About Opentopia
Opentopia Directory Encyclopedia Tools

Anthony Braxton

Encyclopedia : A : AN : ANT : Anthony Braxton

Not to be confused with Toni Braxton.
Anthony Braxton (born June 4, 1945) is an American composer, multi-reedist and pianist.

He has created a large body of highly complex work. Much of Braxton's music is jazz oriented, but he has also been active in free improvisation and orchestral music, and has written operas. Among the vast array of instruments he utilizes are the flute, the sopranino, soprano, F alto, E-flat alto, baritone, bass, and contrabass saxophones; and the E-flat, B-flat, and contrabass clarinets.

Critic Chris Kelsey writes that "Although Braxton exhibited a genuine — if highly idiosyncratic — ability to play older forms (influenced especially by saxophonists Warne Marsh, John Coltrane, Paul Desmond, and Eric Dolphy), he was never really accepted by the jazz establishment, due to his manifest infatuation with the practices of such non-jazz artists as John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen [and though Kelsey doesn't mention it, Braxton has long been interested in Arnold Schoenberg's music]. Many of the mainstream's most popular musicians (Wynton Marsalis among them) insisted that Braxton's music was not jazz at all. Whatever one calls it, however, there is no questioning the originality of his vision; Anthony Braxton created music of enormous sophistication and passion that was unlike anything else that had come before it." [link]

Braxton's music is highly theoretical and mystically influenced, and he is the author of multiple volumes explaining his theories and pieces—such as the philosophical three-volume Triaxium Writings and the five-volume Composition Notes, both published by Frog Peak Music. While his compositions and improvisations can be characterized as avant garde, the swing feel and rhythmic angularity of pieces shows a debt to Charlie Parker and the Bebop tradition.

Braxton is notorious for naming his pieces as diagrams—often with no textual or numeric titles. Some of these diagrams indicate positions of the performers in the piece, a variation on aleatory music that presaged his follower John Zorn's "game pieces." The labels of long playing records were better suited than compact discs for the depiction of these diagram titles.

In 1994, he was granted a MacArthur Fellowship.

Beyond his musical career, Braxton is an avid chess player and has played at a professional level.

Contents

Biography

Early in his career, Braxton led a trio with violinist Leroy Jenkins and trumpeter Leo Smith and was involved with The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the "AACM", founded in Chicago, Braxton's birthplace.

In 1968, Braxton recorded For Alto. There had been occasional unaccompanied saxophone recordings previously (notably Coleman Hawkins' "Picasso"), but For Alto was the first full-length album for unaccompanied saxophone. The album's songs were dedicated to Cecil Taylor and John Cage, among others. The album influenced other artists like Steve Lacy (soprano sax) and George Lewis (trombone), who would go on to record their own acclaimed solo albums.

Braxton joined pianist's Chick Corea's existing trio with Dave Holland (double bass) and Barry Altschul (drums) to form the short-lived avant garde quartet "Circle", around 1970. When Corea broke up the group, forming Return to Forever to pursue a fusion based style of composition and recording, Holland and Altschul remained with Braxton for much of the 1970s as part of a quartet, with the rotating brass chair variously filled by trumpeter Kenny Wheeler, or trombonists George Lewis or Ray Anderson. This group recorded on Arista Records. The core trio plus saxophonist Sam Rivers recorded Holland's Conference of the Birds, ECM. In the 1970s he also recorded duets with Lewis and with synthesizer player Richard Teitelbaum. In the late 1970s he recorded two large ensemble recordings, "Creative Orchestra Music," inspired by American jazz and marching band traditions, and "For Four Orchestras." Both of these records were released on Arista Records.

Braxton's regular group in the 1980s and early 1990s was a quartet with Marilyn Crispell (piano), Mark Dresser (double bass) and Gerry Hemingway on drums was called "his finest and longest standing band". [link]

Braxton has also recorded and collaborated with musicians situated in the European improvisation scene, such as Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, and the Globe Unity Orchestra, or with giants from the 'regular' jazz world, such as Max Roach. Throughout the years Braxton has played with a wide variety of people, such as Mal Waldron, Dave Douglas, Ornette Coleman, Dave Brubeck, Lee Konitz, Peter Brötzmann, Willem Breuker, Muhal Richard Abrams, Steve Lacy, Roscoe Mitchell, Pat Metheny, Andrew Cyrille, Wolf Eyes, Misha Mengelberg, Chris Dahlgren and countless others.

Since 1995, Braxton has been composing and performing almost exclusively what he calls Ghost Trance Music, which introduces a steady pulse to his music and also allows the simultaneous performance of any piece by him.

Braxton studied philosophy at Roosevelt University. He has taught at Mills College and now is Professor of Music at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, teaching music composition, music history, and improvisation.

One of his children, Tyondai Braxton, also is a professional musician & guitarplayer.

Partial discography

Braxton recorded albums for various labels, such as [Leo Records], [Braxton House], [Hat Hut], Emanem, Delmark, Black Saint, Arista Records, etc.

Bibliography

External links

Reading

Listening

 

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.

Search Titles
0123456789
ABCDEFGHIJ
KLMNOPQRST
UVWXYZ?

E-mail this article to:

Personal Message: