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50-473: Prior to the formation of the Revolutionary Ensemble in 1970, Jenkins, recently returned from Europe, had been playing with Anthony Braxton and Leo Smith in a group called Creative Construction Company . Following a May 19, 1970 performance by the group at Greenwich Village 's " Peace Church ", Braxton left, and joined Chick Corea 's group, which became known as Circle . Jenkins began playing with

100-435: A GTM composition is a ceaseless "primary melody", which Braxton describes as "a melody that never ends". This line of music, which may extend for 80 pages or more, is written to be played in unison by any performer who wishes to participate in the "ritual circle dance". Musicians are also able to move in and out of the primary melody, with notes marked by a shape—a circle, triangle, or square—signaling opportunities to move to

150-530: A 12-CD set of duos with various partners; a 7-CD set of the music of 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. And that's probably not all of it." Braxton has written several volumes to explain his theories and works, such as

200-503: A 1994 MacArthur Fellowship , a 2013 Doris Duke Performing Artist Award , a 2014 NEA Jazz Master Award , and a 2020 United States Artists Fellowship. In 2009, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Liège in Belgium; fellow honorees included Archie Shepp , Frederic Rzewski , Robert Wyatt , and Arvo Pärt . In 2016, he was awarded an honorary doctorate in music from

250-533: 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. 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

300-472: A cohesive whole was constantly subject to instantaneous negotiation. Some might view this approach as anarchic, but the three musicians of the Revolutionary Ensemble functioned like a musical high-wire act, sounding sometimes like one voice and at other times like independent individuals coexisting in the same sound space." The group's primary instrumentation was also unique, and each of the members doubled on secondary instruments. Although his primary instrument

350-595: A concert at the Peace Church, a recording of which was released on the ESP-Disk label as their first album Vietnam . On December 31, 1972, they performed at the St. Marks Theater , and released a live recording of the concert as their second album, Manhattan Cycles , issued on India Navigation the following year. By the mid-1970s, the group was receiving greater recognition, and began appearing at festivals. In 1975, they formed

400-573: A different composition, or mode of composing, in the system. A circle indicates that a performer can engage in an open or a "language music" improvisation; if the latter, performers may also give visual cues prompting others to follow the logics of a specific Braxtonian "language type". Triangles and squares are both invitations to play other notated compositions (or "stable identities"). Triangles represent specific "secondary material" included with each GTM score, whereas squares signify pre-selected "outside" materials; these tertiary works, chosen prior to

450-716: A four week engagement at the Mercer Arts Center . According to Jenkins, "first week... nobody was there. Second week, two or three. Third week it was half packed. The fourth week it was jam-packed." By 1972, the group was performing more regularly, with concerts at Artists House, the Jamaica Art Center in Queens, the Five Spot , and the Village Vanguard , as well as various radio interviews. In March of that year, they presented

500-637: A given performance, may include any compositions in Braxton's oeuvre (including other Ghost Trance Music works). Braxton's notational devices also ensure variation within the primary melody itself, often by the orders they refuse to give: for example, a traditional clef assigns a note to a specific line, but the diamond-shaped "open clef" of a GTM composition allows performers to choose any clef or transposition . Micro-level interventions include "open accidentals" that can be played either sharp or flat. The Ghost Trance Music works went through four phases over

550-567: A large group that included Sirone, who had previously played with Pharoah Sanders , Marion Brown , and Gato Barbieri , and to whom Jenkins had been introduced by drummer Sunny Murray . The two began discussing the possibility of forming a new group, and Sirone proposed a leaderless lineup of violin, bass, and drums, to which Jenkins initially responded with shock, before suggesting the name Revolutionary Ensemble. (Sirone later recalled that other musicians told him "You must be crazy. Violin, bass, and drums!") They recruited drummer Frank Clayton, but he

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600-433: A piece is played. Some letters are identifiable as the initials of Braxton's friends and musical colleagues, but many titles remain inscrutable to critics. By the mid-to-late 1980s, Braxton's titles began to incorporate drawings and illustrations. He also began to include lifelike images of inanimate objects such as train cars, which were most notably seen after the advent of his Ghost Trance Music system. Braxton settled on

650-505: 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

700-536: A quintet crediting bassist Mario Pavone as co-leader with Thomas Chapin on saxophone, Dave Douglas on trumpet, and Pheeroan akLaff on drums. From 1995 to 2006, he concentrated what he called Ghost Trance Music , which introduced a pulse to his music and allowed the simultaneous performance of any piece by the performers; many of the earliest Ghost Trance recordings were released on his Braxton House label. His Falling River Musics compositions were documented on 2+2 Compositions (482 Music, 2005). In 2005, he

750-581: A record company named RE Records for the purpose of releasing their third album, The Psyche . They then left for a European tour, taking boxes of the LPs with them, and selling out the first and only pressing to European record dealers. The group also landed a short-lived recording contract with Horizon Records , a subsidiary of A&M Records , allowing them to record and release their first studio album, The People's Republic . However, according to Sirone, when A&M's cofounder Herb Alpert played an excerpt from

800-505: A shared overall construction. The 'glue' for such performance is a combined energy level, density, texture, and sense of shared purpose." The second is the fact that Sirone's bass is rarely heard in a conventional, supportive mode, and instead maintains equal footing with the other instruments. The third is an emphasis on musical texture and the physicality of the instruments as conveyed through sound, what Bob Gluck referred to as "collective sound paintings." Sirone summed up his experience with

850-436: A system of opus-numbers to make referring to these pieces simpler, and earlier pieces have had opus-numbers retroactively added to them. Language Music was Braxton's original composition system, first used as an approach to solo improvisation. By limiting the music to a single parameter (for example, trills), Braxton was able to explore beyond the surface particulars of a given parameter. These language "types", which serve as

900-569: 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 . 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,

950-461: 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

1000-601: 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

1050-574: 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. 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

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1100-582: The MacArthur Fellow and NEA Jazz Master has released hundreds of recordings and compositions. 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

1150-524: 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

1200-597: The Woodstock Jazz Festival to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Creative Music Studio . In 1994, Braxton was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship . During the 1990s and early 2000s, Braxton created a large body of jazz standard recordings, often featuring him as a pianist rather than saxophonist. He released multidisc sets, including three quadruple-CD sets for Leo that were recorded on tour in 2003. He worked with several groups, including

1250-516: The album for musical director Quincy Jones , it elicited a harsh, negative reaction, with Jones claiming that he had "been conned; that it wasn't jazz or music and blah blah blah." (A&M closed Horizon Records in 1979 following a slump in music sales.) In 1977, the group released their fifth album, Revolutionary Ensemble , recorded live in Austria, on the Enja label. However, work began to dry up, and, at

1300-406: 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

1350-568: 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 . Braxton taught at Mills College from 1985 to 1990 and

1400-856: The eleven years of their composition, with each phase considered a different "species" of GTM . Changes across species include increasing range and variation of elements such as rhythm, dynamics, and articulation. The escalation in complexity and intensity culminates in Fourth Species GTM , also called Accelerator Class Ghost Trance Music ; these works have been described by a performer as "a labyrinth of hyper-notated activities", featuring irregular polyrhythms, dynamic extremes, color-coding to denote additional variables––and no geometric invitations to depart. In his Falling River Music , Braxton began to work on "image logics", resulting in graphic scores with large paintings and drawings with smaller legends of various symbols. Performs must find their own meanings in

1450-698: 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

1500-573: The fi ve pieces in John Cage's Imaginary Landscape series (1939– 1952), some of which employ unconventional percussion akin to the AACM's little instruments. All of these pieces are aleatoric— in other words, the performers have to improvise (although Stockhausen and Cage would instead use terms like "intuitive music" and "indeterminacy"). Composition 76 also recalls other improvisatory Stockhausen works for winds, percussion, and voice, including Aus den sieben Tagen (1968) and Sternklang(1971). However, few of

1550-448: 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

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1600-483: The group: "It was very difficult even to be alive for the three of us, and it's a miracle in itself playing this music; the dedication that we put towards this music... having the rare opportunity to write music like that and have musicians to honestly approach it. That just don't happen every day." Anthony Braxton Anthony Braxton (born June 4, 1945) is an American experimental composer, educator, music theorist , improviser and multi-instrumentalist who

1650-439: The home of artist Fred Brown . Jenkins recalled: "we got together and practiced every day... five days a week, anywhere from 11 to two o'clock. I mean, we just hung out. We just played and played, and my art of improvisation got tremendously better, and the group got beautifully tight." In 1971, the group began rehearsing at the annex to Joseph Papp 's Public Theater , then presented a concert there. The following year, they booked

1700-471: The late 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s were laboratories for his experiments in collage forms, or what he refers to as a constructor set approach to composition, giving musicians different compositions to be performed simultaneously. This collage strategy became an integral feature of Braxton's approach to composition and band-leading. One important part of these collage structures was the pulse-track structures. These pulse tracks were graphic notation given to

1750-545: The load off you. A leader has a lot of extra work and the other guys sit back and get all the benefits of his work. The leader also becomes a father complex and a lot of leaders just don't want to be a father." Author Bob Gluck summed up the musical results of this approach: "individual and group configurations were malleable constructs, one giving way to the other without so much as a moment's notice. Collectivity could just as soon feature simultaneous and multiple individual initiatives as it could musical togetherness. Construction of

1800-538: The musicians in Stockhausen's orbit could have played the dozens of instruments that Braxton wanted to feature in Composition 76. Fortunately, Braxton could turn to another community of musicians, one much closer to home. Braxton's son Tyondai Braxton is also a musician, and the former guitarist, keyboardist and vocalist with American math rock band Battles . Braxton's awards include a 1981 Guggenheim Fellowship ,

1850-555: The rhythm section that allowed them to break free from traditional rhythm section approaches but still play a supportive role behind the other instruments. The Ghost Trance Music compositional series comprises approximately 150 pieces written from 1995 to 2006. Inspired by 19th century Native American Ghost Dances , the GTM works are written to provide a "gateway to ritual space" with elements "designed to function as pathways between Braxton's various musical systems". The central thread in

1900-493: The same time, the musicians were being pulled in different artistic directions. Cooper recalled: "I was going into more of a shamanistic journey. I was hanging out with this Mexican, pre-Columbian drummer, Antonio Zapata. And Sirone was going into theater and moving to Berlin. Leroy was going into a more notated European music." The group disbanded that year. However, in 2004, the Mutable Music label reissued The Psyche on CD, and

1950-433: The symbols and construct a path through the score, balancing "the demands of traditional notation interpretation and esoteric inter-targeting." The scoring techniques used in 76 are reminiscent of a number of graphic works by other experimental composers. In a lecture about Composition 76, Braxton "cite[d] as inspirations" Karlheinz Stockhausen's Zyklus (1959), for a soloist playing thirteen percussion instruments, as well as

2000-413: 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 or numbers and letters. Some diagrams have a clear meaning or signification, as on For Trio , where the title indicates the physical positions of the performers. The titles can themselves be musical notation indicating to the performer how

2050-710: The trio reunited, performing at the Vision Festival , and recording their second and final studio album, And Now... , for Pi Recordings . In May of the following year, they performed in Warsaw, Poland; the concert was recorded and released by Mutable Music in 2008 as Beyond the Boundary of Time . In November 2005, they played in Genoa, Italy, yielding the album Counterparts , released by Mutable in 2012. Jenkins's death in 2007 precluded any further reunions. The Revolutionary Ensemble

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2100-705: The vocabulary of his Language Music, are often signaled by hand cues. He has said that "language music is the basis of my work" and that it also serves as the basis for his other compositional systems. Braxton emphasizes working with "notation as practiced in black improvised creativity", where it functions "as both a recall-factor as well as a generating factor". Accordingly, the language types function as both parameters and prompts in ensemble settings, where they may be used to structure improvisation or signal other performers. While he has catalogued over 100 sound "classifications" or "relationships", Braxton uses twelve types in most of his work. Braxton's various quartets in

2150-619: 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

2200-657: Was a guest performer with the noise group Wolf Eyes at the FIMAV Festival. Black Vomit , a recording of the concert, was described by critic François Couture as sympathetic and effective collaboration: "something really clicked between these artists, and it was all in good fun." Braxton is known for a sprawling and extremely diverse discography which has continued to grow in his later career: in introducing his 13-CD box set Quartet (Standards) 2020 , Bandcamp Daily wrote, "Anthony Braxton's discography has been massive for decades. [...] Since 2012, he's released two 4-CD operas;

2250-402: 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

2300-502: Was 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. 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

2350-559: Was soon replaced by Jerome Cooper , who had been playing in Europe with Steve Lacy , Rahsaan Roland Kirk , the Art Ensemble of Chicago , and others, and who, after leaving Europe and arriving in New York, contacted Jenkins at the recommendation of Roscoe Mitchell . The trio began rehearsing on a regular basis at Ornette Coleman's Artists House loft, where Jenkins had been living, as well as at

2400-697: 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

2450-404: Was unusual in that it was a cooperative group, with all three members contributing compositions. Sirone recalled that, in early discussions with Jenkins, he insisted: "everybody has to hold their own ground. We're not talking about no leaders here." Cooper reflected: "we weren't like a trio. We were three individuals playing." Jenkins enjoyed the absence of a group leader, stating: "It takes a lot of

2500-494: Was violin, Jenkins also played viola, alto saxophone, kalimba, recorder, percussion, flute, and harmonica. In addition to playing bass, Sirone played trombone, percussion, and flute, while Cooper played an array of percussion instruments, bugle, flute, piano, electronic keyboards, and saw. The ensemble's musical style was characterized by three notable traits. The first is "parallel play," "a performance mode in which all three musicians pursued their own direction while contributing to

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