"anthony Braxton: Music For Interplanetary Travel"

John B. Litweiler

"Anthony Braxton: Music for Interplanetary Travel"

"Anthony Braxton: Music for Interplanetary Travel" by John B. Litweiler This is the month that Arista is releasing its three-record boxed set of Anthony Braxton's composition for multiple orchestras. The work has one of those diagrammed, nonverbal Braxton titles that look like a Woody Hayes scheme against Clemson; each 40-member orchestra has its own conductor, and the total instruments are 32 woodwinds, 24 brass, 92 strings, and 12 percussion. Chicago people, even relative newcomers, take an almost familial interest in Braxton—after all, he grew up and had his basic musical education here, and his two and a half intense years in Chicago's Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (1966-69) clarified his musical concerns and formed his style. Moreover, since leaving here in 1969, he's recurringly used fellow ex-Chicago musicians; drummer Philip Wilson and trombonist George Lewis have proven especially satisfying in Braxton bands. All this is important just because Braxton is the one genuinely popular musician to emerge from the modern Chicago "movement." He's not, perhaps, the money-making rival of Dave Brubeck or Chick Corea (he's recorded with both). But as a Chicago jazzman pointed out, Anthony Braxton shows that a musician doesn't have to sell out or play down or be inherently trivial to be a popular success. Just two months ago, Braxton gave, at the University of Chicago, his most stimulating concert in this city since he returned to the United States from France in 1970. Despite the excellence of his performing colleagues in the past, the trio of Braxton, Ray Anderson, and Richard Teitelbaum played in ensemble to a degree that Braxton had not been blessed with before. Teitelbaum, synthesizer, has worked irregularly with Braxton in the 70s. Do you recall how some jazz journalists tried to concoct an electric versus "real" instrument controversy a while back? The one genuine conclusion to emerge was that almost nobody else who plays synthesizers has proven as imaginative or as skillful as Teitelbaum. Ray Anderson is a real discovery: the most natural-sounding trombonist in the world, he's gifted with an exuberant freedom of movement and the creative force to project continuous, melodic solo lines. It's as if the swing trombone tradition that Roswell Rudd advanced into the 60s has at last been taken a step farther. It was Braxton, on saxes and clarinet, who mediated between the ingenuous soloist Anderson and Teitelbaum's flowing colorist accompaniment. Indeed, Braxton's improvising acquired a new responsive dimension as he worked with the bright, brash trombonist. In solo, Braxton's lyricism at times drew Teitelbaum into near-duet, their complimentary conceptions mingling in counterpoint. Despite the synthesizer, in a nonrhythmic role, replacing the conventional rhythm section, the format was themes, improvisations (solo or ensemble), fresh themes. Considering the concert's success, it's surprising that this was only the second time they've worked together as a trio, and after the show, Braxton was enthusiastic: "Ray's incredible, isn't he? At our first rehearsal, I knew I'd found someone who could interpret my music. George Lewis was with me for about a year, and when it was time for him to move on with his own music, we talked about trombone players, and George told me Ray could handle it." And how did he meet Richard Teitelbaum? "In a pile of mud in Aroroges, Belgium—we were on the way to a festival of creative music a few years ago." For Trio (Arista 4181) was Braxton's only new American release in 1978, but foreign releases abounded: at least one, and probably two, for Ring, a German label that hasn't made it to U.S. stores; from Canada, Roscoe Mitchell/Duets with Anthony Braxton (Sackville 3016)—discographers, please note that it was recorded December 13, 1976, not 1977; and from Italy, a collection of duets improvised by Braxton and the first great modern drummer, Max Roach, for Black Saint records. "What surprised me was that Max was very aware of my activity. It was like we'd known each other a long while, musically and humanly. There was no gap between the realities of our creativity. We did a collection of improvisations— there were no compositions as such, yet the record sounds like we'd rehearsed compositions. We also performed in concerts in Italy—playing with Max Roach was one of the greatest experiences of my life." This interview, by the way, was taped eight days after the birth of Braxton's first son. "I was very lucky—I was with my wife throughout the whole pregnancy and the delivery itself." But he spoke specifically about his music when he said, "This has been a very good year for me. I'm happiest when I'm able to function in an expanded context, that being the complete spectrum of the music. For the past two and a half months I've been performing solo music, for the most part. I've been able to function with the quartet [Anderson; Brian Smith, bass; Thurman Barker, drums], I took the Creative page 1 of 3

John B. Litweiler

"Anthony Braxton: Music for Interplanetary Travel"

Orchestra to Europe [Braxton's Creative Orchestra Music 1976 (Arista 4080) won several awards in 1977], I conducted the San Jose Symphony in a composition I wrote—about a 50-minute piece for traditional orchestra—and in May I recorded the work for four orchestras. "The normal way a musician perceives his activity, is this: after a given time zone, you can look at his work in a very linear fashion. Someone like John Coltrane's activity after each given time zone would completely transform himself. I think the thing that has bothered people about my music is that the linear progression hasn't been clear. When I made the decision to move into creativity, I started from a series of points, rather than one point. I started the progression of functioning in trio situations; I started to deal with the solo medium as a real medium for single line instruments; and then my work in composition, for instance. For Trio didn't swing, and the guys didn't have 12-hour solos—that disturbed a lot of people. I hope that one day people can deal with the actual music [that they hear], and understand that we document those other areas also"—that is, swing and solo improvisation. Among Chicago wind instrument players, a capella improvisation was very much in the air by the time Braxton returned from the Army in 1966. His first contribution was a concert performance of "Adagio," a Henry Threadgill composition for solo alto sax, in early 1967. By then Braxton was one of three major sustaining soloists in Muhal Richard Abrams's fine series of big bands, and Braxton also was involved with leading a series of his own groups, eventually settling on a trio grouping that included no rhythm instrument players. To us listeners, Braxton in his Chicago period seemed always fertile, intriguing, often exciting; Braxton's own memories of those days are somewhat different: "When I was in Chicago, we were working with certain principles; it wasn't fashionable to function in certain areas of the music. In the A.A.C.M., the basic emphasis was on improvisatory structure, and because of the intensity of certain discoveries, I focused on those aspects. The rate of new information was so dynamic, I was learning so much from Roscoe [Mitchell] and Joseph [Jarman], that I was trying to find my own space, lest I become completely gobbled up by the enormity of what they were developing. I didn't want to simply copy them, but rather, I wanted to develop a viewpoint which would hopefully be as meaningful." Indeed, elements of both Mitchell's and Jarman's musics appear in Braxton's compositions and improvisations—you can hear this directly on most of his records—and in more subtle ways, Braxton's two Chicago colleagues have been stimulated by their exchanges with him. His role in the popular but short-lived quartet Circle established his stylistic confidence: "When I met Dave [Holland] and Chick [Corea] and Barry [Altschul], around 1970, my viewpoint had become more real to me. I was maybe able to deal in a more relaxed way because I had established the nature of my projectional route. For instance, I've always been involved with standard material"—from Ellington to Parker to Dolphy—as some of Braxton's 70s records show. "I have 10, 11, or 12 early compositions that were completed by the end of 1967. But in that time zone, it was very difficult to get performances of totally notated compositions [as opposed to works that incorporated improvisation]. What I would do was save up money and pay musicians to rehearse some of my music, so I could hear it; I did the same in Paris [in 1969-70]. My biggest problem as a composer was that I never got to hear nine-tenths of the music I was writing. It began to change in Europe—at various workshops, I might have the opportunity to have a piece performed. It's only been in the last three to four years that I've had maybe one or two notated compositions performed each year. No matter how much theory you might have, or how attractive it might look on paper, there's nothing that compares with the opportunity to actually hear what you've written." The Schwann Catalogue shows Anthony Braxton works in both the jazz and classical music sections, so there are least two literal, albeit general, ways to describe his art. In fact, years ago in conversation he attempted to list the influence on his music: the great modern saxophonists; the great atonal, serial, and electronic composers; Chicago's elevated trains, too. (An earnest non-Chicago critic dutifully wrote that Braxton was inspired by the rock band "Chicago, formerly CTA.") The services that music performs, of course, range beyond the fact of relating sounds; Braxton sees his music as only the most obvious feature of his creative life. Time and again his comments have attempted to capture the range of his concerns, as they do now: "My activity in this time zone—how can I say it—I'm really interested in the unification of world creativity, and establishing what I call the meta-reality of creativity back to its basic position, that is, creativity is activity that celebrates and actualizes certain spiritual, vibrational, and scientific principles. My research indicates that all of the various junctions

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John B. Litweiler

"Anthony Braxton: Music for Interplanetary Travel"

of world creativity have various things in common. For instance, I'm a Gemini; the note that rules Gemini is F-sharp; the color that rules F-sharp is orange; the part of the body that orange pertains to is the head and shoulders. We can talk about the medical or scientific or functional possibilities of F-sharp, and it goes on—with proper research, we can perhaps form a composite world aesthetic or methodology that reincorporates the whole of the various aspects of creativity as a means to establish culture, and a basis to moving toward the dynamics of interplanetary travel." Which brings us back to the four-orchestra composition that will appear in a three-LP box this month. "The multipleorchestra piece could be viewed in a post-Ayler and especially a post-Webern kind of context, but it's not serial. It's part of a series of works that I've started for multiple orchestras, ranging from four orchestras, four orchestras with electronic music, six, eight, then ten orchestras connected by satellite in ten different cities, and 100 orchestras—there'll be TV sets hooking up all the orchestras in all the cities, in each performing space, and the people who come to experience the music will be able to hear all of the various activities. "That's just in one series; it's just another aspect of my creativity. I'm interested in defining the next adaptation of creativity to the next transitional cycle, that being creativity related to technology. My understanding and hope is that we are moving toward the unification of humanity, getting ready to deal with the dynamics and challenge of interplanetary travel." Music of the Earth? "Yes."

Originally published in the Chicago Reader, January 26, 1976, p. 11. Republished with the permission of John Litweiler, in October 2008 by Jason Guthartz.

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