Next week will see the release of the complete remastered recordings made by Anthony Braxton on the Black Saint and Soul Note labels, packaged as a box of 8 CDs. As had been the case with last year’s anthology of George Russell, the CDs are in cardboard sleeves that reproduce the content of the original vinyl albums, meaning that, once again, most of the text is illegible without a suitable magnifying glass. However, while Russell was as serious about what he wrote as he was about the music he made, making the packaging more than a little frustrating, Braxton is a decidedly different artist.
Most important is that, among those musicians currently alive and plying their trade, Braxton’s work may well be that which most defies any form of classification. Clearly Giovanni Bonandriri, who was responsible for much of what went into the Black Saint and Soul Note catalogs, saw Braxton as a jazz musician; and he certainly has done some impressive jamming with the best of them (including, in this particular collection, Max Roach, Mal Waldron, and Don Byron). On the other hand musicians more commonly associated with the “classical” side of the avant-garde, such as Richard Teitelbaum and Frederick Rzewski, have also performed with him in what may best be called both “chamber” and “orchestral” settings. Thus Braxton himself likes to call what he does “creative music,” a phrase that goes back to his affiliation with the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, which was founded in Chicago in May of 1965.
Under this generic rubric most of Braxton’s works are entitled simply “Composition” or “Opus,” followed by a number and perhaps also a letter (which may have something to do with chronological sequencing but may also have been assigned through arbitrary whim). Only two of the CDs in the new collection depart from this convention: Birth and Rebirth, consisting of seven joint improvisations by Braxton and Roach, each of which has a brief descriptive title, and Six Monk’s Compositions, consisting of a quartet led by Braxton performing works by Thelonious Monk. (The other members are a rhythm section consisting of Waldron, Buell Neidlinger, and Bill Osborne.)
Most of the pieces with generic titles have subtitles that are diagrams. Braxton has made it a point to avoid providing any signification for these images. In some cases the attentive listener may interpret a diagram as a set of guidelines (if not rules) for how an improvisation is to proceed. When one listens to performances, particularly those of larger ensembles for which Braxton is listed as conductor, one feels strongly that some kind of notated guidance is in play; but Braxton himself has always refused to say very much, if anything, about how these diagrams are to be “decoded.”
For those who follow this site regularly, the last two articles I released may have some preparatory value for approaching this anthology, particularly with regard to those generically titled works. (The other two CDs in the collection can easily be taken as “straight jazz.” They both present Braxton as a prodigious wind player in the genre, whether he is spinning his highly elaborated riffs on Monk or engaging in free improvisation with Roach.) It is a pity that one of Braxton’s diagrams was not included in John Cage’s Notations compilation, since it is clear (to me at least) that Braxton is using his diagrams to explore different approaches to just how the process of making music is being abstracted into an appropriate set of marks on paper. Just as important, however, is that Braxton is as concerned with emancipating the concept of structure in the performance of music as Iannis Xenakis was with his abstruse ventures into higher mathematics.
However, where listening is concerned, Braxton definitely tends to go down a lot more easily than either Xenakis or any of the more avant-garde extremes encountered in Cage’s book. While it is easy to understand why Braxton has tried to distance himself from being labeled as “jazz,” there is a fair amount of jazz sensibility in the improvisatory side of his “creative music,” even when he is conducting an ensemble on the scale of a chamber orchestra. I suspect that Braxton’s preference for the “creative music” label is his way of saying that he does not wish to be associated with any label at all. In that respect the CDs in this Black Saint/Soul Note anthology serve him well, because there is no useful category that can accommodate all of the tracks across these eight recordings. Why should there be? Braxton’s choice of label suggests the agenda that every act of making music should be fundamentally “creative;” and, taken as a whole, the tracks in this collection certainly support that proposition.
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