Anthony Braxton, Graham Lock & Me

One of America's greatest composers turns 80

Anthony Braxton (photo: Carolyn Wachnicki)

The first Anthony Braxton album I remember hearing was Four Compositions (GTM) 2000, released on Delmark Records in 2003. I reviewed it for Jazziz. I had absolutely no frame of reference for it, either within the broader context of his catalog or within jazz in general. I liked it, though, and when I revisited it recently I found it pretty compelling. Around the same time I heard Quintet (Basel) 1977, a live recording released in 2001, and that I absolutely loved. I mostly knew Braxton by reputation still, as someone who made extremely advanced “weird” jazz that didn’t really swing, but wasn’t free, either. Well, Quintet (Basel) 1977 was — is — a nonstop flow of energy, extremely creative but also swinging hard as hell, and the compositions were absolutely recognizable as such. It made perfect sense to me as jazz.

A few years later, Mosaic Records put out The Complete Arista Recordings Of Anthony Braxton and I somehow finagled a promo copy, which I wrote about for a few places. Some of that music was difficult and alienating, but a lot of it was even more immediately accessible than I had expected it to be. If you’ve never listened to Braxton at all, you could do a whole lot worse than to start with New York, Fall 1974 or Five Pieces 1975, which were two of his first Arista releases and really do seem like his attempts to make music that would catch people’s ear right away. Indeed, those albums, Creative Orchestra Music 1976, and The Montreux/Berlin Concerts were absolutely mind-blowing to me, and convinced me that he was someone whose work I was going to have to investigate in depth.

I had a major breakthrough a few years later. The catalyst wasn’t an album, it was a book: Forces In Motion, by Graham Lock. Lock went on tour with Braxton’s quartet (Marilyn Crispell on piano, Mark Dresser on bass, Gerry Hemingway on drums) in England in 1985, watching all the gigs — and, as it turns out, recording most of them — and interviewing all the group members repeatedly, and he gives you a 360-degree portrait of all of them as musicians and as human beings. It’s one of the best books about music and musicians I’ve ever read, and I recommend it unequivocally. For me, getting a view into Braxton’s personality enabled me to hear his music more clearly, to understand the strong and unbending compositional principles at work.

(An aside: In 2018, I interviewed guitarist Mary Halvorson for The Wire, and she talked about her relationship with Braxton, first as student and later as member of many of his ensembles. She said:

“Anthony… is someone I’ve always found incredibly openminded about music. I mean, people might assume that he only likes stuff that’s similar to his world, but he’s into everything and that was actually an early lesson, something I learned from him. He gets super excited about…it could be anything. He’s a huge Paul Desmond fan. He taught a class called Sun Ra and Stockhausen. He’ll bring up Lady Gaga and start talking about that. He checks out a lot of stuff. And so for me that was a lesson, to remain open. I see this a lot with students that are college-age, is they get pretty narrow [focused]. I think it has to do with forming your identity as a musician — you’re like, this is the shit, this is what I do, and I only like this little thing. And I think having a teacher at that age that had this really expansive concept of really drawing from everything… allowed me to stay out of a box. And he never would place judgments. He was super encouraging, he would come hear my band play at Wesleyan, and he would tell me what he liked about it. But he never told me what to do at all, stylistically or anything. So that was a big lesson for me, to try to go into his world and understand what he was doing without getting stuck in that world, too, because that’s very powerful, to want to imitate.”)

Over the last 15 years or so, I’ve heard scores of Braxton albums — I probably have about 50 of his releases, which sounds like a lot but is only maybe 20% of his total output — featuring him playing in all sorts of contexts, from duos (with Andrew Cyrille, Roscoe Mitchell, Max Roach, and Wadada Leo Smith) to a trio with William Parker and Milford Graves to quartets playing standards to ensembles of up to a dozen players exploring hour-long compositions. I’ve reviewed his music for The Wire, for Bandcamp Daily, and for Burning Ambulance, and in 2021, I interviewed him for the BA podcast.

When we spoke, one of the things that struck me most strongly was the joy in Braxton’s voice. I asked him about the critical hostility with which his music was greeted early in his career, and even well into it, and he said:

“I feel that when I discovered music was a lifetime component for me, it was at that point I understood I was one of the luckiest people on the planet… in fact, the rejection and complexities that the avant-garde faced in the ’60s for me was kind of a hint that we must be doing something right, because in the beginning of anything that is fresh and different there is a natural — I’ll use the word hostility, although hostility might not be the right word, but the music has to be challenged.”

He seems to take any response at all as motivation to continue. As our conversation wound down, I asked him if, since he’s well known for the size of your catalog, if he hoped that somebody, someday, somewhere would listen to all of it and render opinions on all of it? Or if somebody had heard only one of his records and was really into that one record, would that connection be enough in some way?

“That connection is enough,” he said. “I’ve approached my music in a way that’s slightly different than the jazz musicians — and the classical musicians, for that matter. I wanted to have an experience. I wanted for that experience to be trans-idiomatic as opposed to mono-idiomatic. And I wanted to learn how to use my processes in a way that continues to evolve the kind of things which excited me. And so, if one person comes who likes only one composition that I’ve done, I will be very happy because no one owes me anything. I owe everybody everything because I have had a life of real highs and real lows, and I’m still here. And I’m grateful just to still be here working on music. Hooray for the cosmic forces that allowed manifestation. That’s what I would say.”

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I can’t think of a more optimistic philosophy, or one better suited to a lifetime of art-making. Anthony Braxton will turn 80 next week, on June 4. And Burning Ambulance Music will be celebrating him with the release of Quartet (England) 1985, a digital set of four complete concert recordings from the tour mentioned above. These concerts were recorded on cassette — in mono — by Graham Lock, and have been painstakingly restored. They sound rough and ready, giving the music a charge that honestly reminds me of punk rock. And in addition to the four concerts, each of which is divided into two sets of 36-47 minutes, you also get five performances of standards from soundchecks, allowing you to hear these brilliant musicians playing just for themselves. Buy Quartet (England) 1985 today, and celebrate Anthony Braxton’s incredible career and nearly six decades of music-making.

If you’re a free subscriber, that’s it for this week. On Tuesday, we’ll be back with an essay on the James Brandon Lewis Quartet. If you’re a paying subscriber, stick around behind the paywall for five extended interviews with Anthony Braxton, from various points in his career.