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Anthony Braxton’s Arista Recordings

“I thought Three Compositions of New Jazz would top the charts

and sell a million copies! I thought the kids would be dancing in
the streets to it!”
--Anthony Braxton

That confession has caused me many a rueful chuckle over the past
four decades. Referring to one of the first recordings of his
iconoclastic music, circa 1968, the artist’s words capture so well
the Peter Pan spirit of the times just before its comeuppance. We
countercultured baby boomers took the promises of the zeitgeist
then so seriously, so proactively, on so many levels, all so
impossibly naively. Love—as social justice, all human potential
fully realized, universal brother/sister-hood...cosmic forces and
entities terrible to some and wonderful to others, riding our music
like some wild, bucking bronco—would sweep away the old and
usher in the new. All lions would assume their new positions with
all lambs in the new heaven on the new earth, and our dawning
adulthood would see us sauntering off through the sunset of the old
and into the sunrise of our brave new world, without a night in
between them.

Between 1968 and 1975, when the first of the 13 LPs reissued here
came out, that night had fallen. It fell hardest with the
assassinations (John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, a
few years after Malcolm X), the Chicago Democratic Convention
and Kent State violence, the worst and the end of the Viet Nam
war, the rise of Nixon and his fall in Watergate.

More music-specifically, we saw a golden age of rock music come

and go through Woodstock and Altamont, and the rise and fall of
Fillmores East and West. More jazz-specifically, Miles Davis
stirred things up much as his fellow Columbia recording artist Bob
Dylan had by “going electric”—helping to launch the “fusion” of
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rock and jazz, along with some of his most illustrious former
bandmates leading their own new groups.

More Braxton-music-specifically, those seven years also brought

the deaths of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Eddie Condon,
Mezz Mezzrow, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Kid Ory, Gene Krupa, Igor
Stravinsky, Darius Milhaud, and Pablo Casals; and New York
debut performances of new music by Karlheinz Stockhausen
(Stimmung, and Hymnen) and Krzysztof Penderecki (Utrenja).
They also saw the Apollo expeditions to the moon, and the Mariner
probe’s first pictures of the surface of Mars.

Such details, as grab-baggy as they seem, are in fact pointedly

reflective of Braxton’s public persona then and since, and of the
musical/cultural range and specifics pertaining here. He was an
artist in touch with just such a diverse cross-section of his time and
culture; the names and events above might well have come up in
his interviews and writings about his work, or in the dedications of
his compositions to people, as influences and inspirations.

The Business
The reference to Columbia Records is more than casual in this
context, too. Clive Davis, president of the company from 1967-72,
formed the Arista label in 1974 by consolidating Columbia
Pictures’ legacy labels Colpix Records, Colgem Records, and Bell
Records. (He named the new entity after New York City’s
secondary school honor society, to which he had belonged.) A scan
of Columbia Records during his tenure there, and of Arista’s roots
in earlier pop and rock scenes and its own diverse roster over the
years since, suggests explanations other than quixotic delusion for
Braxton’s initial high hopes for his music’s mass appeal.

Unlike his Columbia colleague John Hammond, Clive Davis had

relatively little personal involvement with jazz, but like Hammond
he was involved with the acquisition of some of the biggest rock
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artists and groups of the time. When he made a production deal

with Steve Backer (Backer’s Productions) to develop Arista’s jazz
line, he was bringing on board the perfect instigator of something
that was not your father’s jazz scene.

Backer had promoted rock artists for MGM/Verve and Elektra

labels before moving to ABC’s Impulse Records (1971-73). In his
book The House That Trane Built: The Story of Impulse Records
(2006), Ashley Kahn describes Backer as “a rock promotion man
and jazz enthusiast” who brought to the label “a certain rock-
generation sensibility,” “an understanding of the new forces in
youth culture like the rock press and FM radio,” and “an
appreciation of studio recording innovations and a willingness to
employ them on jazz sessions.”1 John Coltrane, like Miles Davis
and other jazz stars then, already had a fan base overlapping with
rock’s. Backer was the best positioned and skilled, and the most
inclined, to cultivate such crossovers even further. His success in
doing so for Coltrane’s material and torchbearing artists at Impulse
prepared him to do the same for Braxton’s even more challenging
projects at Arista.

When he heard Davis was launching Arista, Backer pitched his

vision of a jazz line. His words to me in 2008 are close to what he
told writer Michael Ullman almost thirty years ago about the Arista
deal: “My philosophy centers on the idea of yin and yang, or
balance: between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ in the music, between old
and young, acoustic and electric. I was just looking for the
common denominator of quality in all the different kinds of music.

“I saw the artists I promoted at Impulse as an extension of Trane’s

music (Archie Shepp, Marion Brown, Sam Rivers); they were the
less commercial, more ‘out’ players. Keith Jarrett and Gato

1
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Barbieri, whom I signed and who sold more albums, gave me the
latitude to cultivate the others.

“Similarly, Anthony was the central figure of what I wanted to do

with the Arista label then. I couldn’t and still can’t think of a better
artist to paint the picture I wanted to paint with Arista than him.
After him I signed Muhal Richard Abrams, Oliver Lake, Henry
Threadgill’s Air, Cecil Taylor, and started up the Arista Freedom
label—but Anthony was the first. This was also the moment for
fusion crossovers, so the more commercially successful Brecker
Brothers gave me that same latitude to present my riskier artists as
Keith and Gato had given me at Impulse.

“It was noted at the time how rare it was for an artist as
idiosyncratic as Anthony to be signed and promoted so
aggressively by a major label,” he says.

The combination of Davis’s benign indifference to the jazz wars of

the time and his comfort with Backer’s proven success in both rock
and jazz markets, and Backer’s personal taste for Braxton’s music,
opened the door to a signing and sustained cultivation of Braxton
as the new label’s signature artist that did prove to be something of
a rare perfect storm of good fortune for all concerned.

The Artist
It may seem strange to those who think of Anthony Braxton as the
penultimate outcat to recall (or learn for the first time) that he was
once the prime candidate for the crossover marketing and
promotion offered by a major label. Coltrane and extended
psychedelic rock jams, Miles Davis and funk and rock guitar and
electronics, Keith Jarrett and New Age, later, all made more sense.
Braxton’s overlaps were rather with the most forbidding European
and American avant-garde art music. What kind of crossover
potential did that hybrid portend?
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In 1974, though, he was in many ways also the man to watch in

jazz. True, he had shocked some jazz-purist ears with his double
LP For Alto, a groundbreaking recording of original music for
solo alto saxophone; additionally, his Association for the
Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) roots were
themselves suspiciously radical and musically questionable to
many establishment types in the jazz community; granted, his Paris
trio’s nickname was “the slide rule boys,” a pejorative akin to
“egghead;” i and okay, Braxton did spend some quality time
around the post-John Cage Wesleyan University turf of new-music
improvisers/composers such as Alvin Lucier, Richard Teitelbaum,
and Frederick Rzewski after returning from Europe in 1970.

But he had also shown how his singular vision and voice could
work in the collective context of the Circle band (1970-71) with
pianist Chick Corea, bassist Dave Holland, and drummer Barry
Altschul, all duly seasoned and pedigreed leading jazz artists; and
he had released his In the Tradition recordings and other similar,
well received by the mainstream jazz press, on a variety of labels
that demonstrated his proficiency and comfort with standards and
post-bop material, language, and similarly illustrious bandmates.
Moreover, offsetting those who didn’t share his experimentalist
vision of the future of the music were those who found it an
intriguing alternative to the more commercial and less musical (by
their lights) trend toward jazz-rock fusion.

Starting out with music on the clarinet in school, Braxton took

private lessons with a “strict, correct teacher from the German
tradition” named Jack Gell, at the Chicago school of music.ii His
adolescent tastes ranged from the early rock of his time (The
Platters, Frankie Lymon, Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Bill Haley)
to the cool sides of jazz (Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck, Paul
Desmond, Ahmad Jamal). He cut his teeth as both player and
composer-arranger in high school, college, and army bands. In the
army, while in Korea, he discovered the music of Arnold
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Schoenberg, Albert Ayler’s Bells, Coltrane’s Ascension, then

returned to Chicago.

Fellow reedsman Roscoe Mitchell got him into the AACM,

Chicago’s South Side collective, founded by pianist Muhal
Richard Abrams, dedicated to the supplementary alternative
cultivation of the local musical arts: composition, improvisation,
education, performance, business. In 1969, Braxton and fellow
AACM’ers (the late) violinist Leroy Jenkins and trumpeter
Wadada Leo Smith moved to Paris and worked and recorded as a
trio there. Soon after returning to the States, Braxton joined the
Circle group. Between the end of that (1971) and the first Arista
LP (1974), Braxton performed and recorded extensively, mostly as
a leader, throughout Europe, Japan, and North America.

Braxton’s recorded output had already earned him the adjective

“prolific” (which has applied ever since) by the time Arista signed
him. From his first sessions on the Delmark label in 1968, he had
gone on to release over two dozen more on several labels, spanning
the musical terrain from most mainstream to most adventurously
original in those six short years.

The Producer and the Deal

Backer today describes himself as “a jazz fan before I was a rock
fan.” He came up listening to West Coast jazz, and took lessons
from the original Jimmy Giuffre 3 bassist Ralph Pena. Like
Braxton’s, his tastes moved from Paul Desmond to late Coltrane in
the same short and intensive period. He had liked For Alto and
other of Braxton’s most adventurous Delmark records. It was a
letter he got from Braxton himself that planted the seed that later
sprouted.

“When I was general manager at Impulse, Anthony wrote me a

letter from Europe, which I really dug. It was funny. ‘Dear Steve,
here are ten reasons why you probably won’t sign me: I won’t get
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played on the radio, I’m too far out’...things like that. Humorous,
very erudite letter.”

Backer told two good friends whose informed judgment about both
music and music business he respected—Bob Thiele, the first
general manager of Impulse, and Robert Palmer, whom he
regarded as the best journalist and critic of the music then (he
wrote the liner notes to Braxton’s Five Pieces 1975)—that he was
considering signing Braxton as his first and foremost major artist.
Both approved the choice (Thiele had seriously considered signing
him himself, but “just hadn’t gotten to it”).

The Arista signing promised the promising young musical

innovator and his fans a respectable, sustaining platform and
context for his bold initiatives, an alliance between the ‘60s
visionary and the ‘70s practical aspects of the artist as a young
husband and father. He had a new family, bought his first home, in
the country near Woodstock, New York. No longer living abroad,
signed to a major American label with annual renewable options—
a man with “a barn of his own,” to paraphrase Virginia Woolf,
which became his studio for composing, playing, and home
recording—it all bode well for an American-dreamlike future,
critical acclaim, a measure of well-deserved fame and good
fortune, if not the latter sans that qualifier.

Thus came the moment of the Carter after the Nixon-Ford years,
and the moment in the music business that could accommodate the
Braxtonian vision. The work Braxton had done on his other labels,
from the edgiest self-initiatives to the more conventional gestures,
had prepared him well to rise to this fortuitous occasion. The range
of LPs and tracks within each of them here, accordingly,
demonstrates a thoughtful presentation and balance (recalling
Backer’s word) of the traditional and the innovative then. On
balance, however, it might indeed be most pithily characterized as
“not your father’s jazz scene.”
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In short, he was finding his path through the “me” decade to be not
so much about a fall of quixotic idealistic social-cultural activism
and a retreat into self-interested individualism as it was, hopefully,
about trying to mature the vision from carefree, rootless youth into
engagement with the world as it was—the family, business, the
mainstream political/social—and to try and sow the seeds of
change for the better from the inside.

This Writer
Having profiled both Braxton and Backer as that solid and
efficacious mix of open-minded idealism and practicality, and of
similar genre-and-style-crossing musical tastes, I should disclose a
few details about my more personal history with these LPs. (What
we’re leading up to here is how a dream can begin one way and
take a sudden turn another, for better and/or worse, when it ends.
Backer, Braxton, and I, though our profiles have been more public
and our involvements with the music more up close and personal
than many, are not that different from thousands of other
musicians, writers about the music, and fans who came up in those
years, got caught up in such sounds and visions, and bore and grew
with them wherever they led over the time since. The value of
getting to know us in this text lies as much in that commonality as
in our uniquenesses.)

I came of age in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I was exposed
to and clicked with the Beat and jazz scenes there from age 10
(thanks to a rather bohemian father), when I started taking my first
music (guitar) lessons. At 13, in junior high school, I took up the
trombone. My budding serious involvement with music carried me
into and through all the books about and recordings of jazz, blues,
folk, and Western classical and contemporary concert music I
could get my hands on. It carried me into and through the
burgeoning folk and later rock scenes in Berkeley and the Haight-
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Ashbury then, and the live jazz scene up and down the West Coast
from SF to Monterey to LA.

This Writer’s Relevance

When I was old enough to start sitting in on local jam sessions
myself, around 1967, I became acquainted with the man around
whom revolved the most interesting part of the SF jazz scene then,
Donald “Rafael” Garrett. He played bass and reeds, and had moved
there from Chicago, where he had worked with Muhal Richard
Abrams in The Experimental Band, something of a precursor to the
AACM. He called his own local initiative the Rafael Garrett
Circus, a working-cum-rehearsal band. I was too young and green
still for professional gigs, but he let me and other music students
sit in on sessions in his garage. Oliver Johnson, who would play
with Steve Lacy for many years in Paris, and record with Braxton
there, was part of that regular group, and the friend who got me
into it.

Garrett would play and record with John Coltrane’s group when it
was in town. He stayed in touch with the Chicago scene, so I
became aware through him of Braxton’s early Delmark recordings
as they came out, took them in in the spirit of their time, in real
time, my reception and understanding of them shared and shaped
by one of the savviest insiders from the culture and circles that
spawned them.

When I moved from San Francisco to Eugene, Oregon, in 1971, I

found myself joining the company of two more such savvy
insiders: Malinké Robert Elliott and Arzinia Richardson, both
erstwhile stalwarts and pillars of St. Louis’s Black Artists Group
(BAG; Elliott was one of the cofounders). Like me, and Braxton,
they were withdrawing from the fast-lane urban life of the young
and single artist-activist to start their new families in a more
pastoral, healthy environment and lifestyle.
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Our involvement with the music deepened and matured with us,
though, rather than getting left behind as youthful folly. Arzinia
and I both hosted our own local radio (KLCC) jazz shows,
sometimes sitting in with each other—which meant I continued to
get each of Braxton’s recordings as they were released in real time
(free, at the radio station), and to talk with insiders in the know
about the music. (BAG was inspired by St. Louis saxophonist
Oliver Lake’s visit to the AACM, and the two groups have enjoyed
close ties in the same musical-cultural discourse over the years.)

It was over these years of the 1970s in this bucolic and (like
Woodstock) thickly countercultural setting that I took in these
Arista recordings as they were released. As a regular jazz buff, I
took in everything else that was going on in print and on record,
but I was well primed and inclined to give these special place in
my life and thought. I hung out with the BAG guys in our local
jazz scene while our kids grew up and played together, I played in
that scene with my own bands as a trombonist, wrote a lot of
journalism about it, and helped bring and present the artists (Sun
Ra, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Ornette Coleman and other
similar) they knew and I got to know.

Eventually, Braxton was one such guest, and we struck up an

association as fellow musicians, in 1988. That led to my formation
of a big band called the Northwest Creative Orchestra (Braxton’s
choice of name then), which recorded with him a CD on the Italian
Black Saint label, Eugene (1989). The door was thus opened for a
nice little run of other such collaborations, with Andrew Hill,
Oliver Lake, Julius Hemphill, John Carter, Vinny Golia and others.

I went on to return to graduate school under Braxton’s academic

mentorship, played with him in some of his bands, wrote a book,
articles, and scholarly papers about him throughout the ‘90s in the
Northeast, then returned to the Northwest. Since taking my PhD. in
Ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University in 2000, my close
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professional connections with him have become more distant

personal ones, but still nothing but a deepening and unproblematic
friendship.

All this information and disclosure is my way of setting up the

context for my closing remarks about the Arista recordings as a
whole slice of musical-cultural history, and as a slice of the larger
whole of Braxton’s and that same history that succeeded them; and
for my exegesis on the music they’ve preserved.

We’re on the eve of the complete fall of Western ideas and life
values. We’re in the process of developing more meaningful
values, and our music is a direct expression of this...

--Anthony Braxton (from Three

Compositions of New Jazz liner
notes, 1968)

The passing allusion to the American political landscape

(Nixon/Ford to Carter/Mondale to Reagan/Bush) is a fertile one to
mine for a summary assessment here. I look back on the period
that produced the Arista recordings as an ascent of something like
a political vision and party I approved of to take—democratically,
by popular vote— the reins of state away from a regime I
disdained, to then (all too soon and sadly) lose office again to the
old guard renewed.

As we will trace through the sequence of recordings, Braxton did

indeed seem to be the man of jazz’s hour at first, and seized that
moment to produce a series of ever more worthy fulfillments of his
promise that would seem, at the time, to have secured his
subsequent decades at the pinnacle of (as he calls it) the “jazz-
industrial complex.” However, the choices he made to follow them
up left many of his former allies and supporters behind, and his
vision was voted out and replaced by a world those of us still with
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him thought we had left behind (including, indeed, a return of your

father’s jazz scene with a vengeance).

The details constituting that metaphor comprise a story beyond this

one. In a nutshell, it is the story of the artist turning to a brighter,
higher path of his own making and greater interest, as a composer
and performer, as a teacher, and as human being and artist more of
the world and all time than of a nation or a moment, a “race” or a
gender, a party line or a genre.

Musically, I would shift metaphors to compare it to one of those

morning periods of calm after a storm, a period that refines,
contains, and presents with more clarity and restraint the forces
that were raging more chaotically during the night before:
something like the Empfindsamkeit and classical periods in post-
Baroque Europe, or the swing era after early jazz, or cool after bop
(the storm here, of course, being the ‘60s free jazz, to keep
painting with those broad strokes).

Socially, culturally, and commercially, I would sum up the Arista

run as a rare happy (if finite) marriage of business and art. Those
of us aware of Braxton’s work, and invested in its background and
trajectory to that point, had a distinct sense of the potential import
of this deal. It might be compared to, again, Miles or Dylan at
Columbia, where uncompromising brilliance, genius, and
dedication seem to get their due for once in the marketplace and
critical limelight. As Backer said, it was noteworthily unusual for
such a label to sign such an artist, even then. (To his credit, he
stuck to his guns and renewed Braxton’s option to record as long
as possible, enabling [not to be confused with funding; Braxton
financed the most expensive Four Orchestras project] the final
most controversial, least commercial, but arguably most important
recordings.) Obviously, such signings of artists are good for them
personally, professionally—but for us fans and fellow travelers
(musicians, and artists and intellectuals in other and resonant
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fields) who share their visions and passions, they also come as
breakthroughs on the larger levels of history and culture.

Arista signing Braxton seemed to us aficionados then that the

principles and aesthetics his music bespoke, the ideas and visions
he himself had voiced in interviews and liner notes, had succeeded
in their challenge of the mainstream assumptions that marginalized
them and centralized maximum profits and minimum common
denominator, were moving in now to take over and realign the
center in their infinitely better way. The artist’s enshrinement of
idiosyncratic vision and voice combined with transpersonal
abstraction (both graphic and opus-numbered titles) bespoke the
best of the post-‘60s, new ‘70s zeitgeist: get over yourself, take
responsibility for your own life, don’t leave it in the hands of a fate
scripted either by the forces of evil (the big bad establishment
racist/capitalist world bedeviling your youth) or by fairy-tale
utopianism (over-identification with some
identity[ethnic/gender/ideological/doctrinal]-political group
reactive to that world). Both are for wimps and chumps; step up
and show both worlds what you yourself have really got, join the
real party.

A phoenix—the Bird that really Lives—seemed to be rising from

the ashes of the ‘60s.

Personally, I would sum up this music’s effect on my own

evolution from a twentysomething to a thirtysomething baby
boomer white American man in the music something like this: as
the Beatles music of that era brings back to many memories of
initiation into a certain kind of consciousness that then lit the
subsequent path through later years and growth, so growing along
so closely with the music of Braxton and his peers, and with the
individuals and communities it led me to form my closest ties with
in life, served to rearrange some of my psychic furniture in a way I
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would articulate so: it reversed the positions of some cultural

assumptions I had inherited that needed reversing.

Towit: what formerly seemed more theater than reality—music,

the arts, entertainment—became the opposite over time. The
brotherhood of the musicians, the family of the music, if you will,
became the primary human connection, both laterally, with fellow
humans, and vertically, with all that we might call spiritual (life,
mystery, God, gods).

Conversely, all that seemed more primal reality than theater—race,

culture, gender, age, political ideology, religion, personal identity
itself—gradually turned more and more to theater in my eyes. In
no small part, I blame this radical re(dis)orientation on Anthony
Braxton.

I’ve become more the writer and teacher (of writing and
humanities to college undergraduates) than musician in my later
years. But this music and its history, both personal and general,
remains a wellspring of rich material for that writing and teaching.
If that part of it that Anthony Braxton has added did not exist, I
cannot imagine my life without a fight to the death to try and
invent it.

The Music

The packaging
Backer’s and Braxton’s collaborative strategy for the releases was
to lead with the most airplay-friendly (short) and listener-friendly
(musically accessible) tracks, then to slip in the more experimental
and adventurous music later. It unfolded so over the arc of the
whole series of LPs as well as on the sequence of tracks through
the A and B sides of each. Thus the bands and sounds closest to the
“jazz” side of things at the time were featured on New York, Fall
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1974 (1975) and Five Pieces 1975 (1975); still close but less so
were Duets 1976 (1976) and Creative Orchestra Music 1976
(1976); The Montreux/Berlin Concerts (1977) returned to the
hot-jazz-like quartet, for the first live performance of the series.

This is not to say that these five, the latter a double LP, hold
anything back in the way of adventurous originality—the spine of
the repertoire is Braxton’s own music, including those infamous
graphic titles and arcane composer’s liner notes, and the
vocabulary of the compositional concepts and improvisations is
enriched with everything he had taken from his oft-acknowledged
influences, from Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, and the AACM to
Cage, Stockhausen, and others from that eclectic range—but all
five of the first LPs share in common instrumentation, personnel,
performance contexts, energies, and inflections the jazz-fan base
would be comfortable with. Braxton is clearly the crackerjack
mainstream jazz- and even studio-musician’s musician himself
here, and clearly the composer-arranger for such
improvisers/readers. The original material is punctuated by a few
standards and more contemporary jazz heads.

After that, though, the music goes the most “out.” Braxton
continued to release his more jazz-conventional recordings on
European labels, using the remaining Arista dates for his more
concert-compositional statements. For Trio (1978) is followed by
Alto Saxophone Improvisations 1979 (1979), then Composition
No. 82 for Four Orchestras (1978), ending the run four years
later with For Two Pianos (1982). Looking at those later four
releases through the lens of the categories above gives a sense of
their points of departure from the first five:
• instrumentation—pretty much the whole range of
conventional woodwinds, from highest to lowest flutes,
clarinets, and saxophones, and double reeds bassoon and
taragata; “found” and “little” (homemade) instruments, and
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an assortment of metal, wood, and membrane percussion; an

unaccompanied alto saxophone; four symphonic (not
chamber) orchestras; and two pianos, zithers, and melodicas;
• personnel—five of the most illustrious and seasoned of the
AACM experimentalists (Braxton, Henry Threadgill,
Douglas Ewart, Roscoe Mitchell, and Joseph Jarman);
Braxton alone; “serious” (Oberlin) conservatory students;
two pillars of the contemporary concert music community,
Ursula Oppens and Frederic Rzewski;
• performance contexts—two different versions of one
experimentally conceived and notated piece (Composition
76) more resonant with the then-contemporary art/academic
music than the jazz community (also resonant with
“amateurism,” conflating it with high culture, a gesture of
cultural egalitarianism); a solo recital on a single-line
instrument, something more traditional in Western art music
than in the jazz tradition; and, most distinctively in the last
two releases, performances by conservatory-trained players
of advanced scored works encompassing diatonic, chromatic,
and post-serial composition techniques, but no improvisation;
• energies and inflections—occasionally those a jazz audience
might sense, but certainly not at the center of either concept
or execution.

A similar arc of mutation/evolution unfolds in the cover art and

liner notes. In general, music buffs in both rock and jazz scenes
then—undoubtedly fed by a common ground of exotic
intoxicants—devoured cover art and liner notes for “signs” about
the meaning and identity (social, personal, cosmic) of the latest
music, which was always a fresh field for such speculations, mute
as it naturally is in itself (unless words are included) about such
things.
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The first five covers do push at the edges of the aesthetic envelope
of the times, but don’t leap out of it into midair yet. These were the
birthing years of the academic discourses of semiotics, and
postmodern irony; before they were academized they were, like all
such things, grassroots street consciousness at play. (I remember
when the LP Miles Smiles came out, with a picture of same, what
a surprisingly funny statement it seemed to the cognoscenti that the
man had tweaked his own image so.)

New York, Fall 1974 sets the tone with a full head shot and
quintessentially Braxtonian photo: the turtle-neck pullover sweater,
the Sherlock Holmes pipe stemming from bemused mouth, the
wire-rim glasses under furrowed brow through which came the
forthright, intelligent gaze. By then the jazz world knew all this
bespoke the deep and turbulent jazz scene’s most intellectual and
public Public Intellectual, the chess-hustling, schematic-drawing
genius who also knew his way around the horn, even in (mostly)
his own deepest waters. The artist was branding his new territory
here, saying in effect “Remember the eccentric young upstart on
the margins? Here’s the same guy, in full bloom, front and center!”

On the back, another single image prevailed: photographically

altered to appear transparent, Braxton’s ghostly image strides
through an autumnal patch of woods; again, the informed fan will
assume this to be near his Woodstock home, and general
countercultural associations will inevitably come to mind. The
even more informed fan will know the cutting edge of the non-rock
music counterculture then was getting underway with a bang in the
back-to-nature setting so alluring to the urban burnouts then:
German vibraphonist Karl Berger’s Creative Music Studio, more
on which ahead.

Underneath the picture, like a still of a crawling ticker tape, ran the
six graphic/alphanumeric titles of the compositions, three on each
side. Like the front cover, earlier press and recordings had
18

prepared us for this, so we took them in our own stride. The

conventional and laudatory notes by Coda editor Bill Smith, a
voice credible in mainstream jazz journalism, explained the
significance of the edgy new talent in the scene’s big picture; its
text flowed around three photos of men-at-work in the studio,
conveying a sense that some real business was being taken care of
here by people who had proven they knew what they were doing,
and were going to pick up where quixotic young hippies had left
off, in the same woods, in the same spirit, in a more seasoned,
richer, and educated—and ultimately more effective—way.

The Five Pieces 1975 package built on the same lines: the same
iconic pipe, this time a cloud of smoke veiling half his face
(right—‘cause he was smokin’ now, man!); same esoteric titles,
along with the standard You Stepped Out of a Dream (“the
dream” was a fertile allusion in those days); similarly credentialed
jazz critic Robert Palmer supplying even more substantive and
critical-discursive notes, around photos of the same four proven-
bad players, three from the old Circle band; full quartet lined up on
the back cover, clearly of Woodstock-generation stock.

Duets 1976 and Creative Orchestra Music 1976 strays from this
formula only slightly, replacing the front-cover photos with
contemporary art, signaling their awareness of and
interdisciplinary affiliation with the visual art scene then, as
Ornette Coleman had done with a Jackson Pollock painting on
Free Jazz a decade-and-a-half earlier. Braxton himself writes the
liner notes on both: shorter, more general, utterly unpresuming
overviews of the music from his music-specialist’s perspective
(jazz-specialist’s, even, with his allusions to Scott Joplin, Eric
Dolphy, Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, Charles Mingus, and
Ornette Coleman).

The Montreux/Berlin Concerts packaging is the plainest,

foregoing the artsy for the more music-functional aesthetics (all
19

photos are of musicians at their work), with writer-producer

Michael Cuscuna bylining the liner notes. All told, a perfect
balance between the excitingly expected and excitingly surprising.

Then comes For Trio, with its cover photo of a page of an avant-
gardish-looking score, topped by the graphic title of the one
unbroken piece presented in two versions, one on each side. This
cover’s statement (in my words): “The abstract universe of the
music is what is front and center now, and it is speaking to you
directly, not through celebrity-culture conventions of
entertainment-jazz marketing. Not only the common technical
notation we players work from, but also my own composerly-
creative psyche’s innermost subjective language are presented for
your viewing pleasure in print here, unadulterated.”

But decidedly not unannotated; here is where the notorious

Braxton-speak spills forth like some glossalalia of meaning, not
just of sound, as in those Pentecostal services where one exalted
soul speaks in tongues and another chimes in with an
“interpretation.” Braxton’s choice of words here is open to charges
of solipsism, meaningless smoke and mirrors, charges not slow or
few in coming. Sit with them, though, reader; let them simmer,
babble, and trickle through you like a brook, and just see where
they take your thinking.

In one of its many passing pools of poetic-licensed clarity, his text

tells us

For this composition was not designed to adhere to either the

current misconceptions surrounding the word ‘jazz’ (with
respect to how the science of that thrust is viewed, or so-
called viewed—in this time zone) nor can this work be
defined in ‘western art music’ terms. Rather the meta and
empirical foundations of this work was conceived with
20

respect to the spiritual and composite vibrationatory affinity-

arena of world culture.

In retrospect, this might stand as the moment when the gauntlet

was flung that would define the course of the music through and
beyond the Arista series. Not only that—it serves notice on the
community of critics, scholars, and journalists, whatever axes they
had to grind, that the artist himself was entering their fray, taking
up their weapons (“words,” he once said, “are the white man’s
greatest weapons;” yet also, from his Creative Orchestra Music
1976 notes, “It is difficult if not impossible for me to write about
how I see my work in creative music, for I have never felt that
words are meaningful when applied to creativity—and yet
something has to be written—for many of the mis-conceptions that
surround creative music are still with us today.”)

Now his strategy is not to go above or around them, as he did by

resorting to graphics for his titles, but to wield them himself, in his
way—which he would do with a vengeance, starting here. Inside
the jacket is an elaborate four-page foldout with the usual photos
of players at work, and line-drawn schematics—but,
unprecedented, the first wave of a tsunami of such text that would
follow in other recordings and, mostly, his copious tomes Tri-
Axium Writings and Composition Notes, is also blocked off in
fine print on most of one page.

Not unlike composer’s notes on process, technique, and theory

published in specialist academic journals, his describe how he
customized conventions of notation, improvisation,
instrumentation and voicing to suit his vision for the piece. All is
clear enough, if met on its own terms and left unburdened by
baggage imposed.
21

Having found his inner voice in print, he seems to then start

flexing it on what he’s been observing in the outer world, in the
notes to Alto Saxophone Improvisations 1979.

The past couple of years have seen many changes reshape

world creativity. Of those changes, certainly the dynamic
acceleration of solo activity can be viewed as a major factor
responsible for the expanded reality of present day creative
music.

Of course, it was the “past couple of years” that marked his first
musical forays beyond his clear success in the jazz market with
Creative Orchestra Music 1976. Again, it may not have seemed
so naïve and quixotic at the time, to him or anyone else, to choose
to push the envelope instead of playing it safe. His relaxed tone
and expansive thought in the notes evince the confidence of one
who has paid dues and proven himself, thus the legitimized
expectation that when he spoke the words that meant the most to
him people now would listen.

Those words dwelt on what the solo music meant to him, glancing
back to its first soundings in For Alto, defining and describing a
process (“conceptual grafting”—replacing the conventional
harmonic-melodic-rhythmic matrix for improvisation with various
other kinds of premises) that he had previously not had the words
for.

Adding to the many “firsts” mentioned and unmentioned here,

Composition 82 For Four Orchestras was “the first completed
work in a series of ten compositions that will involve the use of
multiple-orchestralism and the dynamics of spacial (sic) activity.”
Braxton writes in his extensive liner note booklet for the 3-LP
boxed set of “multi-orchestralism” as an art and science in itself, to
which he is adding his own unique contributions. The series
reflects the plenum of some huge gathering of nomadic tribes into
22

a temporary, transient city, with hundreds of groups of musicians

playing within overlapping earshots, a thousand conversations and
independent activities occurring at once—colors, order, chaos,
humanity, all in the simple presence and moment of itself.

Several floor plans are included, and diagrams of proposed sound

trajectories and speaker placements; a human body is similarly
diagrammed for its areas of “information approach” (places where
the music is perceived or felt; Braxton scholar Ronald Radano
links these ten approaches to “the Kabbalist metaphor of the Ten
Sefiroth, in which the emanations of God associate with areas of
the human body” [230]); the graphic title’s shape is superimposed
on one elliptically zoned floor plan, the zones having colors,
letters, and numbers; score page facsimiles are included, and
photos of the four orchestras (160 musicians) in place; and the
graphic, colored titles of the nine other proposed multi-orchestral
works, spanning increasingly large distances, from cities to star
systems.

The cover of For Two Pianos is a grainy close-up of an ancient

Egyptian wall of stone blocks covered with carved hieroglyphics.
The dawn of literacy in the world is evoked, and associations with
the scholarship of Cheikh Anta Diop, Yosef Ben-Jochannon, and
Martin Bernal (favoring Egypt over Greece as the African source
of Western civilization) are suggested. Superimposed on the blocks
is a graphic square containing the graphic title of the LP’s single
featured work (a.k.a. Composition 95), which resembles a nuclear
reactor. The AACM motto “Great Black Music, From Ancient to
Future” comes to mind, and the family resemblance between the
hieroglyphs and Braxton’s titles is also unavoidable.

The back of the jacket bears a photo of the two performers, Ursula
Oppens and Frederick Rzewski, dressed in the hooded robes of
medieval monks onstage at their facing pianos. This piece is the
first of what Braxton called his Ritual and Ceremonial music, and
23

what I called the Golden Peak of his body of work to date in my

1996 book’s retrospective on it.2 It was written at the close of the
Arista run, recorded in Italy—marking the end of an era for
Braxton professionally as well as America politically (Carter out,
Reagan in).

Looking at the arc as a whole, then, the surface beneath which the
music ran tells the same tale it told: Braxton’s/Arista’s “not your
father’s jazz scene” had a bona fide heyday, reaped its due rewards
in short order, then turned the corner into the direction it wanted to
take...only to find itself out on a limb that stretched out from the
American tree over the fence that bordered it and the rest of the
world—which then unceremoniously snapped.

The music itself will tell that tale in its proper detail.

New York Fall, 1974

The Tracks
Mirroring in microcosm the same progression from “inside” to
“out,” Side A of New York Fall, 1974 offers up the material
easiest to grasp by both jazz and art music audiences. 23B Braxton
defines as “an atonal version of Donna Lee.” (He had been
featuring that bop warhorse in his bands of the few years previous,
so undoubtedly could play it in his sleep by the time he wrote an
atonal version of it—which fact says much about how the truly,
radically new springs from traditional soil, in practice.) As such, it
is a perfect opening track for his first LP.

The bop standard and his instrument both put him in the tradition
of Charlie Parker the player, and the specification of atonality put
him in the tradition of Parker (along with Arnold Schoenberg) the
chromaticist composer. He extends the player with non-tonal

2
24

effects—high squeaks and smears on top of the bebop lines—that

might be more aptly described as post-Coleman, or post-Dolphy
(indeed, he also invokes Charles Mingus and Ornette Coleman in
his Composition Notes about this piece). He extends Parker’s
chromaticism (as Coleman did Parker’s diatonicism) by writing his
lines free of Donna Lee’s chord and metrical structures (it keeps
the AABA form, but has 56 rather than 32 bars) and of any
diatonic key. This piece is all about establishing and then
extending bop chops and theory beyond its previous parameters.

The B section line ascends much like a walking bass through an

unchanging harmony, serving as a breather from the frantic,
convoluted lines of the A section. Braxton’s solo is more relaxed
than the straight-ahead up-tempo of the bass and drums, but it
catches up with their steaming energy through a fluidity and
comfort leaving behind the clunkier, stiffer phrasing so many
critics had pounced on as devoid of “swing.” Energy-and-entropy
of the total sound, rather than the tension-and-release of signifying
around and against both Common Practice harmonic machinations
and unaltered 4/4 meter, is clearly the preferred modus operandi.

Wheeler briefly alludes to Donna Lee, then improvises atonally

even more than Braxton did: his European milieu peeking through?
Altschul drops out to leave Wheeler and Holland to an improvised
duo. Braxton returns, and the two horns chirp the solos section out
together, evoking the Cherry-Coleman/Ayler-Ayler free-jazz
jubilee chorus, then restate the head. Altschul brings the AACM
into the evocational mix, with his little instruments and no-time
percussives.

The bop rocket has left the earth (via Parker), then the atmosphere
(via Coleman), and is now locked in orbit, in the new
“gravitational intrigue” (one of Braxton’s favorite poetic
descriptors of his music) between earth and space. The piece ends
with a stop-time section.
25

23C, the least jazz-like Side A track, has a structure audible to the
untrained ear: like the popular Christmas song “The Twelve Days
of Christmas,” its form is that of a “cumulative song,” with each
new verse constructed on, extending slightly, the last one. It is
through-composed, and recited with no improvisations. Its verses
are perky and cheeky, Stravinskyish (à la “Ragtime for Eleven
Instruments,” or “L’Histoire du Soldat”). Braxton’s flute and
Wheeler’s muted horn over the clattery rhythm make for a
chamber-music sound that might have come from the Jazz Age-
inflected European compositions of the 1930s.

The cool-jazz sound and style permeates 23D as bop did 23B,
reminding us of Ornette Coleman’s early connections with the
West Coast scene, and of the richly contrapuntal piano-less
quartets there preceding his own. Again, the solos are both
grounded in the cool sound and stretch it in their own new
directions.

The overall effect of Side A is to show connections between the

traditions evoked and the new gestures brought to them, and to
suggest their easy intimacy on the continuum of the composer’s-
players’ visions and voices. These three traditions—bop, modern
art music, cool jazz—were old skins restored to the fiber required
by the new wine.

Side B takes things out a few steps farther in three different

directions. They would show themselves to be seeds bearing
popular fruit in years to follow. The first track, 38A, might have
struck the typical Down Beat-reading record buyer then as the most
radically out of place. The scene-tradition it evoked—through
Braxton as clarinetist and, especially, Richard Teitelbaum as
synthesist—was that of the academic-cum-avant-garde composer
of electronic music. The world of John Cage, Stockhausen, and
Teitelbaum’s own genre-busting group Musica Elettronica Viva—
26

a world visited most extensively by Braxton during his first

Wesleyan University period, after returning from Paris—is well
evoked here. Its distinction from them might be his replacement of
the aleatory by the improvisatory. Electronics also evoke Sun Ra,
naturally, but the distinction from him is Braxton’s greater
reference to and interest in the American Experimental composer’s
tradition, and the academic universe of scores and specialist
journals devoted to technical and theoretical parsings.

As sound synthesis and computer technologies have developed

since then, the piece stands in retrospect as an area of improvised
(adding to taped and programmed) electronic music that would
burgeon in decades to come. It also fits in well with the then-future
mythoi spawned by the Afrofuturist marriage of electronic and
computer technologies with experimental black music-making and
science fiction. (This was during the time when NASA’s greatest
glories were still fresh in memory, and one of Braxton’s boyhood
heroes was Werner von Braun.)

Composition 37 too ignited two later wildfires. The first was

something of a heyday for saxophone quartets, including Rova
and, preeminently, the World Saxophone Quartet (WSQ). Indeed,
the three players here (Hamiet Bluiett, Oliver Lake, and Julius
Hemphill) with Braxton would go on to form the WSQ in 1977,
replacing Braxton with David Murray.

The concept wasn’t radically new; the Charlie Parker tribute band
Supersax—featuring one of Braxton’s favorite tenor players,
Warne Marsh—was au courant in the jazz world then, but while it
foregrounded the virtuoso writing, reading, and playing chops of
the big band sax section, conventional rhythm and brass
complements were also in its mix. Braxton’s teenage experience
with the a capella four-part harmonies of doo-wop groups in
Chicago may have been in play here as well.
27

He uses the palette to voice the more “out” atonality of postserial

music and the more “out” timbre/texture/inflections from the free-
jazz years. We get a real sense of narrative (much as with 23C,
Side A’s second track), especially in the unison parts, after a slow
and spacey opening. Further, we get a real sense of Braxton as a
composer (like Duke Ellington) for particular people and their
improvisational styles and sounds: he manages to keep their
freedom and energy of voice and mind alive and intact while at the
same time liberating them, through transparent orchestrations and a
regulated flux of dynamics and energies, from the tyranny of the
free-for-all jams driven by power plays and displays that were the
occupational hazard of spontaneous, unprescribed improvs back
then. Nothing here is unrelenting, heavy-handed, or
monochromatic, yet all is full blown.

The second wildflower seeded by this piece was Braxton’s own

major Ghost Trance Music (GTM) series, begun in the 1990s. Its
often erratically-beating rhythmic heart was spawned by a musical
device of 37—repeated quarter notes, not “swung,” but sequenced
hypnotically to suggest (induce?) trance.

As many jazz musicians say a slow ballad is harder to do justice to

than a medium or fast piece, the post-tonal, post-metric rubato such
gesture is exponentially harder. Both composer and improviser
must draw the most lyrical lines and expressive textures and the
least regimented, most nuanced rhythmic gestures out of the stasis
and void of the silence and stillness. The devices Braxton uses in
23A to meet the challenge suggest the lineage of Duke Ellington
through Stan Kenton through Gil Evans: tasty voicings of low- and
high-range instruments, for atmosphere. The more pointillistic-
than-lyrical results beg from percussion a more-vertical-than-
horizontal sense of time. Again, freed from Earth but still in its
orbit...yet now turning to face away from rather than back to it,
into the unknowns of silence and space beyond the reach of its
pull.
28

Five Pieces 1975

This LP, again, springboards off tradition, this time with an
American Songbook standard. This being the first of several covers
offered in the Arista LPs, it is the best place to give a theoretical
take on them as a subset of Braxton’s predominantly original
repertoire, for his relationship to them in his aesthetic and career.

For in fact, as it happens, he was the first certifiably “jazz” artist to

have recorded an LP called In the Tradition. Barry Altschul
recalls: “We were very involved with playing the music and trying
to be ourselves, consciously: trying to not play like anyone else,
first; and second, trying to deal with new and unfamiliar music.
Braxton had some definite ideas of what things should be played
and expanded on in some of his pieces. The rhythm section was
more or less about a more traditional approach, with exceptions. I
had to play a complicated pattern on some, and make it live.

“I always enjoyed playing with Braxton. I found it a challenge, and

interesting—very creative. Each time we played his tunes, for the
most part, they were different, unless they were very composed.

“Once with Circle we were on a package tour, and it was with

Johnny Griffin and Ben Webster—Dexter [Gordon] might have
been there—and Braxton. Art Taylor, Kenny Drew...it was a real
bebop band, all living in Europe at the time.

“Out of everybody, the one who truly dug Braxton was Ben
Webster. That, of course, was the biggest surprise, because he was
the oldest-style player. At the end of each night, all the saxophone
players got together with the bebop rhythm section to play, I think,
‘Perdido.’ At the time he was with Circle, he was quite shy about
being onstage. But Ben Webster clearly just dug him.”
29

In his many and lengthy interviews, Braxton has always been as

effusive as the quintessential fan in his praise of established
mentors and models, even crossing then-politically correct lines of
choice drawn for young black militants into quintessentially white
players and composers without a tentative glance back. He would
go on to pepper his own art’s primary output of original music with
tribute projects covering the music of Lennie Tristano, Charlie
Parker, Andrew Hill and others in later years.

This duo rendition of You Stepped Out of a Dream with bassist

David Holland has the feel of a couple guys—not necessarily
pros—kicking around a tune in the jazz-traditional way just for
their own fun. They sound unpretentious, unpremeditated, unaware
of the many exquisite interpretations any past masters might have
recorded, and uninterested in a career or even a high musical
moment in their engagement with the material. Accordingly, the
sound can range from competent but uninspired to amateurishly
stilted and slapdash. Phrasings can be chock-a-blocky rote, ideas
stillborn or undeveloped, potentials unfulfilled.

At the same time, like electrons taking a quantum leap into a new
and wider orbit about the nucleus-tune, the phrasing can turn on a
dime from bumptious to wickedly fluid, time can stretch languidly
away from plodding half-steps into an elaborate rhythmic gesture,
and the vocabularies of notes can leave off automatic recitation and
flow into some fresh news of the moment, or even start speaking in
tongues.

The point I take from this dichotomy is that one can read Braxton’s
perceived deficiencies of musicianship as his indeed—but one
might also hear them as reflections of the inadequacy of the
conventional jazz gameplan and platform.

The jazz improviser’s purview until the first steps away from it in
the late 1950s and early 1960s was proscribed by simply metered
30

musical time, a handful of diatonic chords and keys, a few basic

song forms, all recycled through only slight permutations from
tune to tune, improvisation to improvisation, generation to
generation. Is that all there is? Is it not a rather small and shabby
dance floor, on its sheerly musical face, for the mind and body to
bring its best and brightest ideas and choreographies to?

The genius of the whole African-American tradition that came to

be called “jazz,” of course, lay precisely in the way it took the
shabbiest and smallest and transformed it into something so much
grander and deeper. The dance from Louis Armstrong to Charlie
Parker had become that of a host of ever more brilliant angels
crowded onto the head of a never-growing pin.

When Braxton came along, his dance instead pointed out the limits
and problematic assumptions of using that pinhead for the one and
only dance floor. His choreography was to draw up plans for a
floor worthy of the dancers—smoother, more spacious, housed in
and housing luxury. You can hear the angel’s cramped wings and
awkward steps in his playing of standards, and the restless
lurchings and flashes toward the dance steps that will effect a
restructuring of the pinhead, not accommodate to—even reaffirm
and fortify—it just because he can.

23H resumes that reconstruction project, with its intent to steer the
“free” improvisation away from the extended (read: self-indulgent)
solo into a loose, light collective improvisation. Its spare and
elegant long line sequencing interesting intervals and phrases
“vibrationally provide structural marking points for its
interpreters...to stimulate them into looking ‘for other focuses’”
(Braxton’s Composition Notes B, 75-79). The flute and muted
brass voice Braxton’s line in unison over busier bass and
percussion improvs; their own improvs come in later, pregnant
with the textures and tones their written line laid down.
31

23G is a prime example of a strategy begun with the early (6)

series of pieces Braxton called Kelvin; the term “gravallic basic”
he also coined to capture its essence, and later “pulse track” would
emerge. Essentially, the strategy they commonly allude to is to
replace conventional rhythmic substrates of 2, 3, and 4—the lope
and pace and heartbeat of jazz swing as walked in the bass and
measured out in spoonfuls by the drum kit—with through-
composed rhythmic attacks that add up to a jagged, asymmetrical
pattern of beats.

The melodic line is post-boppish, like 23B, and some of the

phrasing on and of it sounds blocky, as in You Stepped Out of a
Dream—but the interesting thing is how both line and execution
of it sound so much less stiff and constrained when set against the
18-1/2-bar rhythmic line laid down in unison by bass and drums, to
cycle repeatedly under solos and head. The solos flex against the
muscle of that “gravallic base” even more than the written part,
careening and leaping and flowing in ways they surely wouldn’t
have done against a steady, regular, symmetrical pattern of beats.
Hearing the cycled pattern enough times to start to feel it as an
imprinted, entraining groove rather than random bursts leads to a
solid grasp of one of Braxton’s choice mottos: “feet firmly planted
in midair.”

Braxton dedicated 23E to Albert Ayler, and declared it to be an

intense engagement of the implications of “free energy music”
(from Braxton’s Composition Notes and/or liner notes, here and
ahead) The horns play slow, anthemic lines in unison over bowed
bass notes, reminiscent of the kind of rubato plaints over gradually
building noise and free-rhythmic activity Ayler (as also Coltrane
and Coleman) employed to such poignant and powerful effect. The
melody is, again, Stravinsky-ish, its phrases breathing, deliberating
between silence and statement, as percussion beavers away with
the bass in a quiet intensity. When the horns keep marching stately
through a second recital of the piece, the percussion and bass
32

percolate up to a full boil, at which point the horns join them in the
freedom fray. All four are gurgling forth at full throttle, Braxton
biting off those wide intervals with his contrabass clarinet chops
like some gargling, trilling raptor biting off the heads and
swallowing whole the bodies of the primeval mammals that would
someday evolve into humans. Wheeler takes the “free energy”
torch in his open-harmon-muted horn, Altschul helps him lighten
and untangle the former dense and heated fury into lighter, more
transparent space.

This piece is a showcase of how even the headiest and most

physically compelling of the forces unleashed by that Ayler-
channeled “free energy music” could be harnessed and ridden,
dismounted and remounted, and even tamed and trained to saunter,
trot, and amble before returning to its wilderness pastures. Time
starts out as a Big Bang’s potential then ends as a string of pearls
of suns and stars. Anyone who likes the mercury and lava, the
serendipity of free improvisation, the intensity and virtuosity but
not the heavy-handed tunnel vision will love this. Critic Steve
Lake wrote of it that “it might be the most extreme example yet of
the dichotomy between jazz and contemporary classical in
Braxton’s music.”

Side 2 ends with 40M, a slightly different spin on the same kind of
freedom. It brings to mind the forthright exuberance of Eddie
Harris’s popular tune of prior years, Freedom Jazz Dance.

We should pull back from the blow-by-blow account of tracks to

notice a few things about the arc of the whole to this point. Notice
how less the jazz personality/virtuoso and how more the art-music
composer those expositions depict. Any casual first listening and
perusal of the two packages will provoke descriptions of schooled
and skilled young journeymen in the hottest scenes of the moment
then; but to give an intelligent, responsible account of the music’s
character and significance is impossible without venturing into the
33

realm of serious analysis and theory, even if only with the prosaic
toolkit of an intrepid journalist (as opposed to the scholar’s heavier
bag).

This is arguably the clearest sign of the nature of Braxton’s

approach and significance as hybridizer here: the days of “jazz”
and “art music” as separate realms in a hierarchy of aesthetics and
sociocultural politics—having in fact been challenged from the
very first contact between African and European America and ever
more effectively so through various personages along the way
(from Jelly Roll Morton, Scott Joplin, James P. Johnson, Fats
Waller, Duke Ellington, on up through Charlie Parker, Charles
Mingus and many others)—are drawing that much closer to their
inevitable end in this music. Maybe it’s too much to expect except
in hindsight, but couldn’t writers about the music then have taken
on more seriously the question of the validity, and the implications
of, Braxton’s well- and oft-expressed agenda of donning the
mantle and planting the flag of both jazz-improvisational and art-
music-compositional roles and identities?

In any case, based on the reception of these first recordings, that

agenda seemed a workable commercial as well as a satisfying
aesthetic strategy. As Ronald Radano reports in his book (252),
record sales were good, critics and fans approved, and the press
coverage was accordingly good and plenty.

Notice too the preponderance in these first two offerings of the

number 23 (one numerology buffs and fond recollectors of Robert
Anton Wilson’s series of science-fiction novels about the
Illuminati will take in with relish). All of these opus numbers are
just alternate designations adopted to get around the problems of
mixing the pictographic titles with the alphanumeric print media,
and each has certain musically distinguishing features. The 23
series was conceived and designed for the playbook of a working
quartet of particular players, begun with Circle and continued in
34

this later incarnation under Braxton’s leadership. Musically, the

pieces in the series are closest in structure, spirit, and sound to a
conventional jazz group, with the various innovative/experimental
tweaks of musical conceit and concept we’ve seen in each piece. In
that sense, they served as something like the classical string
quartet, in which composers would begin to sketch and work out
ideas meant for greater development in more elaborate
productions.

Creative Orchestra Music 1976 (and such large-ensemble

productions to come, generally) is where the rubber of the
subjective, in-the-head art of the solo player and solitary composer
meets the road of the most formal outer world in full community.
Braxton wrote later in his Composition Notes C about the project
that the studio date was preceded by only two rehearsals, one the
day before and one the day of the recording; he speaks of writing
much of the music itself in the studio as well. It was recorded at
Generation Sound in Manhattan by a sterling array of some of the
most virtuoso improvisers and creative studio musicians on the
New York-cum-global scenes then; and it won high critical
acclaim, including Down Beat’s critic’s choice for 1977 Record of
the Year. It came with his first offering of his composition notes
on each track as part of extensive liner notes about his own music.

Like the LPs described above, it was also a first in two noteworthy
ways: it was Braxton’s first recording of his music for “creative
orchestra” (and his first use of that term in print), and it came with
his first offering of his composition notes on each track as part of
extensive liner notes about his own music (the opening salvo
followed up by the two above that offered much more of same).
His words about both firsts are worth citing for their insights into
that meeting of rubber and road:

I refer to this medium as Creative Orchestra Music both as a

means to separate this activity from my work in notated
35

Orchestra music and also because I feel the phrase Creative

Orchestra Music best describes this medium. For to
understand what has been raised in the progression of
creative music as it has been defined through the work of the
Ellingtons-Hendersons-Mingus’s-Colemans-etc., is to be
aware of the most significant use of the orchestra medium in
the past hundred years (and some).

In keeping with the lead-with-the-familiar strategy, 51 is most like

the conventional big-band chart: a fast, brash romp down “post-
Henderson/Ellington” lines. Supersax-style sectional writing,
rhythmic riffs vamping in and out behind hot-boppish baritone and
alto sax (Bruce Johnstone and Braxton) and trumpet (Cecil
Bridgewater) solos, splashy clashes of brass and reeds...all
pleasantly climaxing in the most open, rather than (conventionally)
the most tightly, intensely orchestrated, part of the piece.

56 dives through said opening into a stark contrast of concept and

sound. Its own opening sounds like some low and high musical
foghorns of reeds and muted brass wafting from a dark night sea of
soft metal, low bass, and high overtones. Soloists are listed—Dave
Holland, Muhal Richard Abrams, Richard Teitelbaum, Braxton,
Frederick Rzewski, George Lewis, Roscoe Mitchell—but are so
blended in with the ensemble and scored sounds that they don’t
stand out as such, as in 51 and similar tracks. The lineages invoked
here are “the post-Webern and AACM continuums of creative
music.” It is a classic example—short, but prefiguring more such
meditatively static music as Braxton and his work matured—of
that part of his work “jazz” purists and identity-political
chauvinists would come to denounce as Eurocentrically affected.
In contrast, his own notes about it are memorably and poetically
telling:

A slow pulse environment...not a complex work that contains

thousands of notes and/or precision multi-structures...nor
36

does 56 seek to provide terms for extended individual solo

realization...rather the work is conceived to establish a way
of perceiving sound distance and inner purpose...as it
concerns the composite ensemble (rather than “the glorious
soloist”)...in this work objects (thought) are moving so fast it
appears to be slow—or the slowest...almost lifelessly...a sea
of drifting sounds...“Listen to the one who had the best
opportunity but did not take it”...For the participating
instrumentalist this work can be viewed as a series of
involvements that necessitates patience and growth...Too
often in this time period we tend to confuse movement and
excitement with “real”—and this is not always the case...56
is a haven for those of us who might need to lean back and
compare notes (every once in awhile)...

In the tracks that follow, the oscillation between most jazz-hot and
most spacey-out pieces repeats, suggesting that the white-hot boil
of 51 (then 58) was being counterbalanced by its static, softer foil
in 56 (as 58 would be by 57). (The final track, 55, stands as a
brilliant synthesis of the two sides of that musical coin.) That
pattern, of high energy offset by deep stasis, would grow through
playlists and individual pieces (most notably, 96) in Braxton’s
future work.

58 pulls us right back into the energy fray, with a march dedicated
to John Phillip Sousa, and inspired by his Stars and Stripes
Forever. It evokes the strong Germanic side of Braxton’s affinity
for that strain in European and European-American music
traditions, and reminds us of its history in the jazz tradition,
starting with the itinerant German music teachers teaming up with
the plethora of post-Civil War band instruments in the South to
teach newly freed slaves.

Whenever I hear this piece, I recall two conversations, one with

Malinké Elliott and the other with Henry Louis Gates and Werner
37

Sollors. Malinké spoke about stories he heard from his elders about
battles of the bands in turn-of-the-century St. Louis. The
neighborhoods were ethnically divided, and each sent a band
marching to the center of town. There they would meet to compete
by simply playing over and through each other, like armies in
formation breaking into hand-to-hand combat. Whichever band
was left intact and prevailing at the end won. The contests typically
ended in a showdown between the black and the German bands. At
an academic conference I attended in Berlin, Gates and Sollors
(premier scholars of African-American and German-American
history, respectively) spoke at length about the special musical ties
between the two groups in that city then.

The hokey 4/4 oompah strut rambles into a breakdown of the

rhythm that suggests an Indian tala in its complexity, or one of
Braxton’s “pulse tracks.” It produces the same excitable soloing as
did 23G, on Five Pieces 1975, in trumpeter Jon Faddis, who shows
the “free” and the fixed to be the match most made in heaven in the
world, and in George Lewis, whose playing here, as in The
Montreux-Berlin Concerts, informs trombonists everywhere that
they can quit trying to do whatever it is they’re doing, because it’s
already been done as well as possible. Braxton’s clarinet solo adds
up to his similar match-up, Ayler-like, between the fixed (primal
American ditty “Little Liza Jane”) and the “free” (most intense
furies of rhythm, harmonies, and speedy, snakey lines).

Braxton calls 57 “an atonal ballad,” and, like 56, a collective rather
than virtuoso-soloist vehicle. However, its three duos have the feel
of some of the trio music with Roscoe Mitchell, who plays bass
sax with Braxton’s contrabass sax over a lush percussion carpet
laid by Messrs. Warren Smith, Karl Berger, Barry Altschul, and
the late Philip Wilson. It is a showcase of various textures woven
through sections drifting by, cloudlike, by contrasting voices
intoning over layers of less conversant, more punctuating sounds.
“I conceived this material in terms of how it visually looked
38

(sounded) moving across the space of the sound canvas,” Braxton

wrote.

55 is another jump back, to the big-band jazz universe, this one

inspired by Ellington and Mingus. Kenny Wheeler, Braxton, and
Muhal Richard Abrams all solo openly over and between blocks of
sectional writing marked by extreme intervallic leaps, to disrupt
the usual more tightly continuous knit of its more traditional
counterpart, as well as repetitive vamps to affirm said knit.

For Braxton, this composition

moves to solidify a state of “indecision” as to the overall

effect of a given note (phrase) decision—and what this means
is that I myself am always surprised about “what happened”
in the music.

Despite the many mentions of influences, Braxton declares here, as

often elsewhere, that 55 was composed in “moment time,”
spontaneously-intuitively rather than systematically. He is just as
careful (and consistent) in explaining that process as more than one
of (a racist-essentialist kind of) “natural” penchant for inspired
improvisation, as for “rhythm” or some other kind of genius that
bypasses intellect:

55 is not an affirmation of a fixed theorem (that glorifies

some mathematical theorem) nor did the work happen by
chance. Rather the final realness of this structure involves the
integration of improvisation and preparation—and as such
these matters can be discussed (my emphasis).

The piece serves well the needs of both the traditional and newer
jazz audiences. While increasing the LP’s cachet as Record of the
Year material, it gives body to what the composer would later call
his “Tri-Axium:”
39

How we integrate our past (and the past of humanity) into

future decisions will determine the success of the future (or if
there is to be a future).

In fact, the musical hero named as an inspiration (along with,

again, the AACM) for the final track, Karlheinz Stockhausen,
himself said something to the same effect.iii 59’s effectiveness as a
climax lies in its mix of flexibility, simplicity, and directness, and
its showcase of the duo dynamic at its most exciting (a particular
treat in the Mitchell-Braxton duo here, one typically less supported
by a band and more subdued on other recordings). The post-
Stockhausen aspect here might be read in the piece’s simple
isolation of, focus on, and working over the improvisational
parameters and attitudes developed from the AACM foundation.

The score is a series of punches, pitches mostly open, cued in by

the conductor (Abrams, here) and splayed off into chords and new
accents through his spontaneous signals. The conductor effectively
functions as a third player in a trio with the two featured soloists,
his instrument being the ensemble. The piece has even more
potential than many to create something new on the spot, and that
in the most visceral, accessible terms.

Creative Orchestra Music 1976’s playlist—especially backed by

the Arista label’s imprimatur, then so honored by the major
mainstream jazz-critical community—stands as a celebration of
both American culture and its international DNA in the tradition of
high court musics from around the world and history, especially
those that give a new voice and meaning to time-honored myths
and songs. It is a flower cultivated not in the hothouse of genre
(jazz, art music) but decidedly from the same richest Germanic-
African soil in America that has produced its most brilliant such
blooms all along, in the composer’s own luxuriant garden.
40

The strategy of hiring musicians as skilled as classically-trained

readers and commercial studio players as they were as improvisers
was no doubt crucial to the success of the session. Jazz artists who
had played with each other and/or had played common material in
a common idiom had long been capable of doing the same kind of
quick ad hoc turnaround from first rehearsal to finished recording
in as short a time, but these tracks are the proof in the pudding of
that “jazz scene” that was not your father’s anymore.

Not only is the reading comparable to that required by

contemporary art music, but the improvisational idiom born with
free jazz had grown beyond its initial wide open leaps and
thrashings into a fluid vocabulary of nuance, control, and
complexity that is as mastered here as bebop was a decade after its
few intrepid inventors established their new idiom. (It’s also
interesting that the AACM is consistently associated with the
serial/postserial European composers in the continuum of influence
behind those most “non-jazz” pieces.) All these fresh strengths
would find even more expression in the LPs to come.

Duets 1976
Recalling the comparison of the quartets with classical string
quartets, we turn to two more such “composer sketch labs,” the
duo and solo LPs. The focus shifts here from young-turk
showmanship and teamwork to the intimacies of intergenerational
familial dialogue and, later, of naked monologue. As the 23 series
constituted schematics for the quartet context, and the 50s for large
ensemble, so the 60s and 40s and other material chosen for Duets
were consciously crafted or chosen to serve the more relaxed and
openly interactive context of the duo.

As a next step from most accessible to farthest afield from the jazz-
marketing point of view, an alto sax/piano duet, and this particular
duo, had an interesting profile. The least unsettling duo
instrumentation to conservative jazz tastes is one that features one
41

(preferably a chordal) instrument with one that plays the

melody/improviser role. Pianist Muhal Richard Abrams fulfilled
the dual function of being a voice from the pre-free-jazz club scene
of Chicago—the mainstream, grassroots tradition—as well as the
seminal scout out of that old and local and into the new and global
terrain, the soil of which brought forth Braxton’s exotic fruits. Like
the quartet LPs, its mix of traditional and new offered both
bearings to orient and new paths to explore. That blend included
the material, which again included originals with covers and public
domain.

Eric Dolphy’s Miss Ann opens Side A—an also interesting cover
to consider as a choice of repertoire easier for the jazz audience to
swallow than would be an original work. Dolphy had been as much
the controversial outcat a decade before as Braxton was in some
circles then and even more later, and for similar musical reasons
(weird playing style, involvement with Third Stream). Now his
tunes were in “fake books,” and called at jam sessions, and playing
the role on this LP a standard played on the last one. Braxton’s
suggestion, intended or not: you’re having trouble with my new
and original? Stick with me, this is just the beginning; in a few
years it’ll be old school too.

As with the previous cover, it feels something like a warm-up

piece. If it is a more challenging line than You Stepped Out of a
Dream to jam to, once it has been learned and is more or less
automatically rendered, it brings a looser and lighter feel to the
post-bop playground, in contrast to the tighter, tenser one of a
Parker line.

An alert ear will pick up the written and improvised sections from
60. The 23 pieces were close to typical jazz lead sheets in
structure—little machines with components, such as AABA
sections, generally fairly determined charts; later series, such as the
40s and 69s (and the odd number not part of a series, such as this
42

one and Side B’s track one [62]) would go more into suites, or
collages, or fragments and vamps...simple at first, then more
complex—looser, more mutable, flexible, and varied (more options
than repetitious patterns of A and B). 60 sounds a series of phrases
voiced by clarinet and piano that evoke, again, the contemporary
art music recital. Its affect is light, and its palette delights in the
melodic-harmonic language of atonality. The piece oscillates
between written phrases and the open improvisations they launch.

This is a natural point to talk about a certain “conference of the

birds” named Arnold Schoenberg, Anthony Braxton, and Muhal
Richard Abrams. Braxton invokes both Ornette Coleman and
Schoenberg in his Composition Notes as inspiring 60 and 62. He
has often made a point to acknowledge the influence of both as
lying not so much in their respective systems (Schoenberg’s 12-
tone, Coleman’s harmolodics) per se, but (as with all his heroes) in
modeling the profile of what he calls a “restructuralist”—coming
up with something fresh and original to contribute to the
idiom/discourse he or she inherited, something fully informed and
trained by that tradition, but then revamping and/or extending it in
some way. That said, one of the remarkable aspects of his music,
as also Abrams’, Cecil Taylor’s, Coleman’s, Albert Ayler’s and
many others since, has been the way African-American idioms and
voices have dovetailed so organically with that Western musical
paradigm of atonality.

Remarkable, because it would seem counterintuitive, that such a

rare and cultivated hothouse flower of Western art music theory
would find such common ground with what would seem at first
glance the comparatively weed-like wildflowers of free jazz and
improvised music. (Indeed, critics of Braxton’s music from the
jazz-purist and politically ethnic camps have groused at its atonal
aspect as Europhiliac affectation.) Schoenberg was as schooled and
skilled in Western conservatory theory and praxis as they come,
albeit as masterfully creative as he was intellectually rigorous;
43

Braxton and Abrams, by comparison, are autodidacts, working

musicians in a field far removed from that Viennese circle and its
European and American academic offshoots. Even Cecil Taylor,
who did get some conservatory training in such contemporary
European music, didn’t then use it as the certified acolyte, to go on
to be a composer to the idiom trained, with a tenured position to
match.

In fact, the piano itself has often been problematized as too

charged with Western harmonic tradition—no less so in the jazz
tradition, in which its very function in the “rhythm” section was
more to affirm the harmony than the rhythm—to be useful to
musical explorations beyond it. Cecil Taylor’s way around that
was to treat it like a pitched percussion instrument, and develop
something more like a solo music than anything, even when
playing with others. The palette that will emerge from that
approach will naturally be the same as Schoenberg’s “twelve-
tone,” because the piano is by design a chromatically tuned
instrument.

Abrams’ way with that dodecaphony-by-design is more

conversational, less percussive, more an additive to than radical
departure from the diatonic cast of the keyboard in both jazz and
art music histories. He and Braxton share in these duets the kind of
musical father-son talk that had been taking place between them
and their AACM family all along, showing the Chicago roots of
Braxton’s thinking as a composer, and as a player voicing it on his
instruments. Hearing them inspires reflections on the
commonalities between the Second Viennese School and the
African-American vocabularies, as between, say, African art and
Picasso’s cubism.

It bears remembering that early jazz, European atonality (via

Schoenberg, Berg, Webern), and American Experimentalism
(fathered by Charles Ives and others) were all deconstructive
44

modernist movements that took place in the same early-twentieth-

century years. While Schoenberg’s idiom went on to rule the
academy, the reaction in his time and place to his piano music—
the oeuvre Braxton claims as the primary inspiration for his own
“language musics” for solo alto saxophone, about which ahead—
was not that his music was too cerebrally esoteric for popular
tastes, but that it was too much the regression to “primitivism.”

The common ground of all three movements is the liberation of the

chromatic scale from diatonic pitch hierarchies, and then the
pitched note itself from the chromatic scale. To avoid getting
overly technical or theoretical about this here, think of the Western
system of Common Practice harmony that governed everything we
called art music, folk music, popular music, and jazz, as being a
2000-year chess game of white and black pieces in which the white
side, starting with the Greeks, had an intrinsic advantage. Now
picture the relatively recent deconstruction of that system and its
reconstruction into atonal idioms as a melting down of all the
pieces into black and white pebbles on a reconfigured board to
become instead the ancient Chinese game of Go: no more
hierarchical armies clashing unequally on an unlevel playing field,
but a richer, more nuanced complexity and egalitarianism of
potential strategies for optimum gaming.

African-American traditions generally tolerated sounds deemed

dissonant and dirty by the Western classist aesthetic that polarized
them into “high” and “low” categories anyway; the black
composer tradition—another respected influence on Braxton and
the AACM—also included easy integration of the Second
Viennese and American Experimentalist devices of serialism, post-
serialist “noise,” the aleatory, the ludic and others.

60 and 62 spell and sing all such connections out, the first in a
flowing, conversational way, the second more pointillistically, with
more of that “gravitational intrigue” between the silences and
45

sounds, the more dramatic range of timbres and voices of

woodwinds, the lows and highs of pitch. Both improvisations,
aided by Braxton’s more open and flexible forms, establish the
rightness of this tonal idiom to this African-American river, make
it easy listening by being easy playing.

40P steers us down the more African side of that river, in the bark
of Braxton’s contrabass clarinet, with its (also atonal) blues-tinged
line and rhythm: the repeating cycle of rhythmic and tonal pattern,
the tight and directed rather than loose and meandering weave.
Mingus replaces Schoenberg with Coleman as acknowledged
inspirations. Braxton: “The reality of this music moves to
reawaken our memories about the last five hundred years by
calling our attention to the primary basis of the ‘blues’...a
vibrational blues structure that reestablishes what this continuance
can mean in the open space implications of the music. The blues
will go on forever” (Composition Notes C, 150-51).

Maple Leaf Rag has the hasty, half-muffed feel of an old

gramophone recording of Scott Joplin himself knocking it off
casually (much more interesting than the usual polished academic
renditions). Braxton’s blocky phrasing and scruffy-scampy tone
sound right at home here, evoking the ricky-tick feel of generic
early ragtime or jazz. The more current spin comes in the patches
when he blows in a pointedly different key than the score as
rendered by Abrams. The more suite-like form resonates well with
Braxton’s own then-new, post-23 compositions here, reminding us
of the wider range of such structures in the pre- and early-jazz
band books.

Nickie is a freely improvised ballad, reaching for the lush and

sweet hush of romantic tenderness. Braxton plays a cool,
vulnerable, lyrical alto sax; Abrams feels his way around a chord
selection to match with a ginger sensitivity. Unprescribed
spontaneity in such a context could serve as a composer’s stepping
46

stone to a more finely resolved orchestration, if such were the

desired result. Here, left as it unfolded in the moment, then titled in
tribute to Braxton’s wife, it rather says things straight from the
heart of life’s ultimate duo, two lovers: unorchestrated,
improvised, the love and passion here are always tentative, never
quite connecting, even as they swell in the desire and attempt to do
so. Shifting, sliding, both reaching for something always just out of
reach...and not until that process stops does it get a name, an
identity to match its state.

Overall, this LP is a dialogue between past and present about the

most alluring and promising futures—a deeper, softer dimension of
the artist’s mind at work and play in its natural fields.

The Montreux-Berlin Concerts

That combustion between the coolest (the academy-domesticated
child of the original more exotic blooms of the Second Viennese
School of composers) and the hottest (the pre-academy-
domesticated African-American improvisation and performance,
whatever the language) is passed like a torch to the next piece in
the sequence here.

63 picks up the thread of 60 and 62, from Duets 1976, as well as

much about 56, 57, and 59—Creative Orchestra Music 1976’s
“post-AACM/Webern-Stockhausen” pieces—in its atonal pitch
relationships, in both written and improvised sections. Most
brilliantly, however, it gleams like a diamond peak of Braxton’s
signature journey through his most original materials to the fullest
realization of their potential in the moment of live performance. It
shines that high light over the more rugged, messier and shadier
trails and screes leading up to it, for several reasons.

The earlier quartet and duo gestures were, by comparison,

interesting and fun for players and listeners as postulations of the
same ideas present here, and as demonstrations of what might be
47

done with them; the creative orchestra pieces were satisfying as

such for their larger complex of instruments and interactions. All
were studio projects, and as lively as any such can be. 63, by this
particular band in this particular venue, upped the ante in three
dynamic ways:

• the quartet, as the classical string quartet did for Beethoven

and Bartok, served here as the perfect fulcrum between the
sparer, more partial sketches of the smaller groups and the
full-color paintings of the largest (orchestra, be it
“symphony” or “creative”). The music is flying thicker and
faster, with more suppleness, muscle, viscera; the players go
all the way back to Circle together, and to some of the first of
Braxton’s own work as leader and composer (fellow
AACM’er trombonist George Lewis’s replacement of Kenny
Wheeler in Berlin increased rather than detracted from this
sense of familiarity). They know both each other and the
material so well that they take us instantly beyond any hint of
the tentative awkwardness that comes naturally with the new
and experimental. Here, orchestrating riffs and blowing solo
and collective improvs on them in the language of atonal
European art music makes as much organic sense and
generates as much light and heat as did Charlie Parker and
Dizzy Gillespie doing the same thing with the American
Songbook, or Duke Ellington with French Impressionism, or
Jelly Roll Morton with French Opera and his “Spanish
tinge,” or James Reese Europe with John Phillip Sousa, or
Thelonious Monk with European cabaret, or Miles Davis and
Gil Evans with Spanish composers. Chicago—via the
AACM, and especially in Braxton’s and Lewis’s extensions
thereof in this music—becomes an official sister city to fin-
de-siecle Vienna and Weimar Berlin on the transnational,
trans-historical “jazz map” of such connections;
48

• it is a live performance—the first and only such of all these

recordings. As such, in this as in all its tracks, it brings an
energy we hear received, reciprocated, and fed in the regular
spontaneous bursts of applause throughout them all;
• it is a live performance for an audience of Berliners—
Prussians, the martial home tribe that loomed so large in the
American popular and concert music of the 19th century,
which African Americans worked so gloriously into their
20th-century field of dominance, both in America and abroad.

If such music would so often be treated as a stranger in a strange

land in its own American home, here it splashed down like some
prodigal son returned (or maybe like the best friend he made
promise to return in his place, with his messages, just before he
died in his battles). Both martial and serial material are clearly
appreciated in the same way African-American gospel music is in
the Protestant churches of (especially) former East Germany where
Protestantism was born, or the blues in England where its folk
forms still had strong roots. In all such cases, the material
originated in Europe, spread to white and black America, and came
back home in the new African-American hands and voices.

The next four tracks, from Sides One and Two, were recorded in
Montreux, Switzerland, in July of 1975. 40N, inspired by South
Indian classical music, opens with a bowed bass drone and
cymbals shimmering, vina-like, under muted trumpet and clarinet
improvising around a line staggered through a couple of different
modal fragments. It opens up after that intro into a less mysterious,
more offhand give-and-take of free improvisation. Braxton
switches to soprano, then to alto sax. The piece loosens and opens
even further into more pointillistic-then-fluid whimsy...the full
drum kit enters...
49

...and 23J bursts forth seamlessly, another of the post-

bop/Coleman lines that dominated the first two LPs here.
Dedicated to T.S. Eliot, it takes Braxton through an extended,
probing solo that plumbs his way of bebop phrasing, from the
chock-a-block through the lava flows more fluid, to the primal
screams more fiery.

Again, the enthusiastic live applause signals the probable

inspiration for such serious solo statements by him and the others
here. Dave Holland’s open a capella solo following reminds us of
similar openings of harmonic, rhythmic, and formal-structural
fields his former major bandleader, Braxton’s fellow Gemini Miles
Davis, had made. The reminder grows upon hearing Kenny
Wheeler and Barry Altschul chime in as organically as, if more
volubly atonally than, Miles playing with Holland and drummer
Tony Williams.

40(O) opens with a relaxed Braxton ruminating freely on clarinet

with Holland and Altschul. This piece marks the end of the 40s, a
series among others that included the “arhythmic” pre-pulse-track
patterning of the Kelvin pieces, which 40(O) also is. He describes
it as “69 notes in 6 different phrase groupings in a time field of 24-
1/2 beats,” suggesting the ludic approach that launched many of
his innovations. Having conducted and played this particular piece
often as his graduate teaching assistant and sometime bandmate a
couple of decades later at Wesleyan University, I can attest to the
way repeated rehearsals of such material lead naturally from the
initial feeling of its impossibility (to even play as written, let alone
interpret creatively enough to swing with and improvise on it—
shades of Mingus) to the status of catchy Stravinsky-ish ditty to
downright St.-Vitus-dance-cum-earworm you could do in your
sleep and never get out of your head if you tried, so you’d damn
well better learn to interpret it creatively. Which, of course, the
crew does here...
50

...to travel then back in compositional and forward in real time, to

Berlin in the summer of ’76, and back to the 6 series, with the
Fellini-esque 6F. Dedicated to Stockhausen, it was the very first of
the Kelvin series of improvisations, those based on “a phrase-based
repetition structure that establishes a fixed rhythmic pattern—with
open actual pitch possibilities based on suggested contour”...his...
“first attempt to move into the world of repetition and pattern
thinking.”

This rhythmic alternative to melodic-harmonic approaches to pitch

generation was not so radical for its emphasis on repeated rhythmic
patterns—plenty of Afrocentric approaches demonstrate that,
including, closest to home here, Cecil Taylor’s likening of the
piano to “88 tuned bongos”—but it is so for its conscious assertion
and exploration of pulse, and patterns and cycles thereof, as a
systematically (if we grant the personal-ludic the same status as
system as we grant the public-paradigmatic) analyzable generation
of pitch selections. Not melody lines, not chords, but rhythmic
patterns are posited as pitch generators, for both composer and
improviser: as in speech, where we all select our pitches and their
interplay, our cadences and accents, according to the rhythms of
our emotions and thoughts at play, both as individuals and as
members of groups. There is a certain range—nothing precisely
fixed, but also not infinite—within which our keel is evenly
pitched, both to ourselves and others. That range defines the
unevenly pitched as well, and we ride it through both as we will,
can, and must.

6F, then, shows what such a new approach can generate after it’s
been worked long enough. This one had been performed and
recorded by this band often and long enough that they had only to
set it in motion to make it gush with its juiciest yields. It goes
much farther out with its improvisations than did three previous
recorded versions. Sometimes the bass and drums hold close to the
pattern, with the horns providing complementary colors. Braxton’s
51

first improvisation, on contrabass clarinet, is loosely anchored over

the drums; his puppy whines are rejoined by George Lewis’s
snuffles and grunts, both moving in and out of the rhythm. A hot
drum solo follows, then all four are in, noodling into a walking
groove...then another written part, walky, swingy, punchy.
Extended collective and solo improvisations continue to weave
through romps through the written material (hello, Nino Rota).

With all due (and genuine) respect to the Kenny Wheeler version
of the quartet, the George Lewis version is my favorite of all the
groups here. Lewis’s trombone voice and chops, his intellect, his
Chicago/AACM roots and creds all so match and complement
Braxton’s versions of same that they bowl over an interest that
would otherwise have been merely piqued (albeit radically) by
comparison. That any of my fellow jazz-schooled, Western-music-
schooled baby-boomer aficionados could hear anything but the
strongest beating heart and blood-flooded brains of the American
music tradition at its most hip and worldly in this music—the
clearest present and future of its past—and exclude it from their
working definition of “jazz” makes me shake my head in perplexed
wonder, now as then.

40K is another perfect storm of the artist’s then-new visions and

the by-then-well-schooled and seasoned voices articulating them
so eloquently. The comparison to the late Beethoven and Bartok
string quartets is perhaps most apt here. It is a full dose of the
artist’s essence, unfettered by earlier (and more American)
considerations of audience and market considerations, or by the
special effects and complexities of the large ensemble, and beyond
the sparseness and solitude of solos and duos, especially in the
studio. We can feel the equilibrium of full-flown energies and
potentials, the volcano at eruption’s height, the lava racing to the
four corners of the round earth, and that not in some uninhabited
clime or island, but right where the heart of this particular
52

civilization can take in the whole spectacle, and either be mowed

down and burned up by or survive and never forget it.

6C (composed in 1967) is another Fellini/Rota-esque circusy

piece, suggesting one of Europe’s first effects on Braxton’s music.
(My colleague Ronald Radano hears the shadow of Kurt Weill in
the melody, and notes a passing allusion to the University of
Southern California’s football team song, “Fight On!”)iv The other
live recording of 6C, from around the same time as this one, is
more developed and tweaked in some ways, but this one expands
on it in another way, by halving the two-beat oompah feel into a
more open groove that opens up the space for more low blatts and
other spontaneous effects. Extended improvisation—mostly a
Hold-That-Tiger-ish horn duet over rhythm—leads to more
noodlings, then a fade-out, with no restatement of the head.

Following on the heels of Creative Orchestra Music 1976’s

success, both musically and critically, The Montreux/Berlin
Concerts, arguably, even trumped it in both ways. It served up a
purer, more bracing distillation of the music for those hardcore
fans and critics who had ears for it, and it demonstrated the fact
and details of the popular appeal of the supposedly esoteric music
in live performance. As the endpoint of an arc of courageous and
creative marketing of a new and challenging music to the
mainstream but open-minded jazz community of critics and fans,
one affirmed by largely good-to-rave reviews and reception, it
would seem to be the pièce de résistance. Braxton’s place in jazz
history and careerism would seem to have been optimally launched
from the firmest possible foundation.

Then came...

For Trio
When this LP’s one piece was composed, in the fall of 1977, the
country was well into its first Democratic administration since the
53

Nixon-Ford crew took over in the wake of the 1968 shakeups.

Never the partisan-political activist, Braxton has nonetheless
typically been attuned (as a self-confessed “political junkie”) to
such dynamics in society and politics, and his work has always
reflected them in various ways. Without making too much of this
social-political shift, it’s safe to note that this was a time before the
Iranian revolution, and during a moment of hopeful optimism after
a decade of little of either in the (let’s call it) post-countercultural
community. A visionary artist might feel in such a moment
unharried enough to let down the guard erected by old battles and
take a look around at their new, more peaceful and promising
favorable outcomes.

More personally, it was the heyday of the Creative Music Studio,

Braxton’s Woodstock-neighborhood institution conceived and
designed to promulgate just his sort of work. Launched by German
vibraphonist Karl Berger with Ornette Coleman and Ingrid Sertso
in 1971, its staff and round of illustrious guests and serious music
students provided the vital function of rehearsal bands for Braxton,
Cecil Taylor, and other experimental composers for improvisers
with few if any such outlets for their ambitious and challenging
work, especially for larger ensembles.

“Anthony was a regular at CMS during those years” Berger recalls.

“He workshopped a lot of the music on the Creative Orchestra
Music record with the students. We had a kind of orchestra
rehearsal every afternoon, always about 20 or 25. He would come
for a week. He was a regular there for as long as he lived in
Woodstock, starting in 1973.

“The 1970s was the golden age for the CMS, especially between
1976 and 1982. The practice of the big labels like Arista at the time
with Anthony—of focusing on one or two more adventurous artists
and really promoting them heavily—had the effect of drawing
more people into the music of CMS generally. More students
54

would enroll to come and learn this music. The student bands
became big, good resources for composers, Anthony especially.
They helped him copy the parts for his Four Orchestras project,
and were on hand to play through work as it was written, allowing
him to hear it. In the days before computers, that was quite a
luxury.”

A propo of Braxton’s disavowals at the time of “jazz” and

“Western art music” as categories limiting his music, and his
replacement of them with “world,” and “universal,” Berger says,
“The more the CMS grew during that time, the more it became the
world music center. More people from different traditions came in,
and the world music genre was on the rise. Particularly the summer
sessions had a lot of Brazilian, Turkish, Indian, African people
there, who were bringing their own music in. The countercultural
aura of Woodstock drew a healthy cross section of talented
musicians, too—people who had gone through the conventional
music education, training, and professional situations and weren’t
satisfied with that. This was their chance to get an intensive eight-
week exposure to the best players in the kind of direction they
wanted to take their music.”

The double serving of the same dish (Composition 76, played by a

different trio on each side) here is an extension on the earlier 73,
made for a previous performance by Braxton, Joseph Jarman, and
Roscoe Mitchell at The Kitchen in New York. It was designed to
maximize the possibilities of multiinstrumentalism (each player
was instructed to play at least nine different instruments), of a
particular kind of synaesthesia (passages were notated in nine
different colors, plus black), and disparate musical ideas (“102
multiple phrase grouping components and 25 unison grouping
components”—short written phrases in 19 notated sections cued in
by one of the players to serve as entrances to, exits from, or
parallels or supports to solo, duo, or trio improvisations (24
designated).
55

More summarily, this is something of a landmark piece in the

composer’s oeuvre for the way that it brings to a head three things:
(1) the AACM roots as manifest in a trio of peers, begun in the late
‘60s with Leroy Jenkins and Wadada Leo Smith, especially
through the early 6 series of compositions; (2) the
appropriation/reconstruction of conventional music notation for
Braxton’s brand of creative music (both composed and
improvised); and (3) a similar takeover of conventional musical
form for such music.

As a 10-year reunion of the old gang (two different bandmates, but

from the same “family,” comprising the same number three), the
performances invoke especially that of 6E, from Three
Compositions of New Jazz. More maturity and mastery here
infuse the play between vocal and instrumental gestures; the play
between the written and the improvised is more seamless, less
forced; the serious amateur’s aesthetic maxim (“if the fool will
become wise, let him persist in his folly”) is fulfilling its promise
here. The first version shows off the gentle flow of conferring
winds (flutes brooking each other and Ewart’s percussion like
water over rocks, sax barking away the humdrum); the second is a
more active and bolder interpretation, with a wider range of reeds
and vocal dynamics. Moments of rarefied atonal counterpoint and
conservatory correctness give way to shocking shrieks and growls;
some extreme of cold keeps meeting it counterpart in heat. While
more the maze than its predecessor pieces, 76 pumps their blood
with the same proportion of control and balance through its rises in
the heat of freedom of invention.

The notation, too, brings together in a definitive, comprehensive

score devices that had been kicking around in earlier works more
loosely and casually. Dubbed here “modular notation” by the
composer, it stands as a complete expression of the move from a
fixed script through or around which improvisations flow to one
56

that allows for mutations—readings both forward and back, a

variety of combinations and juxtapositions of phrases, tempos,
pitch and rhythm placements—of itself. The improviser can thus
improvisationally massage and manipulate the form as well as its
contents, can thus co-create both with the composer. The use of
color, of perspective, of abstract shapes engages sheerly visual
abstractions, the subjective aspects of improvisation (indeed,
Braxton likens the piece to a “Japanese painting” fueled by
unadorned meditative focus and intention).

The overarching effect is something like a radical return to the

roots of early Western music notation, when it was still a literate
device determined by, to aid rather than define, oral-aural tradition,
shared lore and craft, and material. Influences of Satie and Cage
(sublimation of ego from naked will into measured, defined
processes) and cubist and abstract painters
(deconstruction/reconstruction of elemental components) are
palpable and pronounced.

For Trio stands as a look back over the ground covered by the
intrepid mountaineers to date, a laying down of the essentials for a
comfortable, viable base camp from which to plot out the next trek
to the summit. The concept of modular notation would expand in
coming decades to the juxtaposition of works from the beginning
to the most current of the opus numbers in simultaneous
performances—one of Braxton’s major strategies for rising to the
challenge to creative innovators voiced by Stockhausen, of
integrating “all that came before” as one proceeds, as he did here.

For Four Orchestras

And so we come to the tour de force, here and now as then and
there. If the rubber met the road in Creative Orchestra Music
1976, it left the ground and withdrew into the jumbo jet its wheels
gripped on earth to soar with it roaring up to its stratospheric
cruise.
57

Braxton’s liner notes’ description of Composition 82 rested on

the term “multi-orchestralism.” This multiorchestral way of
making music has a long and varied history, from medieval
antiphony to abovementioned battles of the marching bands,
among others. Braxton nods here to such battles in his own
Chicago neighborhood and in Kansas City as influences on 82; he
also mentions Charles Ives’ Fourth Symphony’s scored
simulations of such clashes, along with works by Stockhausen
(Gruppen and Carrie), Xenakis (Polytope), Sun Ra, and parallel
approaches by other cultures. Such divisions of sound have often
represented the interplay between separate aspects of reality (e.g.,
spirit and matter), or different cultures. The concept here, however,
is more unified-sensory than that:

There has always been something special about the reality of

different ensembles making music in the same physical
universe space that has excited my imagination. It is as if the
whole of the universe were swallowed up—leaving us in a
sea of music and color.

Perhaps this vivid sensory experience is the key to understanding

Braxton’s penchant for all of his syntheses, innovations, and
complexities—they all make for that much prettier, brighter a noise
(it is a more charitable explanation than to say he’s lost himself in
mental mazes and pretensions, anyway). As he himself writes at
the end of his notes on 82:

For the realness of multiple orchestra activity directly sheds

light on the cross vibrational activity that takes place in
everyday living (that being the realness of creative—and
“real”—invention and how it is related to the very fabric of
existence on this plane). For at the heart of my series of
works in multi-orchestralism is the attempt to create a music
that can dynamically accentuate (and celebrate) the multi-
58

complexual—and not complexual—realness of life on this

planet, as a means to be better prepared to deal with this
sector in space, and as a factor that might hopefully be
positively related to what this preparation could vibrationally
and spiritually reveal about “living” (emphasis mine;
Braxton’s “complexities” are not affectations).

As a completely notated work performed by conservatory-trained

student and professional musicians and conductors—no
improvisation, not a hint of the jazz tradition here—it stands out in
the Arista series as a complete and blatant extravaganza of
anomaly. It appears as the pièce de resistance of the compositional
language employed throughout the series, after that language had
been plied by unimpeachable masters of the jazz tradition, to their
improvisational art’s ends, in their thick jazz accents. Here it
morphs radically and completely over to the contemporary concert
composer’s side of things in aesthetic, performance, and sound. In
its prominent dedication to “historian-writer-educator Eileen
Southern,” it associates itself with a paragon of summative
scholarship of African-American music culture.

Part 1 opens with short, fleeting phrases—very much the post-

Webern punktuelle affair. It gradually moves into a higher level of
density, percussive continuity, complexity, all sustained at a high
intensity, suggesting the Ives influence; followed by a return to an
even sparser-spacier, silence-salted series of moments. These
oscillations between extremes constitute part of Braxton’s
signature approach, in contrast to likeminded composers in the
same idiom (Feldman, Reich, Glass) who have reached for similar
trance effects through unrelenting sameness. The music alternates
that with more sustained sonic clouds floating by, and more clear-
sky silence between them.

When the first longer-held notes occur, shortly into Part 2—for
relatively brief durations, to construct some klangfarbliche melodic
59

phrases, but sounding dramatically like a swelling stream after the

steady trickles and rushes before it—we shift from Webern’s
language of notes and phrases to Stockhausen’s of “sound masses”
wandering around. Panning of tracks in the mix simulates the
central feature of sound traveling through space, itself simulated in
performance by scoring it from one orchestra to another. The piece
settles back into a mix of the punctual and the textural, thickening
the sound canvas with more activity, layerings, and dynamic flux.
82 ends not with a bang nor with a whimper, but simply as it began
(many short phrases, a few long tones).

For Braxton to choose this work for his final statement, and for
Backer/Arista to let him, says the whole relationship there was
summed up in that conclusion, radically disengaged from the
“jazz-industrial complex.” It says that the most important thing for
him was to use it as a visibly fleeting opportunity to do something
he wouldn’t otherwise get to, even if it burned bridges and set him
on a course he couldn’t then turn back from. It expresses the same
priorities from Backer’s side.

“I thought of the four orchestras project as something that Anthony

deserved to have done,” he says—as a parting reward for the
success of the previous recordings, especially Creative Orchestra
Music 1976. Its extravagance of resources, ambition, and
documentation stood then and now as a statement by both artist
and producer about the kind of support and recognition they
thought the music itself would duly earn if America’s blinders of
racism and anti-intellectual lack of cultural literacy and taste were
removed.

As a synthesis of the Second Viennese School and its torchbearers,

the American Independent composers from Ives on, the African-
American composers tradition, the counterparts of the multi-
orchestral from other cultures, and the AACM, the statement
beyond the music here takes us from jazz-as-Americana to the
60

music of the larger “court” that is the world. If it was a foregone

conclusion that this piece would effectively lose Braxton all his
stock as a jazz star, it was no less destined to take him to that larger
stage of not just the world that is, but of a world that should be, by
his creative vision’s utopian criteria. In that world, this recording
would trump all those that came before, would extend and magnify
their precepts and successes, by being hailed as a major work by a
major American composer, completely consistent and continuous
with the previous acclaim by the jazz world on its terms. As it was,
it stands more as a guerilla fighter’s parting shot just before he runs
off to fight another day.

The statement in the music, beyond the music, is that the Arista
years and its fruits on record amply embodied a satisfying
American flowering of Braxton’s work, in the “jazz” plot of its
garden...but in doing so, and moving through flower to airborne
pollen, it also showed that moment to be as evanescently
improvised, as idiosyncratically composed, as the music itself.

Alto Saxophone Improvisations 1979

The logical segue, then, is back to where it all began. Offered after
the most developed and populous productions, Alto Saxophone
Improvisations 1979 stands as artist’s sketchbook, blueprints, and
keynote of the Arista recordings as a composer’s oeuvre, one that
still holds up as a faithful microcosm of the larger oeuvre it
subsequently became. The first distinguishing feature of it as such,
of course, is its very issuance from the solo alto saxophone.

Whereas the public groundbreaking ceremony that was For Alto

back in 1968 was annotated with graphic abstracts and no words,
this double LP caught us up with Braxton’s extensive liner notes
about the creative processes he began working out through his solo
alto music in 1967. He writes that his words were that (decade)
long in coming because his intellectual understanding of those
processes lagged behind their musical expressions; that the value
61

in such solo statements lay in their facilitation of artistic contact

with one’s deepest, purest original and authentic self, of
rejuvenation thereof, thus a replenishing of the gifts one brought to
the table of one’s more social music; that his particular such
project was in direct response to the exhaustion of Western music
principles and materials brought about by Cecil Taylor, Ornette
Coleman, and John Coltrane, and a turn to other world cultures as
well as his own creativity for alternative platforms.

Inserted with the records in the jacket is a full-sized foldout of yet

more notes, with abstract line drawings, microscopically detailing
the considerations and processes—what Braxton calls the
“language”—of each piece. The feel of the collection is that of a
conventional book of études for the classical musician, only these
are not sheerly technical but also conceptual sketches (indeed,
“conceptual grafting” is his declared working principle here—
isolating his musical ideas into separate pieces in which he can
develop them) for the intrepid musical explorer/experimentalist.
The best exegesis of the individual tracks here might be a quick,
off-the-cuff scan of each in sequence, drawing on both those notes
and the listening experience to construct an overview of the whole.

77A employs a strategy of “reverse development” of line

construction: abortive self-interruptions as the moment’s impulse
suggests them, quantum leaps from one fragment (say, a soft-fluid
high-pitched phrase) to a radically different one (slashing loud
barks at the bottom of the horn). Parker/Coltrane/Ayler and
Webern/Stockhausen “language continua” are named as the sound-
and-logic palette here (and it is dedicated to composer Ulysses
Kay). The piece stands as the statement resulting from the mish-
mash of such fragments spontaneously sequenced.

The device of ascending diatonic triplets (CDE, DEF, etc.) is

worked in 77C, repeated at various points on the horn until
body/mind are entrained to, entranced by that loopy musical DNA
62

enough to transcend and transform it into more complex and

soulful phrases and statements, to singularly lyrical and
mellifluous effect (dedicated to “my friend Barbara Mayfield”).

Braxton’s fortuitously personal encounter with Ben Webster is

mined for practical value in 77D. He works the “slap-tongue”
technique he learned from the master. This is a perfect example of
the generic category of “extended technique”—innovation coming
by taking some technical means to some musical end, or even
some undeveloped by-product of such process (say, unintended
squeaks or valve noise in a sax solo), and turning it into the music
itself, working it as a new “language” for the new things it might
have to say. It is dedicated to Emilio and Pat Cruz, two friends and
fellow artists (painter and theater, respectively) in New York.

Red Top (along with Benny Golson’s Along Came Betty and
John Coltrane’s Giant Steps) have the casual, perennial-music-
student feel noted above about the Braxton-Holland duo recital of
You Stepped Out of a Dream. On the solo alto, it feels like a
chance encounter with a street or subway musician, or someone
playing in a practice room or through an open apartment window
on a city street. That isn’t to say it is not advanced playing, just to
put it in the context of the étude-cum-sketchbook here: an artist
working for himself alone, making preparations and rehearsals that
are in fact skilled and developed enough to be of general interest
when done, especially to fellow artists and anyone else fascinated
by what goes on behind the curtain in Oz.

The narrow parameters of 77E are the pentatonic scale and the
shakuhachi (Japanese bamboo) flute tradition. The constraints of
both notes and tonal expression serve as a musical mantra focusing
our meditation on the proportionately vaster pool of potential
(world music traditions beyond the West and Africa) that would
loom increasingly larger in Braxton’s vision and work after the
63

Arista years. This (dedicated then to dancer Sheila Raz) stands out
now as a glimpse and seed of things to come.

Another such glimpse, one of more than a few from several

quarters in the 1970s, is 26F, a seed of musical minimalism.
Repetition of phrases, punctuated by slight additions, subtractions,
or alterations in their flow, is the m.o. The way Braxton writes
about it, and the way one then hears it in the light of his
description, makes this a prime example of what I’ve called his
“speculative music” elsewhere.v In its musicological context, it’s a
term used to discuss music as a “speculum,” or mirror, of some
other natural, mathematical, or cultural pattern (say, a chess game,
a fractal equation, or the lunar cycle). Braxton has often expressed
an awareness of and interest in this for his own work. 26F is just
such a musical homology of the process of microbiological
evolution, whereby strands of DNA—repetitive chains of four
basic nucleotides—combine and recombine, add and shed, to
express life’s dance between constancy and change. Like sonic
rosary beads, a piece such as 26F (dedicated to composer Phillip
Glass) reminds us of why Einstein liked to play the violin so much,
and why music has played such a complementary role in the
intellectual histories of scientific theory both occult and physical.
(It also resonates tellingly with the history of race and gene-based
racist theories thereof.)

77F is a way of getting at the concept of “ballad,” both as

transportive beauty and narrative in music. Paul Desmond and
Johnny Hodges are cited as masters of the concept/sound, which
Braxton claims as important to his own musical self-identity. It is a
window onto the processes at work on Nickie and 77C, described
above, and is dedicated to his oldest child, daughter Terri.

Braxton’s notes about 26B suggest that his intention with all these
pieces and his inserted notes and illustrations—and the recording
itself—is more that of a composer/improviser writing for peers and
64

aspirers as potential interpreters of his pieces than for an audience

of passive fans (indeed, it is dedicated to his colleague, reeds
player Kalaparusha Difda, a.k.a Maurice McIntyre): “I would ask
each interpreter to create a very special universe with this section,”
he writes of the second of the piece’s “5 primary construction
criteria that serve as regions of exploration” (the device of high-
register multiphonics, or blending the sounds of both horn and
voice)—“create a music that does nothing and yet holds our
attention,” he adds, koan-like.

Long and short staccato lines, extreme changes of register and

speed of attack “to establish dimensionality.” The latter rationale
clues an insight into his sense of technique’s musical effects: a
long tone or closely stepped line will suggest one spatial
dimension, and the wider the range of pointillistic leaps around
register, volume, and timbre, accordingly simulates the larger and
more textured the sonic simulation of three-dimensional space.
These techniques and strategies are juxtaposed with florid passages
that thus suggest themselves as flowers in the “space” so
“coordinated” by such “tools of dimensionality.”

77G is a fabric woven with the whole-tone scale, that most

symmetrical halving/balancing of the chromatic scale so much
more wildly sculpted by Germanic composers, itself so fully
milked by their French Impressionist counterparts. It is a platform
that seems to suggest Apollonian tranquility in flow and harmony,
and that’s how Braxton uses it here “for lyrical and gentle
improvisations.” I detect a personal connection in this abstract to
the France of his own experience as first step into the world
beyond the turbulent America of the time, into the kinder, gentler
European center traditionally most open to and appreciative of
African-Americans and avant-gardism both. It is where he first met
his wife, led his own bands recording his own music, a place of
similarly “lyrical and gentle” language. It is dedicated to the birth
of his firstborn son, Tyondai.
65

26E, as both composition notes and listening reveal, is a kind of

dialogue between horizontal chromatic lines running through high
and low patches of spacetime and vertical (multiphonic) moments
that suggest a sonic ladder from one such line to another. The notes
range between the clinical (“Composition No. 26E utilizes
intervallic shifts”) and the poetic (“the realness of shadowlike
phrases,” “worlds of vapor and mystery”), a style that would come
to flourish over the years since in grander productions from the
same DNA. It is dedicated to the Creative Music Studio director,
vibraphonist Karl Berger.

Trills constitute the “language” of 77H. Braxton’s performance

here suggests how these solo improvisations function as études not
only of the given material and technical premises, but of the
improvisational/creative process itself. He has often remarked that
“mystery” makes up at least a third of his music’s system. Here, as
in all these solo tracks, he sets in motion the premise—start
trilling—and then trusts in his intuition to turn one trill into
another, different one in just the right new notes, thence into a
sequence of many that will order itself into a finished musical
statement. This is why his abstracts and hyperrationalism have
never struck me as overly determined or clinical, despite first
impressions: they always seem to generate or issue from a
proportionate measure of fertile, comfortable unconsciousness.

All told, then, this and all such solo recitals continue to connect
with the jazz audience Arista appealed to at the time to the extent
that (1) the saxophonic voice had the familiar sound and feel of
one of their own at home and the proverbial woodshed, practicing;
and (2) the composer/improviser’s mind at work in the original
pieces was so clearly associated with the same processes brought
to bear on the familiar ground of the three jazz covers presented
here. More than its predecessors, however, this release speaks
66

directly, even exclusively (though interested eavesdroppers are

welcome), to fellow specialists aspiring to the same art and craft.

For Two Pianos

As is For Trio, For Two Pianos is also a single work (95), this
one spanning the two sides of the LP.

If the 70s and 80s comprised the final ascent to the summit of the
oeuvre to date, 95 is its peak, where the first peek at the new
horizon of the higher and more mountain ranges beyond was
possible. It is the first of what the composer calls his Ritual and
Ceremonial series of compositions:

My original intention when composing this work was that I

sensed and felt that the next immediate cycle in social reality
promises to be extremely difficult [95 was written and
recorded in 1980, as Reagan was ascending to succeed Carter
as U.S. president, shortly after the Iranian Revolution of
1979—M.H.]—and there is danger in the air for all people
and forces concerned about humanity and positive
participation. Composition No. 95 is composed as a vehicle
to alert the spirit about serious change...Composition No. 95
is my first attempt towards solidifying a ritual and sacred
music.

Like 76, it is a merging culmination of some aspects of his work

that had developed disparately in different pieces throughout the
years: music for piano (his very first notated work was for piano),
the play of yin and yang, the worlds of both occult “perennial
wisdom” and its historical overlaps with rationalistic-technocratic
science, the visual and dramatic elements of theater, and Western-
traditional harmony and notation. Like 76, the language in his
composition notes about it employ the word “spiritual” a lot, a sign
that it does figure in his oeuvre as a summative, finished whole
rather than a partial, exploratory sketch. As the devices in 76
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would blossom into grander versions in larger ensembles and more

ambitious juxtapositions of mutable scores, the theatrical aspects
and mystical affects, and the suggestions of social oppression and
resistance to it in 95 would seed later elaborations of same in
productions such as the Trillium opera series and similar stand-
alone theatrical-cum-literary (his composition notes would evolve
from technical to poetic/narrative descriptions) projects.

95 is written for two performers whose gender, race, and other

visible aspects are shrouded in a hooded robe. Each is to enter the
concert stage from the two different directions while playing a
melodica; they meet in the middle, where the two grand pianos
curve into each other’s shape like the circled-S symbol for yin and
yang; after their piano duet, they exit as they entered, playing the
melodicas to a fadeout. (On the recording, their walks to and fro
are simulated by slowly panning their tracks together; their
opposite genders are also plain to see in a photo of them in
performance, despite the hoods. In addition to their primary status
as new-music luminaries, both Frederick Rzewski and Ursula
Oppens were known for their associations with music and
musicians charged with leftist social-political positions and
passions as well as revolutionary aesthetics.)

The sound from the opening bars is that of atonal concert music,
but the feel (if we can make that distinction) is of something
hatched unsystematically, in the spontaneous inspiration of the
moment. This comes across in a driving cohesion of phrasing and
rhythm that has avoided the trap of the stasis thereof too often the
result of the absence of the usual melodic-harmonic tension-and-
release inherent in tonal music. That energy is further vitalized by
an overarching ebb-and-flow, a periodic relenting of attention in
release, like paragraphs that ease the reading of a page. Such
suggestions of moment-form’s nonverbal narrative, combined with
the atonal language’s abstract energy, make the listening
experience like a viewing of a Chagall, or early Pollock painting,
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with a shoreless sea of abstract shapes and colors on which a few

real objects—a ladder, a chicken, a disembodied hand—surreally
float.

An additional such enlivening distinction is the contrast between

piano and zither; with one player articulating the latest in complex
atonal repertoire and the other scraping and plucking open strings
seemingly at random (presumably both alternately, since each
player is assigned all three instruments). The effect is of a dialogue
between the primeval and the most modern incarnations of the
family of plucked and struck stringed instruments. It evokes the
same meeting of primal and cultivated Africa and the West have
enacted in music and culture all along, in the same back-and-forth
of roles and power points, only here in the most esoteric-Ernst
reaches of the art and its field, rather than the folk grassroots or
popular arenas.

Side Two (labeled Part 2 of 95) opens decisively with trills and
punched low notes. The declamation the music implies therein is
that when all the drama of pitch relationships is played out, the
field is cleared for the new (visceral, not intellectual) drama of the
new (meta-visceral) meanings emanating from, not imposed upon,
rhythm, phrasing, energy, silence, timbre and texture, sequence
and structure through time. The pitch relationships dominating
Side One are still happening, but not idealistically or ideologically;
they are not the seat of the music’s identity. They are ornamenting
rather than ornamented by the music’s other elements just listed, as
horizontal and vertical clusters of those equal-tempered chromatics
a composer just wants to hear for their sheer vibrational pleasure. It
is a moistening approach to a musical language (serialism) many
find devoid of aesthetic pleasure, too cerebral and dry, to milk and
squeeze it out of its overheated mind.

Of all the works and recordings mentioned here so far, For Two
Pianos, along with Creative Orchestra Music and For Four
69

Orchestras, is the one my own ears are sensitized to by my

subsequent years as a player of Braxton’s music in his larger
ensembles. I played much more sporadically his music with him
for and in smaller groups, and the difference is marked. More of
the composer’s thought and work, less of the improviser’s,
dominated the former, and I can hear that presence in this record.
Parts of it feel like pieces I played and improvised on in the CD we
co-produced, Eugene (1989), such as the recurring ascending
pattern (like 77C on the Alto Saxophone Improvisations 1979)
that seems to climax into infinity like some sonic barber pole,
around which looser and wilder filigrees of music dance and twine
like flowered vines and sweaty bodies. Such repeating motifs are
often musical triggers meant to launch entrances and exits to and
from the main event that is the piece, such as I would hear
proliferate and magnify up close in New York minutes and
compositions to come.
***
Like American politics, like the changes of life and time
themselves, the transience and illusion of the moment was
revealed, and endured, in the counterbalancing constant/constancy
of the artist’s dedication to his own creative processes and visions.

The new world of computer technology is one that favors Anthony

Braxton’s chosen arena of the independent and marginal even as it
threatens that of the lucrative corporate “record deal.” It turns the
“life in the cracks” to which he felt consigned by such deals toward
a much more truly multicultural America. It turns him toward a
more multi-polar world, and away from the white over-black
America and America-over-all world he inherited.

Braxton would go on from the alienation from so much of what

he’d imagined his dreams to be when he set out to realize them, to
work and record even more outside America in the decades to
follow; to start and build a career in academia commensurate with
his achievements and potential as a musician apart from cultural-
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political and commercial measures, winning the MacArthur

“Genius” grant and other prestigious recognitions therefor; and,
most centrally, to continue to compose and record prolifically,
cultivating the seeds planted in the Arista years into the lush and
exotic Ghost Trance Music series of compositions, the Trillium
series of operas, and more tributes to American jazz masters, as
well as mentoring collaborations with new generations of students
that virtually shepherded them and their new scenes of “creative
music” safely and soundly past the corporate-commodification and
academic-domestication of “jazz” they were born to grow up with,
and into the substantive alternative scenes in cities large and small
and online throughout the world today.

References

Thanks to Michael Fitzgerald, moderator of the Jazz Research

newsgroup, for his research assistance on these notes.

See The Music of Anthony Braxton (Heffley, M., 1996, Greenwood

Press) for much more information and discussion along these lines.

i
Lewis, G. 2008. A Power Stronger than Itself: the AACM and American Experimental
Music. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, p. 242.
ii
Radano, R. 1993. New Musical Figurations: Anthony Braxton’s Cultural Critique.
Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, p. 47.
iii
Stockhausen, K. 1989. Towards a Cosmic Music. London: Element Books Ltd., p. 102.
iv
Radano, 210n.
v
Heffley, M. 2008. “O, For a Thousand Tongues to Sing”: Anthony Braxton’s
Speculative Music. Journal of the Society for American Music. Volume 2, Number 2, pp.
203–233.