Anthony Braxton (born June 4, 1945) is an American experimental composer, educator, music theorist, improviser, and multi-instrumentalist. He is best known for playing saxophones, especially the alto sax. He grew up on the South Side of Chicago and was an important early member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. He gained recognition for his 1969 double album For Alto, the first full-length album of solo saxophone music.

Braxton is a very active composer with a wide range of music that combines different styles. He has received honors such as the MacArthur Fellowship and the NEA Jazz Master title. He has released hundreds of recordings and compositions. During six years with Arista Records, his work included musical partnerships with members of the AACM, such as duets with Muhal Richard Abrams, a co-founder and first president of the AACM. He also collaborated with electronic musician Richard Teitelbaum, performed in a saxophone quartet with Julius Hemphill, Oliver Lake, and Hamiet Bluiett, composed for four orchestras, and created ensemble arrangements for Creative Orchestra Music 1976, which won the 1977 DownBeat Critics' Poll Album of the Year award. Many of his projects continue today, including the Diamond Curtain Wall works, which use the 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, where musicians play iPods containing much of his body of work. He also released the first six operas in a series called the Trillium Opera Complex.

Braxton describes himself as a "trans-idiomatic" composer and has opposed the idea of strict differences between improvisation and composition. He has written extensively about the "language music" system that guides his work and developed a philosophy called "world creativity" in his Tri-Axium Writings.

Braxton taught at Mills College in Oakland, California, from 1985 to 1990 and was a Professor of Music at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, from 1990 until his retirement in 2013. He is the artistic director of the Tri-Centric Foundation, a nonprofit organization he founded in 1994 to support the preservation and production of works by Braxton and other artists "in pursuit of 'trans-idiomatic' creativity."

Early life

Braxton was born in Chicago to Julia Samuels Braxton, who was from Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Clarence Dunbar Braxton Sr., who was from Greenville, Mississippi. His father worked for the Burlington and Quincy Railroad. His parents divorced when he was young, and his mother later married Lawrence Fouche, who worked at Ford Motor Company. Braxton lived with his mother, stepfather, and three brothers, but he often saw his father. He grew up in a poorer area on the South Side of Chicago, where he attended Betsy Ross Grammar School and delivered newspapers for The Chicago Defender.

Anthony Braxton sang in a church choir and loved rock music, with groups like Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers and Bill Haley & His Comets being his favorites. However, as a child, he was more interested in rockets, television, and technology. After World War II, Chicago had more violence by white mobs against Black people, similar to what happened after World War I. Braxton learned about events such as the Cicero race riot of 1951, protests near the White City Roller Rink where he lived, and the lynching of Emmett Till, a Black teenager from Chicago who was killed when Braxton was 10 years old.

Education and military service

In his early teens, Braxton expanded his interest in technology and electronics by attending Chicago Vocational High School. There, he took classes in drafting and spent time in the school shop, where he studied wiring diagrams, which helped shape his future work with musical diagrams.

After high school, Braxton enrolled at Wilson Junior College in Chicago for one semester. However, he could not continue his studies because of financial challenges. Instead, he joined the United States Fifth Army Band in 1963. He was first stationed in Highland Park, Illinois, where he continued his musical education with Jack Gell at the Chicago School of Music. Later, he moved to South Korea with The Eighth Army Band. While there, he met other musicians who played improvisational music and led his own group. Some soldiers in the barracks did not enjoy the more complex pieces in his collection, and he bought headphones to listen to music during limited allowed times.

After several years in the military, Braxton left the army and returned to Chicago. He later studied philosophy and music composition at Roosevelt University in the city, but he did not complete his degree.

Career

Shortly after returning to Chicago, Braxton's cousin told him about the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Braxton attended a concert and met Roscoe Mitchell, who invited him to practice with and later join the group.

Braxton played over ten instruments on his 1968 debut album, 3 Compositions of New Jazz. He credited influences such as Paul Desmond, Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy, Jackie McLean, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Miles Davis, James Brown, and the Chicago Transit Authority (Chicago). The album's trio included Leroy Jenkins and Wadada Leo Smith, with Muhal Richard Abrams joining on the B-side recordings.

In 1969, Braxton recorded the double LP For Alto. This was the first full-length album of unaccompanied saxophone music. The album has been praised as one of the greatest solo saxophone records ever made. It influenced artists like Steve Lacy, Joe McPhee, and Evan Parker, who later recorded their own solo albums. Tracks on For Alto were dedicated to Cecil Taylor and John Cage.

Braxton was initially unsure about making a living as a musician and worked as a chess hustler. 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 stayed with Braxton for much of the 1970s. They played in a quartet that included Kenny Wheeler, George E. Lewis, and Ray Anderson. The core trio, along with saxophonist Sam Rivers, recorded Holland's Conference of the Birds. In 1970, Muse released Braxton's album Creative Construction Company, featuring Richard Davis (bass), Steve McCall (drums), Muhal Richard Abrams (piano, cello), Wadada Leo Smith (trumpet), and Leroy Jenkins (violin). The album was later released in the late 1970s by the Italian label Vedette under the title Muhal. Creative Orchestra Music 1976 was inspired by jazz and marching band traditions. Braxton also recorded duets with George Lewis and Richard Teitelbaum in the 1970s.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, Braxton's regular group included Marilyn Crispell (piano), Mark Dresser (double bass), and Gerry Hemingway (drums). In 1981, he performed at the Woodstock Jazz Festival in Woodstock, New York, to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Creative Music Studio. In 1994, Braxton received a MacArthur Fellowship.

During the 1990s and early 2000s, Braxton created many jazz standard recordings, often playing piano instead of saxophone. He released multidisc sets, including three quadruple-CD sets for Leo, recorded on tour in 2003. He worked with groups such as a quintet featuring bassist Mario Pavone as co-leader with Thomas Chapin (saxophone), Dave Douglas (trumpet), and Pheeroan akLaff (drums). From 1995 to 2006, Braxton focused on Ghost Trance Music, a style that added a rhythmic pulse to his work and allowed performers to play pieces simultaneously. Early Ghost Trance recordings were released on his Braxton House label.

Braxton's Falling River Musics compositions were documented on 2+2 Compositions (482 Music, 2005). In 2005, he performed with the noise group Wolf Eyes at the FIMAV Festival. A recording of the concert, Black Vomit, was described by critic François Couture as a successful collaboration: "something really clicked between these artists, and it was all in good fun."

Braxton has a large and diverse discography that has continued to grow in his later career. In 2020, he released a 13-CD box set titled Quartet (Standards) 2020. Bandcamp Daily noted that Braxton's discography includes two 4-CD operas, a 12-CD set of duos with various partners, a 7-CD set of music by Lennie Tristano and associated artists, an 11-CD set of Charlie Parker's music, a 12-CD set of vocal music, an 8-CD set of duos with Eugene Chadbourne, a 4-CD set of collaborations with Nels Cline, Greg Saunier, and Taylor Ho Bynum, and an audio Blu-ray of 12 compositions for sextet, septet, and nonet, totaling over 11 hours of music.

Compositional style and systems

Braxton has written several books to explain his theories and works. Examples include the three-volume Tri-Axium Writings and the five-volume Composition Notes, both published by Frog Peak Music.

Braxton often titles his compositions with diagrams, numbers, or letters. Some diagrams clearly show the positions of performers, as seen in the piece For Trio. Some letters are initials of his friends or colleagues, but many titles remain unclear to critics. By the mid-to-late 1980s, Braxton began using drawings and illustrations in his titles. He also included images of objects like train cars, especially after creating his Ghost Trance Music system. Braxton later added opus numbers to his works to make them easier to reference, even retroactively assigning them to older pieces.

Language Music was Braxton’s first system for creating music, used for solo improvisation. By focusing on a single musical element, such as trills, he explored deeper aspects of that element. These "language types" act as a vocabulary for his music and are often signaled by hand gestures.

Braxton said that Language Music is the foundation of his work and other systems. He emphasizes using "notation as practiced in black improvised creativity," where it helps both remember and create music. These language types function as both guidelines and tools for musicians to structure improvisation or signal others during performances.

Braxton has cataloged over 100 sound "classifications" or "relationships," but he uses only twelve types in most of his compositions.

In the late 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s, Braxton’s quartets served as places to experiment with collage forms, which he called a "constructor set approach." This method allowed musicians to perform different compositions at the same time. The collage strategy became a key part of his composition and leadership style.

A key part of these collage structures was the pulse-track system. These were graphic notations given to rhythm section musicians, allowing them to break from traditional roles while still supporting other instruments.

The Ghost Trance Music series includes about 150 pieces written from 1995 to 2006. Inspired by 19th-century Native American Ghost Dances, these works aim to create a "gateway to ritual space," connecting Braxton’s musical systems.

Each Ghost Trance Music piece features a continuous "primary melody," which Braxton describes as a melody that never ends. This melody may span 80 pages or more and is meant to be played together by any performer. Musicians can join or leave the melody, with symbols like circles, triangles, or squares indicating opportunities to switch to other compositions or modes. Circles allow for open improvisation or "language music" with visual cues, while triangles and squares direct performers to play specific pre-selected pieces.

Braxton’s notational methods also allow for variation in the primary melody. For example, a traditional clef assigns notes to specific lines, but the "open clef" in Ghost Trance Music lets performers choose any clef or transposition. Small details, like "open accidentals," can be interpreted as either sharps or flats.

Ghost Trance Music evolved through four phases, each called a different "species." Each phase included more complex rhythms, dynamics, and articulation. The final phase, called Fourth Species GTM or Accelerator Class Ghost Trance Music, features highly detailed notations, irregular rhythms, and color-coded elements, with no geometric symbols for leaving the melody.

In his Falling River Music, Braxton used "image logics," creating graphic scores with large paintings and drawings alongside smaller symbol legends. Performers must interpret the symbols and find their own paths through the score, balancing traditional notation and abstract symbols.

The scoring techniques in Composition 76 resemble works by other experimental composers. Braxton cited Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Zyklus (1959), which features a soloist playing thirteen percussion instruments, and John Cage’s Imaginary Landscape series (1939–1952), which uses unconventional percussion. These works involve improvisation, though Stockhausen and Cage used terms like "intuitive music" and "indeterminacy." Composition 76 also echoes Stockhausen’s works for winds, percussion, and voice, such as Aus den sieben Tagen (1968) and Sternklang (1971). However, few musicians in Stockhausen’s circle could perform the many instruments Braxton wanted for Composition 76. Instead, Braxton turned to a nearby community of musicians.

Personal life

Braxton's son, Tyondai Braxton, is also a musician. He was the former guitarist, keyboardist, and vocalist with Battles, a math rock band.

Awards

Braxton has received several awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1981, a MacArthur Fellowship in 1994, a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award in 2013, an NEA Jazz Master Award in 2014, and a United States Artists Fellowship in 2020. In 2009, he was given an honorary doctorate from the University of Liège in Liège, Belgium. Other people who were honored at the same time included Archie Shepp, Frederic Rzewski, Robert Wyatt, and Arvo Pärt. In 2016, Braxton received an honorary doctorate in music from the New England Conservatory in Boston.