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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 sax. He grew up on the South Side of Chicago and was a key early member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. 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. During six years that he was 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 Braxton's projects are ongoing including 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 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.
Braxton taught at Mills College in Oakland, California from 1985 to 1990 and was Professor of Music at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut from 1990 until his retirement at the end of 2013. He is the artistic director of 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 to Julia Samuels Braxton, from Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Clarence Dunbar Braxton Sr., from Greenville, Mississippi; His father worked for the Burlington and Quincy Railroad. His parents divorced when he was young, and his mother remarried Lawrence Fouche, a worker at Ford Motor Company. He 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.
Anthony Braxton 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 he was more excited by rocketships, television, and technology. 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 including 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 in Chicago 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, although 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.
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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 sax. He grew up on the South Side of Chicago and was a key early member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. 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. During six years that he was 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 Braxton's projects are ongoing including 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 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.
Braxton taught at Mills College in Oakland, California from 1985 to 1990 and was Professor of Music at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut from 1990 until his retirement at the end of 2013. He is the artistic director of 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 to Julia Samuels Braxton, from Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Clarence Dunbar Braxton Sr., from Greenville, Mississippi; His father worked for the Burlington and Quincy Railroad. His parents divorced when he was young, and his mother remarried Lawrence Fouche, a worker at Ford Motor Company. He 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.
Anthony Braxton 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 he was more excited by rocketships, television, and technology. 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 including 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 in Chicago 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, although 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.
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