Welcome to AMN Celebrates Braxton 75, a multipart series focused on the work of American composer and multi-instrumentalist Anthony Braxton. Braxton, who in 2020 will be celebrating his seventy-fifth birthday, is one of the most important and influential creative minds of the past fifty years. Each week this series will feature three to four links of live performances, interviews, and articles found on the web that should be of interest to both the curious and the longtime explorers of Braxton’s music.
In the last fifty years or so Anthony Braxton has composed hundreds of pieces and recorded well over one hundred albums. Navigating this vast amount of material can be a little bit intimidating. Seth Colter Walls’s article “Anthony Braxton: Ghost Trance Music” is a great place for all to start. This article is an excellent guide that provides a nice overview of Braxton’s work with clear high-level explanations of some of Braxton’s most prominent musical concepts and structures. It also includes links to suggested listening examples.
Among Braxton’s many innovations is his extensive work for solo saxophone such as his landmark 1969 LP “For Alto”. Here is a short but excellent example of Braxton’s solo saxophone music. The clip is from Hamburg in 1981.
This thirty-minute clip features a 1973 performance from one of Braxton’s many quartets. This may be the first live performances of his compositions 23B and 23D. The quartet is Kenny Wheeler – trumpet and flugelhorn, Jean-François Jenny-Clark on Bass, Charles “Bobo” Shaw on drums and of course Anthony Braxton – flute, contrabass clarinet, and alto saxophone.
Join us again next week for another post as AMN Celebrates Braxton 75.
Chris De Chiara
Avant Music News 