Musicians - Anthony Braxton

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	Musicians - Anthony Braxton

Anthony Braxton (born June 4, 1945) is an American composer, multi-reedist and pianist.

He has created a large body of highly complex work. Much of Braxton's music is jazz oriented, but he has also been active in free improvisation and orchestral music, and has written operas. Among the vast array of instruments he utilizes are the flute, the sopranino, soprano, F alto, E-flat alto, baritone, bass, and contrabass saxophones; and the E-flat, B-flat, and contrabass clarinets.

One critic has written that "Although Braxton exhibited a genuine — if highly idiosyncratic — ability to play older forms (influenced especially by saxophonists Warne Marsh, John Coltrane, Paul Desmond, and Eric Dolphy), he was never really accepted by the jazz establishment, due to his manifest infatuation with the practices of such non-jazz artists as John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen . Many of the mainstream's most popular musicians (Wynton Marsalis among them) insisted that Braxton's music was not jazz at all. Whatever one calls it, however, there is no questioning the originality of his vision; Anthony Braxton created music of enormous sophistication and passion that was unlike anything else that had come before it."

Braxton's music is highly theoretical and mystically influenced, and he is the author of multiple volumes explaining his theories and pieces - such as the philosophical three-volume Triaxium Writings and the five-volume Composition Notes, both published by Frog Peak Music.

Braxton is notorious for naming his pieces as diagrams--often with no textual or numeric titles. Some of these diagrams indicate positions of the performers in the piece, a variation on aleatory music that presaged his follower John Zorn
's "game pieces."

In 1994 he was granted a MacArthur Fellowship.

Beyond his musical career, Braxton is an avid chess player and has played at a professional level.
Biography
Early in his career, Braxton led a trio with violinist Leroy Jenkins
and trumpeter Leo Smith and was involved with the AACM, The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, founded in Chicago, Braxton's birthplace.

In 1968 Braxton recorded For Alto. There had been occasional unaccompanied saxophone recordings previously (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 acclaimed solo albums.

Braxton joined pianist's Chick Corea
's existing trio with Dave Holland
(double bass) and Barry Altschul
(drums) to form the short-lived avant garde quartet "Circle". When Corea broke up the group, forming Return to Forever to pursue a fusion based style of composition and recording, Holland and Altschul remained with Braxton for much of the 1970s as part of a quartet, with the rotating brass chair variously filled by trumpeter Kenny Wheeler, or trombonists George Lewis
or Ray Anderson
.

Braxton's regular group in the 1980s and early 1990s was a quartet with Marilyn Crispell
(piano), Mark Dresser
(double bass) and Gerry Hemingway
on drums was called "his finest and longest standing band".
[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Anthony Braxton ]

Some related entries: Paul Sarebresole | Arthur Franz | Francesco Molino | John Du Prez | John Ferguson | Robert Farnon | Andreas Tilliander | Robert Taylor | Suna Kan | Jaime Nunó | Steve Gadd
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Musicians - Anthony Braxton

Biography

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