was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.
During the 1990s and early 2000s, Braxton created a large body of jazz standard recordings, often featuring him as a pianist rather than saxophonist. He released multidisc sets, including three quadruple-CD sets for Leo that were recorded on tour in 2003. He worked with several groups, including a quintet crediting bassist Mario Pavone as co-leader with Thomas Chapin on saxophone, Dave Douglas on trumpet, and Pheeroan akLaff on drums. From 1995 to 2006, he concentrated what he called Ghost Trance Music, which introduced a pulse to his music and allowed the simultaneous performance of any piece by the performers; many of the earliest Ghost Trance recordings were released on his Braxton House label.
His Falling River Musics compositions were documented on 2+2 Compositions. In 2005, he was a guest performer with the noise group Wolf Eyes at the FIMAV Festival. Black Vomit, a recording of the concert, was described by critic François Couture as sympathetic and effective collaboration: "something really clicked between these artists, and it was all in good fun."
Braxton is known for a sprawling and extremely diverse discography which has continued to grow in his later career: in introducing his 13-CD box set Quartet 2020, Bandcamp Daily wrote, "Anthony Braxton's discography has been massive for decades. Since 2012, he's released two 4-CD operas; a 12-CD set of duos with various partners; a 7-CD set of the music of Lennie Tristano and associated artists; an 11-CD set of Charlie Parker's music; a 12-CD set of vocal music; an 8-CD set of duos with Eugene Chadbourne; a 4-CD set of collaborations with Nels Cline, Greg Saunier, and Taylor Ho Bynum; and an audio Blu-ray of 12 compositions for sextet, septet, and nonet, totaling over 11 hours of music. That is probably not all of the music."