Anthony Braxton
And the headwaters of new Jazz sounds....
Blake said: “The Imagination is not a State: it is the Human Existence itself.”
There are many springs that feed into Lake Itasca, the headwaters of the Mississippi River in Northern Minnesota. They each come from their own unique sources, not knowing of each other’s existence. Making the same journey, they all persistently meander along, seeking their home in that Big River. Like these springs, in the early 1960s, new jazz music was flowing independently from segregated black communities, who formed organizations or multidisciplinary arts collectives in Chicago, St. Louis and LA. Anthony Braxton was one of the pioneers of this new jazz music and perhaps one of the most brilliant and original composer-instrumentalists of our time.
Here’s a great Braxton interpretation of a Thelonious Monk tune:
By the time I met Anthony Braxton, he was already a legend, in my mind anyway. I had been going to shows at Koncepts Cultural Gallery in Oakland for quite some time. I remember this as a special place during a special time.
The spirit of that community was wonderful. The coming together of people of different ethnic backgrounds for music and art was something that I had never before experienced. And on a Spring evening in 1990, something very special happened.
On Saturday, April 14, 1990, I went to see the Steve Lacy Sextet at Koncepts Cultural Gallery. At the first break, I went outside to get some fresh air. As I stood out on the patio, completely alone, I noticed a man coming out of the club. I recognized Anthony Braxton immediately. In those days, he was teaching at Mills College in Berkeley. It was a moment of truth! Do I dare go up to him and start an awkward conversation?? I thought, it is not often that you have the opportunity to meet one of your heroes. So I approached him and just started talking to him. I have no idea what I said or what we discussed. All I remember is that he was a perfect gentleman and so incredibly humbled that I acknowledged him and actually knew something about his music. It was 10 minutes of the happiest moments of my life. The completely random one-on-one meeting with someone you have been reading about in The Wire and Graham Locke’s Forces in Motion and whose music you have been listening to for years. It really doesn’t get any better than that.
I like this picture of Anthony Braxton - the chess player, smoking his pipe. Click on this short interview to get an idea of Anthony Braxton, the person:
I think perhaps that he also liked chess because it was a world of specific rules that could be learned and mastered. The game was completely indiscriminate, and I suspect he could not understand why the rules of life were not so.
It was this meeting with Anthony Braxton that launched my voyage of discovery into the deeper waters of that Big River called jazz.
Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians
In LA in 1961, Horace Tapscott founded the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra (PAPA), which from its beginning has been dedicated to community, social consciousness, arts and Afrikan culture. In St. Louis in 1968, Oliver Lake, Lester Bowie, and Floyd LeFlore founded the Black Artists Group (BAG), a multidisciplinary arts collective dedicated to the convergence of free jazz and experimental theater. However, the most influential of these collectives was the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) founded in Chicago in 1965 by Muhal Richard Abrams, Jodie Christian, Phil Cohran, and Steve McCall. These collectives were creating new, organic directions for jazz. It’s important to note that this was pre-internet days. News did not travel quickly. This allowed for each community to develop their own unique style and sound experience (We’ll explore some of these community collectives in more detail a little later in our journey - starting next week with the AACM). The Midwest musical collectives, more than 1000 miles from New York, were really the true breeding ground for the next step in jazz, after the high-energy passions of the first wave of avant-garde started to run out of fresh ideas.
Anthony Braxton was born in Chicago in 1945. As a young man, his fondness for philosophy, mathematics and chess, plus a love of music that encompassed Fifties’ Doo-wop, Paul Desmond and John Coltrane, made him something of a misfit. But when his old college friend Roscoe Mitchell introduced him to the newly formed AACM in 1966, Braxton found the community of like spirits he was looking for.
Here is a short, low-fi, but very effective interview where Anthony Braxton looks back on his journey:
His debut LP, Three Compositions of New Jazz, featuring AACM colleagues LeRoy Jenkins, Leo Smith and Muhal Richard Abrams, bears many of the hallmarks of that new Chicago music: the use of voice, “little instruments”, and the kaleidoscope feel of sounds floating in space.
“I thought Three Compositions of New jazz would top the charts and sell a million copies! I thought kids would dance in the streets to it.”
Anthony Braxton
For its time, Anthony Braxton’s debut LP Three Compositions of New Jazz is an incredibly innovative album, a masterpiece of western music's deconstruction. On the liner notes, Anthony Braxton is quoted, “ We’re on the eve of the complete fall of Western ideas and life-values.” While I love his optimism, I think this quote really does capture the Peter Pan spirit of the times. Perhaps the baby boomers took the promise of the zeitgeist a little too seriously, riding the music like some wild, bucking bronco. However, that doesn’t diminish the music and innovation in and of itself. He goes on to say, “We’re in the process of developing more meaningful values, and our music is a direct extension of this. We place more emphasis on the meaningful areas of music, and less on artifacts – meaning today’s academic over-emphasis on harmonic structure, chord progressions, facility, mathematics, the empirical aspects of Art. Our emphasis is on the idea of total music, with each individual contributing toward it totally.” Now that is something I can hang my hat on. Braxton continues, “We’re dealing with textures, now – individual worlds of textures. We’re working toward a feeling of one – the complete freedom of individuals in tune with each other, complementing each other. This is going to be the next phase of jazz.”
Braxton’s Conceptual Grafting - What?
Here’s a great video tribute to Anthony Braxton at the 2014 National Endowment of the Arts Jazz Masters Ceremony. Fantastic - stick with it, you’ll be treated to a wonderful duet to close it out that you won’t want to miss:
From here, we can just start to understand this profound, complex artist and how he abandoned University music teaching to explore his own musical frontiers.
“Music teaching should emphasize the love the musicians should have for their art – but I was getting only empirical aspects. They ignore non-Western music entirely!”
“In the middle sixties", Anthony Braxton recalls, “the challenge for me was to participate in the extended improvisation that was taking place, as related to the exploration of Coltrane and Taylor, and integrate that into the structural dynamics that were exciting me from the post-Webern continuum, especially the work of Stockhausen and John Cage. Those were the factors that established my whole involvement in music.”
From this, Braxton developed his own system of “conceptual grafting” as a method to build music from particular parts, like painting a picture. Conceptual grafting also began as an alternative to serialism, which had attracted him. Braxton goes on, “Rather I found myself moving, or vibrating, towards the world of color and shape. At the time I didn’t understand it all myself; it was, like, how to create a language that respected the musics that were ‘calling’? I began to break down phrase construction variables with regard to material properties, functional properties, language properties, and use that as a basis to create improvised music.” This is an example of how Braxton represents his Composition N. 96.
It sounds like this (it’s a 50 minute composition, but you’ll get the idea):
While I do like this, I find the music where Braxton integrates traditional models more appealing for general listening. Like this duet with Muhal Richard Abrams:
For all the little “mistakes”, I like this duet version of Lennie Tristano’s Dreams:
This was the first and only take. It was also the recording debut of piano player, Dred Scott. After it was finished, Dred Scott, knowing of the mistakes he had made and wanting to do it over again, asked for another take. Anthony just looked at him and said, “Why would we do that? We just played it?” There is something to be said about that - living life on the first take and enjoying all that goes with it, the good and the bad.
Next week, we’ll journey a little further down that Big River called Jazz and follow it into the Chicago River and out along Lake Michigan to the South Side of Chicago, where the AACM was founded.
If you like what you’ve been reading and hearing so far on our journey, please share my newsletter with others - just hit the “Share” button at the bottom of the page.
Also, find my playlist on Spotify: From Fred Astaire to Sun Ra.
Feel free to contact me at any time to talk shop. I welcome and encourage that….
Until then, keep on walking….
Interesting quote re imagination!