Anthony Braxton 80th Birthday Release!

Four complete concerts from 1985

The Anthony Braxton Quartet at Stonehenge: L-R Anthony Braxton, Mark Dresser, Marilyn Crispell, Gerry Hemingway

We’ve got a major announcement this week:

“THIS MUSIC IS REALLY SOMETHING! The music is equal to the best of the quartet — maybe it’s even better than that.” — Anthony Braxton, November 2024

The Anthony Braxton Quartet’s legendary fall 1985 tour of England will be revisited on June 4, the composer’s 80th birthday, with the release of the digital box set Quartet (England) 1985.

The quartet, which comprised Braxton on reeds, Marilyn Crispell on piano, Mark Dresser on double bass, and Gerry Hemingway on percussion, was one of Braxton’s most active bands in the mid to late ’80s, but they did not record a studio album until 1991. While the 1985 tour has previously been documented in Graham Lock’s book Forces In Motion: Anthony Braxton and the Meta-Reality of Creative Music and concerts in London, Birmingham and Coventry are available from Leo Records, Burning Ambulance Music is proud to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the tour with this set of previously unreleased recordings.

Quartet (England) 1985 — the equivalent of a nine-CD box — will present for the first time ever four concerts, held in Sheffield, Leicester, Bristol and Southampton on November 19, 20, 21 and 22. The original mono cassette recordings, captured by Lock as references for his book, have been painstakingly restored by engineer (and Sun Ra discographer) Chris Trent. In the liner notes, Lock writes that the recordings “have been restored close to their original pulsating life, full of the fire and tenderness and magic that I remember from 1985.”

Each concert, consisting of two sets running between 36 and 47 minutes each, will be available separately as Quartet (Sheffield) 1985, Quartet (Leicester) 1985, Quartet (Bristol) 1985, and Quartet (Southampton) 1985. The complete Quartet (England) 1985 package will include all four shows, plus bonus recordings of the quartet playing John Coltrane’s “After the Rain,” Miles Davis’s “Four,” and the standards “All the Things You Are” and “On Green Dolphin Street” at soundchecks.

Quartet (England) 1985 and the individual concert recordings will also include a digital booklet with new liner notes by Lock and photos — including many previously unpublished images — by Nick White, and cover art by Burning Ambulance Music co-founder I.A. Freeman.

The individual concerts and the full set are all available for pre-order now. I’m not bullshitting when I tell you this is some of the most live-wire Braxton music you’ll ever hear. This group was on fire.

If you’re a free subscriber, that’s it for this week. Next Tuesday’s newsletter will also be for paying subscribers only — it’s the full text of my recent interview with guitarist Nels Cline. But we’ll be back on May 6 with some thoughts on the work of guitarist Robin Trower. If you’re a paying subscriber, though, stick around for a fascinating piece of literary criticism/literary scholarship, a really good short story, and a review of a great new death metal album that also takes a deep look into how we process art. Thanks as always for reading.