Of all the musicians that I used to listen to back in the 1970s - Mingus, Miles, Monk, and the 'Trane, the Art Ensemble and Don Cherry and Pharoah Sanders, Abdullah Ibraham and Julius Hemphill - none of them, none, compared to Anthony Braxton.
The 'Brax was the bomb, he was light years beyond anyone else. His unique combination of complex, dense, almost Bachian composition with incredibly free improvisations were like no other. While everyone else was playing odd time signatures or abandoning structure altogether, Braxton's solos sounded like he was spitting out quadratic equations, when he wasn't sounding like moss growing on a tree or a ray of light refracting through a cloud of smoke or a petrified squid escaping from a jar of formaldehyde.
His presence on any album changed that album for the better and I spent hours at used records stores and at street vendors digging through the jazz crates to find anything with his name on it.
Not that he was to everybody's taste. My college girlfriend, a sweet Irish-American girl from South Boston, liked folk music and hated my taste in jazz, and Anthony Braxton in particular drove her up a wall. For whatever it's worth, I found her seemingly endless record collection of sincere-sounding musicians with acoustic guitars as somnolent as she found my Braxton records annoying. But who's to explain tastes?
Anyway, Anthony Braxton's still alive and well and producing challenging and interesting music today. In 1994, he was the recipient of a McArthur genius grant. But here's a piece from back in 1975 to give you some idea of how far ahead - or outside - of his time he was (and still is).
No comments:
Post a Comment