# Experiment without inhibition: A celebration of Anthony Braxton: Photos, Albums, Videos

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2020/06/21/experiment-without-inhibition-a-celebration-of-anthony-braxton-photos-albums-videos/
- Published: 2020-06-21T23:36:16+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**On June 4, the iconoclastic composer, esteemed academic/pedagogical luminary, 
and free-jazz firebrand Anthony Braxton turned 75 years old. To trace the course
of Braxton’s career, from its beginnings in the late-1960s with groundbreaking works
such as _3 Compositions of New Jazz__ _and the double-LP solo sax masterpiece _For
Alto__,__ _across over 100 recordings of his live horn/woodwind performances, small
group jazz-orbiting sessions, and exhibitions of his compositions for all manner
of large ensembles, is to witness far-flung threads of the 20th century avant-garde
tradition improbably lace together into one fully synthesized _oeuvre_ with virtually
no touchstones for comparison. Braxton’s work long ago shattered the divide between
the gritty, atonal language of improvised free jazz performance and the typically
cloistered world of academic classical and minimalist composition, and he continues
to expand in unexpected directions with new works that emerge to this day.**

Braxton singlehandedly pioneered the idiom of solo saxophone performance, proving
that one person could transfix listeners in the context of an unaccompanied performance
of one horn and one microphone. His branchings into orchestral compositions and 
pieces for atypical ensembles (e.g., 100 tubas, electronic-processed choir) draw
a through-line from the foundation of Stravinsky, Stockhausen, and Varèse to the
catalogs of Ornette Coleman and Pharaoh Sanders to the drone-focused works of minimalist
composers Morton Feldman and Phill Niblock. One would be hard-pressed to find another
artist who has been commissioned by modernist classical organizations around the
world to compose full-length operas and works for orchestra, and who has also performed
live in concert with American noise icons Wolf Eyes (at a festival in Victoriaville,
Quebec that was captured on an album titled _Black Vomit_). Needless to say, Braxton’s
vision knows no boundaries of genre and actively defies convention at every turn,
all while he sketches out new trajectories for those who follow in his wake to experiment
without inhibition.

On the occasion of his 75th birthday, the organization The Tri-Centric Foundation,
which is dedicated to the preservation, cataloging, and continued performance of
his music, uploaded a treasure trove of Anthony Braxton’s recordings onto Bandcamp–
under the heading “New Braxton House.” Meant to centralize his work into one location
where curious listeners can sink in, the (incomplete) catalog here encompasses 62
releases from all eras of his career and all manner of ensembles for which he has
composed. To excise any limited selection of releases from this canon would be to
highlight only a tiny fraction of the diverse work that he has put into this world,
but that will not stop me from doing so.

![Anthony Braxton circa 1979](https://i0.wp.com/www.rcreader.com/sites/default/files/
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Anthony Braxton circa 1979

**_1) Solo (Kent) 1979_**

Among the chronologically earliest releases in the New Braxton House catalog on 
Bandcamp, _Solo (Kent) 1979__ _captures a live performance at Kent University with
Braxton on solo alto saxophone – channeling the same recording practice that led
to his groundbreaking 1969 album _For Alto__. _Braxton’s solo horn performances 
contain the seed from which his entire recorded catalog springs, as they define 
his approach to (a)tonality and improvisation, his acute sense of musical structuring
and narrative flow, and his ever-present exploration of the transportive effects
of controlled chaos. “Composition No. 77 A,” which kicks off this set, could serve
as a manifesto for the solo-horn sector of his catalog. Showcasing his virtuosic
control of breath and his lightning fingering, Braxton winds his way through a torrent
of juxtaposed sax phrases that range from pure noise skronk, to moments of legible
harmony, to textural techniques designed to push the saxophone to its physical brink.
The tones he produces in solo performance can rise to the absolute top of the instrument’s
range, emerging in piercing whistle tones like a bird gasping for air, or pour out
in a cascade of gnarled, chromatic phrases a few steps removed from John Coltrane’s“
sheets of sound” performance style. The close mic-ed performance here captures Braxton’s
every breath, every press upon the sax’s key buttons, and every gasp from the crowd.
The next piece, “What’s New,” finds Braxton pushing the sheer output of notes emitted
past the limits of sanity, while threading moments of lyricism and major-key melody
into the din – a move that evokes the work of free jazz icons such as Albert Ayler,
for whom the fanfares of the marching band and the military horn ensemble were always
laced into the context of uninhibited, atonal sax improvisation.

**_2) __Trio (Wesleyan) 2005_**

Recorded at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, Braxton’s long-time 
home base and the institution where he taught music composition and music history
for more than 20 years, _Trio (Wesleyan) 2005__ _showcases a trio performance of
Braxton, omnivorous brass player Taylor Ho Bynum, and guitarist Tom Crean. The album
exemplifies a subsection of Braxton’s output that he named Diamond Curtain Wall 
Music, which combines the raw output of an ensemble of players improvising in the
uninhibited free-jazz idiom with an interactive backdrop of electronics that respond
to their playing in real time. The data- and code-based computer music program SuperCollider
provides the electronic accompaniment here, producing synthetic tones and patches
of disfigured electronic noise that emerge from the system and swell along with 
whatever the musicians pour out of their instruments. In typical Braxton fashion,
the tonal palette on display here is continually alien and baffling, while maintaining
some semblance of what could be considered a “traditional” jazz ensemble. The various
brass instruments that Braxton and Bynum weaponize in this session sound like wailing
sirens, grunting animals, and melting trumpet calls that ring out like “Taps” played
to wake a platoon of demons at sunrise. Crean provides a perfect counterpoint to
the brass chaos with his electric- and acoustic-guitar improv, which ranges from
stuttering finger-picked atonality, to warp-speed electric guitar shred, to the 
sound of fingers scraping against the fretboard. All the while, Braxton’s SuperCollider
system forms the fourth member of the ensemble, blasting out walls of electronic
noise into the open air, or dipping down into barely-there textures that sound like
whispered field recordings in moments of near silence.

**_3) __Octet (New York) 1995_**

An example of the style of composition and performance that Braxton titled Ghost
Trance, _Octet (New York) 1995__ _showcases an unbroken composition that stretches
to almost an hour in length. The eight-person ensemble includes a horn section (
featuring Braxton himself), vibraphone and percussion, upright bass, accordion, 
violin, and more, with many performers actively switching between instruments on
the fly when the need arises. Braxton’s Ghost Trance idiom essentially boils down
to the playing of a winding, staccato melody that the ensemble keeps going at various
tempos and levels of intensity for the whole duration of the piece. At times, this
centerpiece melody can sound like a Stravinsky-esque modernist ensemble blurting
out an atonal stream of notes, like a symphony orchestra unplugged from conventions
of harmony and allowed to simply wail – but always tethered closely together in 
terms of synchronized rhythms and tempos. While the bulk of the ensemble keeps this
melody pumping out, Braxton encourages soloists from the group to leap into action
at moments, tempering that winding, central melody with bursts of fiery sax screaming,
spiraling accordion phrases, or clattering instances of chimed vibraphone. Braxton
described this structure as a unified center with a series of “exits,” both notated
and un-notated, that performers could leap into to break from the main theme. In
the constant war of attrition between conventional rhythm and unhinged madness, 
someone in the ensemble is always sticking to the central melody at any given moment,
as if to remind us of the piece’s roots in the modernist European classical tradition.
But Braxton ensures that the piece nods to that tradition simply as a point to start
at and then to continually pervert and shatter. Shards of free jazz and pure atonality
leap from the ensemble as they streak down the highway, looking back at the European
canon receding behind them in the rear-view mirror.

![Anthony Braxton circa 2011](https://i0.wp.com/www.rcreader.com/sites/default/files/
styles/inside/public/field/image/2020-06/anthonybraxton2011.jpg?resize=519%2C344&
ssl=1)

Anthony Braxton circa 2011

**_4) __Syntactical GTM Choir (NYC) 2011_**

Another recording under the umbrella of Braxton’s Ghost Trance works, this release
showcases a live performance of 13 vocalists at the venerable New York City avant-
garde venue Roulette in 2011. If you’re wandering into Braxton’s catalog for the
first time, his unbelievable command of the language of choral music might come 
as a surprise. How can this one man have pioneered solo saxophone performance, compose
works for orchestra, play in gnarly small jazz ensembles, _and_ compose punishingly
complex works for the human voice? By now, you should understand that Braxton can
do anything. The Syntactical Ghost Trance Music Choir works their way through Braxton’s
hyper-dense libretto here, latching into phrases that sound like the human voice
box melting down the scale or leaping up into harsh climaxes of headache-inducing
brutality. Discrete words emerge from the mire of voices, often in the form of numbers
and mathematical figures (“twenty-six plus thirty-four”), further exemplifying Braxton’s
long-standing incorporation of elements from math and other formal, quantitative
realms of study into the context of free-wheeling modern composition. The choir 
bops their way through wordless synchronized melodies that sound like jazz vocal
scatting at its most deconstructed, or launches together into full-throated screams.
Certain vocalists take center stage as soloists whose mutant melodies channel the
fury of Braxton’s sax performance, but all pumped from a larynx instead of the bell
of a horn. The sheer range of extended vocal techniques on display here, from amplified
vocal fry and whispering to operatic falsetto peaks, defies all reason.

**_5) __Composition No. 19 (For 100 Tubas)_**

Yes, that’s right: one hundred tubas. Braxton wrote this piece in the early 1970s,
and the performance documented here took place at the World Financial Center in 
New York City’s Battery City Park in 2006. Divided into four groups of 25 tubaists
that are each overseen by a conductor (including Braxton himself and longtime collaborator
Taylor Ho Bynum), the ensemble here must have taken up a fair bit of space in the
physical world, to say the least. On the more minimal side of the full spectrum 
of Braxton’s catalog, _Composition No. 19__ _rumbles across swathes of unbroken 
low end as it slowly burns its way through a score focused on overlapping swells
and rubato mid-range phrases. The piece’s drama stems from the tension between the
formless mass of bass tuba drone and the moments in which small groups of tubas 
lock together into quasi-melodies, which often hit like peaks of sudden occult energy
that you might find in the score to a horror movie. The two halves of the composition
both stretch past the 20-minute mark, and though they occasionally settle into periods
of near stasis, Braxton keeps the narrative continually moving forward. The first
piece culminates in a climax of interlaced tuba blasts that possesses a level of
firepower that could only be realized with, well… . _S__o. Many. Tubas.__ _The second
half of the piece, in typical Braxton fashion, maintains a bedrock of droning tuba
output but allows certain players to stretch out and “exit” that framework as they
start spiraling off into torrents of free-jazz anti-melody. At other moments, Braxton
switches up the textural palette on display, encouraging certain tubaists to manically
blow air into their instruments or scrape their fingers across the buttons, which
introduces sinister wind-like and percussive elements into the already pitch-black
haze. The last four minutes or so of the piece have to be heard to be believed, 
as those aforementioned peals of what seemed to be improvised tuba skronk prove 
to be tightly notated, to the point that many tubas at once lock in to pump out 
the same atonal phrases together.

**_6) __Duo (Improv) 2017__ – _Anthony Braxton and Eugene Chadbourne**

A meeting of two iconoclasts and friends for many decades, this album finds Braxton
linking up with legendary genre-obliterating guitarist and string player Eugene 
Chadbourne for roughly _eight hours_ of duo improvisation, with Braxton on sax and
Chadbourne on various guitars and banjos. Operating somewhere in the wide territory
of Appalachian folk guitar, American Primitive performance (_à__ la_ John Fahey),
and mutated, “rock”-adjacent free improv, Chadbourne was, according to legend, persuaded
by Braxton to seriously pursue music when he was on the cusp of switching his main
focus from music to journalism in the 1970s. The telepathic interplay between Braxton
and Chadbourne in these sessions is nothing short of spellbinding, illustrating 
the depths to which both artists have explored in the style of free improv, and 
the language they so easily latch into when put in the same room together. Though
there are plenty of moments in which the two of them roar into full assault mode,
deluging us with continual streams of notes meant to overwhelm our senses, the most
common baseline they occupy here is one of open space and careful listening to each
other. Braxton deftly switches between barked, guttural phrases on the low end of
the sax’s range to his typically raucous, squealed upper register. Chadbourne demonstrates
his comfort on the guitar in virtually any tonality or rhythmic framework as he 
shifts between steadily chugging, finger-picked phrases that sound like corrupted
back-porch folk music, to squalls of fast fretwork that fall off the deep end into
sheer mania. Chadbourne essentially plays the wild-card here as he switches from
instrument to instrument, cycling from the acoustic twang of the banjo to the long,
throbbing sustain of the baritone electric guitar, to the textural scrape of the
prepared guitar with its frets loaded with bits of metal and wood. This opens up
a fascinating context in which Braxton plays the role of the straighter, more regimented
player in the duo, “limited” to the vocabulary of solo sax performance – though 
of course, in Braxton’s hands, the solo saxophone contains an entire universe.

![](https://i0.wp.com/www.rcreader.com/sites/default/files/styles/inside/public/
field/image/2020-06/anthonybraxton3.jpg?w=640&ssl=1)

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