Anthony Braxton: Not A Jazz Musician?

In other Braxton news, he is sounding more like Sun Ra every day.

He’s an improvising saxophonist and a meticulous long–form composer. A 1994 MacArthur Fellow. A product of late ’60s Chicago and a major figure in the black experimental milieu of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians AACM . He’s equally in awe of Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers and the postwar classical avant–garde. His prose, collected in the Tri–Axium Writings and Composition Notes, is voluminous. He’s created pieces not just for orchestra, but four orchestras much like his role model Stockhausen . He’s perpetually at work on an ”opera complex” called Trillium R. He has conceived of music to be performed simultaneously in different cities, on different planets and in different galaxies.