Anthony Braxton - Biography
Anthony Braxton, multi-instrumentalist, bandleader and composer, philosopher, teacher and visionary, is one of the most highly regarded and controversial artists of the late 20th century. Derided at one time or another for his interests in European music, his complex philosophical language when talking about music, the diagrams and pictures that he uses as titles, and his supposed inability to swing, he has been formally recognized as a genius with the awarding of a MacArthur Fellowship in 1994. He’s made a bewildering array of albums over a 40-year period, and continues to perform widely in the United States and Europe with a variety of ensembles. Currently a tenured professor at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT, Braxton has come a long way from living on rice and Twinkies in his hometown Chicago in 1969, “dealing with severe poverty,” as Braxton later told chronicler Graham Lock.
Anthony Braxton was born on June 4, 1945, the middle child of five. He described the prevalent hopelessness of the black community at that time to Lock, saying “the only thing that saved me was the music.” Encouraged by his parents to follow his own path, Braxton started taking music lessons when he was around eleven. His first musical hero was doo-wop singer Frankie Lymon. Before long, he was seriously listening to Paul Desmond, Miles Davis, and Warne Marsh. He studied for a while at Wilson Junior College, where he met Roscoe Mitchell. Two periods of further study in philosophy at Roosevelt University were divided by an Army enrollment, done of economic necessity. Working in Army bands, which undoubtedly cemented his life-long love of marches, enabled him to practice many hours each day. While overseas, Braxton stayed in touch with the jazz scene in the States by having his family send him albums by Albert Ayler and John Coltrane, among others.
Back in Chicago after leaving the service, Braxton heard of the formation of the collective Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). He went to a concert by the Muhal Richard Abrams Sextet where the curtain stayed down for the entire first half of the show. Braxton told Lock that “for the first time in my life I met a group of people who would not call me strange.” He became involved with the nascent organization. “My association with the AACM would clarify what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.” While he barely scraped by economically, Braxton’s life in the late Sixties was rich with discussions, workshops, and constant playing with early AACM members like Abrams, Mitchell and Smith. His main instrument in the Army had been the alto saxophone, but the AACM’s encouragement of experimentation with sound sources, plus Braxton’s growing interest in John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, led him to explore clarinets, flutes, the extremes of the saxophone family, and even power tools at one time.
Braxton made his first recordings in 1967, as a sideman on Abrams’ own first release, Levels and Degrees Of Light (1968 Delmark). Abrams played a similar role on Braxton’s first album, performing on one track of 3 Compositions Of New Jazz (1968 Delmark). Although Braxton’s name was on the cover, the trio of Smith, Braxton, and violinist Leroy Jenkins, known as the Creative Construction Company, was a resolutely cooperative outfit. “Braxton was always better known” was the main reason given by Jenkins to Robert Palmer. At the beginning at least, that might have been as much for his arcane, diagrammatic titles as much as for his music.
In the autumn of 1968, in the basement of the Parkway Community Center, Braxton recorded a series of solo alto saxophone pieces. For Alto (1969 Delmark), a double-album set with six original compositions, was as audacious as it was unprecedented. But with gigs impossible to come by, and little support in the community for the style of unfettered free improvisation and expanded tone colors that were part of the CCC’s arsenal, something had to change. Rather than starve in Chicago, the trio decided to try to make it in Paris, where numerous other American jazz musicians were then eking out a living.
The Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble, soon to be known as the Art Ensemble of Chicago, moved to Paris around the same time and were very well received. The Creative Construction Company was not as welcomed. According to Braxton, the trio’s music was viewed as “cold, intellectual, borrowing from Europe...We were not acceptable African-Americans.” In liner notes for a 1977 Braxton duet with synthesizer pioneer Richard Teitelbaum, the keyboardist recalls meeting Braxton around this time at a festival. During a backstage conversation, Braxton raved about the music of Stockhausen. “In retrospect,” he writes, “I can see that his interest in the White avant-garde was no less valid than mine in the Black, and in a way was structurally equivalent.” Braxton’s voracious and color-blind interests in music were not usually received with such sympathy.
Although the band did make a pair of albums for the BYG/Actuel label in 1969 and 1970, with drummer Steve McCall added to the group, they split up in Europe. Braxton stayed in Paris, making a number of appearances with European and American musicians. Soon, though, he started to feel like he had unfinished business in America. So he left for New York, and on May 19, 1970, he made his New York debut with a reunion concert with Smith, Jenkins, McCall, and Abrams, with bassist Richard Davis rounding out the group. Two albums from this concert, credited to the Creative Construction Company, were later issued on Muse. Braxton was staying with another passionate innovator, the composer and saxophonist Ornette Coleman, at the time. Coleman, credited as recording supervisor for the two Muse albums, was crucial to Braxton’s survival in this period. So were his skills as a chess hustler, which is how a discouraged and disillusioned Braxton mostly earned money during this stay in New York.
Right after the CCC reunion show, Braxton and drummer Jack DeJohnette, a friend from Chicago, went down to the Village Vanguard, where pianist Chick Corea, bassist Dave Holland, and drummer Barry Altschul were performing. Introductions made, Braxton and DeJohnette sat in for the second set. Corea asked for Braxton’s phone number, and soon the four were rehearsing as the cooperative group, Circle. The group’s first recordings were made in August 1970, but not released until a “re-issue” program many years later, when the pieces were rescued along with more studio work. Two double-albums were issued under Chick Corea’s name, as Circling In (1975 Blue Note) and Circulus (1978 Blue Note). The band lasted until late 1971, after a couple of tours of Europe, and a number of concert recordings. A solo show in Paris offered the first documentation of Braxton the pianist (Recital Paris 1971, 1971 Futura). The association with Corea helped Braxton get some of his notated music recorded in London in February 1971, including a tuba quintet, solo pieces for sopranino saxophone and contrabass clarinet that reflected his life-long interest in timbral extremes, as well as the first recordings of his quartet-to-be with British trumpeter Kenny Wheeler, Holland, and Altschul.
Braxton eventually found himself stranded in Los Angeles when Circle broke up. He managed to get a gig in San Francisco, then escaped back to Paris. The early Seventies continued to be financially precarious. Braxton recorded as a soloist and in duets with both Joseph Jarman of the Art Ensemble and guitarist Derek Bailey. He had a Town Hall concert in New York and appeared on Dave Holland’s Conference Of the Birds (1972 ECM). There was also a trip to Japan, and the first installment of a series of recordings devoted to jazz standards. The first albums in Braxton’s career to feature other people’s music, In The Tradition, Vols. 1 & 2 were made with a quartet of pianist Tete Montoliu, bassist Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen and drummer Albert "Tootie" Heath (1974 SteepleChase).
Then in 1974, Braxton - in Paris, discouraged, holed up writing piano music - got a phone call that changed everything. Producer Michael Cuscuna, who he knew from Chicago, called from New York to say that he’d managed to get Braxton a contract with Arista Records. “The challenge,” as Braxton saw it, “ was to feed them the quartet music and slip them some of my other projects ‘under the rug.’” Braxton relocated to New York with his girlfriend, soon to be wife and collaborator Nickie Braxton, and embarked on “a whole new life.” The first two Arista albums, New York Fall 1974 and Five Pieces (1975), gave him his greatest visibility to date in the US, and they remain excellent introductions to his music, if you can find them. The 1974 album includes a piece featuring Braxton in a saxophone quartet with Julius Hemphill, Oliver Lake, and Hamiet Bluiett. The latter three, with David Murray, went on to form the World Saxophone Quartet. The range of Braxton’s Arista output from 1974 to 1979, the bulk of which remains scandalously out of print, includes concerts with the quartet in Europe, an album of Creative Orchestra Music, duets with Abrams, another double album of solo alto saxophone music, a triple-lp set of music for four orchestras, a album-side long composition performed by two different trios, and notated music for two pianos played by Ursula Oppens and Fredric Rzewski. Also in that period were documented appearances with bands led by pianist Dave Brubeck, multi-instrumentalist Gunter Hampel, and trumpeter Woody Shaw, as a member of Derek Bailey’s improvising Company, in duet with Teitelbaum, trombonist George Lewis, reedman Roscoe Mitchell, drummer Max Roach and pianist Ran Blake, as a member of the Globe Unity Orchestra, and more. It’s no surprise that no one was really sure what slot Braxton’s music filled when he clearly rejected even the premise of slots in the first place.
After the Arista period, Braxton continued to record for a wide array of independent labels. With a growing family to support, Braxton managed to hold on until a professorship at Oakland’s Mills College came his way in 1985. It gave him, he said to Lock, “the possibility to have a profession that I can make a living at.” In the early 1990's, Braxton moved to Wesleyan.
The security of his teaching work, along with the large cash award that comes with a MacArthur, have enabled him to document much of his musical output. A cursory overview begins with solo work and a series of quartets and small groups, including his long-running group with pianist Marilyn Crispell, bassist Mark Dresser, and percussionist Gerry Hemingway. There are the special projects devoted to the musics of Charlie Parker, Lennie Tristano, Andrew Hill and Thelonious Monk. There have also been a number of “standards” releases, including a quartet featuring pianist Hank Jones, a series of live albums with Braxton at the piano, and two boxed sets taken from European concerts with a quartet of guitarist Kevin O’Neal, bassist Andy Eulau, and percussionist Kevin Norton. A seemingly endless series of duets with instrumentalists in Europe and the US includes pairings with Crispell, percussionist Gino Robair, electronic musician David Rosenboom, saxophonists Andrew Voigt and Evan Parker, bassists Peter Niklas Wilson, Mario Pavone, and Joe Fonda, pianist Georg Grawe, and many more. Among his many collaborations are works with the Rova Saxophone Quartet and the London Jazz Composers’ Orchestra. And there were always one-time combinations on stage and on record with everyone from Borah Bergman and Peter Brötzmann to Lauren Newton and the rock band Wolf Eyes. Not to mention his opera, Trillium R, and ongoing interests in costume, structured environments, puppet theater, and electronic manipulation (his Diamond Curtain Wall Music). Braxton has elaborated on his work in 3 volumes of Tri-Axium Writings (1985) and Composition Notes A-E (1988). In the 1990's, Braxton started his own label, Braxton House, to further document his music.
With many of his students active in improvised music scenes around the country, Braxton has established both a pool of players for his music as well as an influence that belies his low profile in mainstream media. In the 21st century, the ongoing documentation of new material, including the massive boxed set 9 Compositions (Iridium) 2006 (Firehouse 12) and releases on Leo and Victo, and archival material on Leo, continues unabated. As Braxton told Graham Lock in 1985, “I’d like to have 5,000 records, like Duke Ellington!” He added, ruefully, that if he did make that many, “there’s a chance two or three of ‘em will still be available after six months.”