Anthony Braxton

Anthony Braxton (born June 4, 1945) is an American experimental composer, educator, music theorist, improviser and multi-instrumentalist who is best known for playing saxophones, particularly the alto.

Braxton grew up on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois, and was a key early member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians.

As was the case after World War I, post-WWII Chicago faced increased rates of white mob violence against Black people, and Braxton heard about incidents such as the Cicero race riot of 1951, protests at the White City Roller Rink near his home, and the lynching of Chicagoan Emmett Till, who was killed when Braxton was 10.

In his early teens, Braxton took his at-home explorations of technology and electronics to Chicago Vocational High School, where drafting courses and time in shop studying wiring schematics set the course for his future compositional diagrams.

After high school Braxton attended Wilson Junior College for one semester, but was unable to continue his studies due to financial difficulties; he instead applied and was admitted to the United States Fifth Army Band in 1963.

He was initially stationed in Highland Park, Illinois, where he could continue studies with Jack Gell at the Chicago School of Music, but he later traveled to South Korea with The Eighth Army Band.

While in South Korea he met a number of improvising musicians and even led his own group, though many in the barracks did not appreciate the more esoteric works in his collection, and he purchased headphones due to rules restricting his listening time.

After a few years Braxton left the army and moved back to Chicago; he later studied philosophy and music composition at Roosevelt University, though he did not complete his degree.

Shortly after returning to Chicago, Braxton's cousin told him about the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians and he attended a concert.

Following the performance he met Roscoe Mitchell, who invited him to come practice with, and later join, the group.

Braxton played over ten instruments on his 1968 debut, 3 Compositions of New Jazz, the influences for which he identified as Paul Desmond, Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy, Jackie McLean, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Miles Davis, James Brown, and the Chicago Transit Authority.

The album's trio arrangement included Leroy Jenkins and Wadada Leo Smith, with Muhal Richard Abrams joining on the B-side recordings.

He received great acclaim for his 1969 double-LP record For Alto, the first full-length album of solo saxophone music.

A prolific composer with a vast body of cross-genre work, the MacArthur Fellow and NEA Jazz Master has released hundreds of recordings and compositions.

In 1969, Braxton recorded the double LP For Alto.

There had previously been occasional unaccompanied saxophone recordings (notably Coleman Hawkins' "Picasso"), but For Alto was the first full-length album for unaccompanied saxophone.

The work has been described as "one of the greatest solo saxophone records ever made, and maybe one of the greatest recordings ever issued" and "an album of solo free improvisation that still remains a paragon of technical, aesthetic and emotional excellence".

The album influenced other artists like Steve Lacy, Joe McPhee, and Evan Parker, who went on to record their own solo albums.

Tracks on For Alto were dedicated to Cecil Taylor and John Cage, among others.

Braxton was initially pessimistic about making a living as a working musician and began hustling chess, but in 1970 he joined pianist Chick Corea's trio with Dave Holland (double bass) and Barry Altschul (drums) to form the short-lived avant garde quartet Circle.

After Corea left to form the fusion band Return to Forever, Holland and Altschul remained with Braxton for much of the 1970s as part of a quartet that variously included Kenny Wheeler, George E. Lewis, and Ray Anderson.

The core trio plus saxophonist Sam Rivers recorded Holland's Conference of the Birds.

In 1970, Muse released his album Creative Construction Company, with the group of the same name, consisting of Richard Davis (bass), Steve McCall (drums), Muhal Richard Abrams (piano, cello), Wadada Leo Smith (trumpet), and Leroy Jenkins (violin)--this album was released in the late 1970s by the Italian label, Vedette, under the title, Muhal.

Braxton also recorded duets with George Lewis and Richard Teitelbaum in the 1970s.

During six years signed to Arista Records, the diversity of his output encompassed work with many members of the AACM, including duets with co-founder and first president Muhal Richard Abrams; collaborations with electronic musician Richard Teitelbaum; a saxophone quartet with Julius Hemphill, Oliver Lake and Hamiet Bluiett; compositions for four orchestras; and the ensemble arrangements of Creative Orchestra Music 1976, which was named the 1977 DownBeat Critics' Poll Album of the Year.

Many of his projects are ongoing, such as the Diamond Curtain Wall works, in which Braxton implements audio programming language SuperCollider; the Ghost Trance Music series, inspired by his studies of the Native American Ghost Dance; and Echo Echo Mirror House Music, in which musicians "play" iPods containing the bulk of Braxton's oeuvre.

He has released the first six operas in a series called the Trillium Opera Complex.

Braxton identifies as a "trans-idiomatic" composer and has repeatedly opposed the idea of a rigid dichotomy between improvisation and composition.

He has written extensively about the "language music" system that forms the basis for his work and developed a philosophy of "world creativity" in his Tri-Axium Writings.

Creative Orchestra Music 1976 was inspired by jazz and marching band traditions.

Braxton's regular group in the 1980s and early 1990s was a quartet with Marilyn Crispell (piano), Mark Dresser (double bass) and Gerry Hemingway (drums).

In 1981, he performed at the Woodstock Jazz Festival to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Creative Music Studio.

Braxton taught at Mills College from 1985 to 1990 and was Professor of Music at Wesleyan University from 1990 until his retirement at the end of 2013.

He is the artistic director of the Tri-Centric Foundation, a nonprofit he founded in 1994 to support the preservation and production of works by Braxton and other artists "in pursuit of 'trans-idiomatic' creativity".

Braxton was born in Chicago, Illinois to Julia Samuels Braxton, from Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Clarence Dunbar Braxton Sr., from Greenville, Mississippi; Braxton's father worked for the Burlington and Quincy Railroad.

His parents divorced when he was young, and his mother remarried Lawrence Fouche, a worker at the Ford Motor Company.

Braxton grew up living with his mother, stepfather, and three brothers, but still saw his father regularly.

He grew up in a poorer district on the South Side, where he attended Betsy Ross Grammar School and had a paper route delivering The Chicago Defender.

He sang in a church choir and had an early love of rock music, with Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers and Bill Haley & His Comets among his favorites, but as a child was more excited by rocketships, television, and technology.

In 1994, Braxton was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.