Mentoring women musicians as well as men distinguishes Anthony Braxton among avant-garde composer-performers. That’s not the only unusual aspect of the career of Braxton, a 66-year-old composer, improviser, philosopher, educator and multi-instrumentalist who just celebrated a four-night festival overview of his work at Roulette music and dance space, new to Brooklyn. But it’s a significant one. He discusses such mentoring in a new eyeJAZZ video I’ve posted at Youtube.
Braxton says he’s not to a jazz musician nor a classical one, but rather a “creative musician” who has spent his life in uncategorizable spaces. You can hear what you think — there is a free sampler of his music at his website. But the breadth of programming at Roulette — which included debuts for small ensembles, solo piano, an orchestra, 12 vocalists performing two acts from his new opera Trillium J, works with movement and electronics — certainly bears this out.
Having emerged as an iconoclastic and virtuosic multi-reeds player from Chicago’s AACM — Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians — more than four decades ago (check out his 1968 albums Three Compositions of the New Jazz and 73-minutes of solo sax dedications, For Alto) Braxton has earned an international following by creating an unmistakable personal approach to sound and culture. He has collaborated with an extraordinary array of other major talents (Chick Corea, Dave Holland, Sam Rivers, Kenny Wheeler, Tete Montoliu, Gunter Hampel, Jeanne Lee, Archie Shepp, Derek Bailey, Andrew Cyrille, Max Roach, Dave Brubeck, Lee Konitz, Pat Metheny, Richard Teitelbaum, Fredrick Rzewski, Ursula Oppens, Julius Hemphill, Oliver Lake, Marianne Schroeder, Gerry Hemingway, Mark Dresser, Mark Helias, Ray Anderson, Woody Shaw, Marilyn Crispell, Fred Frith, Tyshawn Rosey, Kyle Brenders, John Lindberg, Garrett List, Hank Jones, Larry Polansky, David Rosenboom, ROVA Saxophone Quartet, Giorgio Gasilini, Misha Mengelberg, Han Bennink, Ran Blake, Marion Brown, Lauren Newton, Steve Lacy, Evan Parker, Nicole Mitchell, Mary Halvorson and Taylor Ho Bynum, besides his AACM compadres Muhal Richard Abrams, Wadada Leo Smith, Joseph Jarman, Douglas Ewart, Henry Threadgill, Steve McCall, Roscoe Mitchell, Thurman Barker, Malachi Favors, George E. Lewis, Leroy Jenkins — and I’ve barely scratched the surface). He has recorded prolifically and challenged diversely constituted ensembles to expand on arts across boundaries, systematically and with reference to everything from Sousa to Paul Desmond and Frank Sinatra to Dinah Washington, including the world’s ritual music and concepts of post-tonal Western classicism. Indeed, he rules out nothing as an area of potential interest, being as fascinated by absurdist science fiction as Wagner, Berg, Stockhausen and Xenakis.
Such breadth of investigation, experimentation and ambitious accomplishment is characteristic of the AACM school – now comprising multiple generations of brilliant individualists who have developed musical ideas each of their own, aware of, related to but not beholden by the others, typically in departure from preconceived conventions, assumptions and limitations. That’s the way Braxton continues to evolve, even after 27 years in academia (22 as a professor at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, and five before that at Mills College, Oakland). See his mission statement!
Braxton has been awarded Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships along with other honors, but he’s also suffered slings and arrows of odd criticism — that his work is overly conceptual and intellectual, “not black enough,” that he’s goofy (Why was a drug pusher given his name in an episode of The Bill Cosby Show?). His music is unusual, oh yes, and so it’s often puzzling, challenging — but well worth delving into. An American original who believes “there’s never been another country like the United States of America . . . We should be proud of our country” and hopes that after our current phase of turbulence the U.S. will “unleash it’s creativity as it did in other turbulent eras, like the ’30s and the ’60s,” he’s also a patriot. Thanks to Roulette for providing a beautiful restored theater to hear some of the deepest and most surprising music of the year to date. More Braxton, more!
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