Anthony Braxton (born June 4, 1945) is an American composer, saxophonist, clarinetist, flautist, pianist, and philosopher. Braxton has released well over 100 albums since the 1960s. Among the array of instruments he plays are the flute; the sopranino, soprano, C-melody, F mezzo-soprano, E-flat alto, baritone, bass, and contrabass saxophones; and the E-flat, B-flat, and contrabass clarinets.
Braxton studied philosophy at Roosevelt University. He has taught at Mills College and beginning in the 1990s is Professor of Music at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, teaching music composition, music history, and improvisation. In 1994, he was granted a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant.”
Early in his career, Braxton led a trio with violinist Leroy Jenkins and trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith and was involved with The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the “AACM”, founded in Chicago, Braxton’s birthplace.
Lush Life
In 1968, Braxton recorded the double LP For Alto. There had previously been occasional unaccompanied saxophone recordings (notably Coleman Hawkins’ “Picasso”), but For Alto was the first full-length album for unaccompanied saxophone. The album’s songs were dedicated to Cecil Taylor and John Cage, among others. The album influenced other artists like Steve Lacy (soprano sax) and George Lewis (trombone), who would go on to record their own solo albums.
Braxton joined pianist Chick Corea’s existing trio with Dave Holland (double bass) and Barry Altschul (drums) to form the short-lived avant garde quartet Circle, around 1970. In the late 1970s, he recorded two large ensemble recordings, Creative Orchestra Music 1976, inspired by American jazz and marching band traditions, and For Four Orchestras. Both of these records were released on Arista.
In 1994, he was granted a MacArthur Fellowship. From 1995 to 2006, Braxton’s output as a composer concentrated almost exclusively on what he callsGhost Trance Music, which introduces a steady pulse to his music and also allows the simultaneous performance of any piece by the performers. Many of the earliest Ghost Trance recordings were released on his own Braxton House label.
In addition, during the 1990s and early 2000s, Braxton created a prodigiously large body of jazz standard recordings, often featuring him as a pianist rather than saxophonist. He had frequently performed such material in the 1970s and 1980s, but only recorded it occasionally. Now he began to release multidisc sets of such material, climaxing in two quadruple-CD sets for Leo Records recorded on tour in 2003.
Beyond his musical career, Braxton is an avid chess player; for a time in the early 1970s he was a professional chess hustler, playing in New York in Washington Square Park.
Braxton is notorious for naming his pieces as diagrams, typically labeled with cryptic numbers and letters. Sometimes these diagrams have an obvious relation to the music — for instance, on the album For Trio the diagram-title indicates the physical positions of the performers, but in many cases the diagram-titles remain inscrutable. The titles can themselves be musical notation indicating to the performer how a piece is played. Sometimes the letters are identifiable as the initials of Braxton’s friends and musical colleagues.
In the twenty-first century, he still actively performs with ensembles of varying sizes, and has to date written well over 350 compositions. He has just recently finished the last batch of Ghost Trance Music compositions, and has now shown his interest in three other music systems: The Diamond Curtain Wall Trio, in which Braxton implements the aid of the computer audio programming language SuperCollider; Falling River Musics; and, most recently, Echo Echo Mirror House music.