Anthony Braxton

Composer

• Born: June 4, 1995
• Birthplace: Chicago, Illinois

Musician and composer

Braxton is a multi-instrumentalist and composer. First influenced by John Coltrane, Paul Desmond, and Warne Marsh, he became a leading proponent of merging avant-garde jazz with contemporary art music. A versatile innovator, he linked such disparate areas as mathematics and African ritual practices with elements from free jazz to European art music. His performances and compositions were partly notated (often in a graphical notation he developed) and partly improvised.

Areas of achievement: Music: bandleading; Music: classical and operatic; Music: composition; Music: jazz

Early Life

Anthony Delano Braxton was born in 1945 in Chicago. He studied clarinet with Jack Gell of the Chicago School of Music from 1959 to 1963 before he took up the saxophone. During a brief enrollment at Chicago’s Wilson Junior College, where he played clarinet and studied music for one semester, he met drummer Jack DeJohnette and Roscoe Mitchell, a future member of the Art Ensemble of Chicago. In 1963, Braxton entered the music corps of the US Army and was stationed with the Eighth Army Band in Korea, where he encountered the music of Arnold Schoenberg for the first time.

Upon his discharge in 1966, Braxton returned to Chicago to study philosophy and composition at Roosevelt University with the objective of becoming a philosophy teacher. At the invitation of Mitchell, he joined the newly formed musicians’ cooperative Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). At the AACM, where emphasis was put on experimentation with sound, space, and texture, Braxton collaborated with Muhal Richard Abrams and Joseph Jarman, among others.

In 1967, Braxton formed the trio Creative Construction Company with violinist Leroy Jenkins and trumpeter Leo Smith. They performed and recorded in New York. Along with other AACM members, the trio traveled to Paris in 1969, but Braxton was not well received there. The trio disbanded within a year. In 1970, Braxton left Paris for New York and joined the Italian improvisation ensemble Musica Elettronica Viva, then played—after an introduction by DeJohnette—with Chick Corea, Dave Holland, and Barry Altschul in the cooperative avant-garde quartet Circle (1970–1971). After the breakup of that band in 1971, Braxton moved back to Paris. He did not permanently return to the United States until 1974.

Life’s Work

Braxton achieved wide acclaim in 1972 with the release of the epochal double album For Alto (recorded in 1968), the first album of unaccompanied saxophone music. He was subsequently invited to present numerous solo concerts and appeared frequently from 1971 to 1976 as the leader of his own quartets, which included Holland and Altschul and a brass player—briefly trumpeter Kenny Wheeler, then trombonist George Lewis. Braxton’s growing success during the 1970s also was aided by a contract with Arista Records. The albums For Trio (1978), For Four Orchestras (1978), and For Two Pianos (1982) were increasingly inspired by the works of Schoenberg, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and John Cage. Displaying his growing interest in contemporary music, Braxton became a controversial figure in jazz circles. He countered with tribute sessions to Thelonious Monk and Lennie Tristano, a collaboration with Max Roach, and the album In the Tradition (1974).

From 1983 to 1985, Braxton was based in New Haven, Connecticut, before he accepted a professor of music position at Mills College in Oakland. In his last year in California, he formed an influential quartet with pianist Marilyn Crispell, bass player Mark Dresser, and drummer Gerry Hemingway; the group remained active until 1994. During the 1980s, Braxton composed symphonies for large orchestras, parade marches, and a series of twelve operas called Trillium. This “ritual and ceremonial” work demonstrates Braxton’s fascination with mysticism, astrology, and numerology, as well as theater, dance, and costume.

From 1990 until his retirement in 2013, Braxton taught composition, music history, and improvisation at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. The prestigious MacArthur Foundation Award, which he received in 1994, enabled Braxton to set up the Tri-Centric Foundation, a New York-based organization established solely to perform his multimedia works, and he remains the artistic director of that organization. In 1996, he began giving concerts of “Ghost Trance Music,” extensive performances navigating the boundaries between notated and improvised music. During the early years of the twenty-first century, he recorded (primarily on piano) an impressive series of more traditional jazz material. He also released several comprehensive box sets during this period, including Qunitet (Tristano) 2014 (2016) and Quartet (New Haven) 2014 (2019).

Over the years, Braxton collaborated and recorded with the avant-garde musicians Derek Bailey, Alex von Schlippenbach (of the Globe Unity Orchestra), Richard Teitelbaum, Marty Ehrlich, Pheeroan akLaff, Adelhard Roidinger, Tony Oxley, Evan Parker, Ornette Coleman, Muhal Richard Abrams, Peter Brötzmann, Willem Breuker, Andrew Cyrille, Wolf Eyes, Misha Mengelberg, Chris Dahlgren, and Lauren Newton. He also has worked with more traditional jazz musicians, such as Mal Waldron, Dave Brubeck, Lee Konitz, Steve Lacy, and Pat Metheny.

Significance

Braxton has written roughly four hundred compositions spanning all major genres. He composed orchestral works, works for a big band, chamber music, works for piano, works for solo saxophone, and works for a small improvisatory ensemble. A reed player who is a virtuoso on all members of the saxophone and clarinet family, Braxton continued the tradition of such early free-jazz avant-garde musicians as Eric Dolphy, Albert Ayler, and John Coltrane. He has recorded more than seventy albums and appeared on at least fifty others, and was named a 2014 National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master.

Bibliography

Braxton, Anthony. Composition Notes. Lebanon: Frog Peak Music, 1988. Print.

Braxton, Anthony. Tri-Axium Writings. 3 vols. San Francisco: Synthesis Music, 1985. Print.

Broomer, Stuart. Time and Anthony Braxton. Toronto: Mercury, 2009. Print.

Heffley, Mike. The Music of Anthony Braxton. Westport: Greenwood, 1996. Print.

Lock, Graham. Forces in Motion: The Music and Thoughts of Anthony Braxton. New York: Da Capo, 1988. Print.

Radano, Ronald M. New Musical Figurations: Anthony Braxton’s Cultural Critique. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993. Print.

Ratliff, Ben. "Anthony Braxton's Tempo Emphasizes the Upbeat." New York Times. New York Times, 18 Feb. 2016. Web. 16 Mar. 2016.