E-Mail This Article to a Friend Going his own way Anthony Braxton continues to push beyond categories BY JON GARELICK
	Related Links Franklin Bruno on Anthony Braxtons return to Delmark.

The 30-year-old trumpeter Taylor Ho Bynum still remembers his first class with Anthony Braxton. Bynum was an 18-year-old freshman at Wesleyan when Braxton — the legendary avant-gardist and ’60s jazz radical with a reputation for knotty compositions and an imposing intellect — came into the classroom and announced, "There’s a new 10-CD Frank Sinatra set and the Dallas Cowboys are playing this weekend — it’s great to be an American!" He was, Bynum recalls, completely serious.

Bynum’s story is just another example of the ways in which Braxton — whose current sextet makes its Boston debut at the ICA this Saturday — has confounded expectations and defied categories for more than 30 years as a major figure in the American avant-garde. In the late ’60s and early ’70s, he was a member of Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM ), the collective whose members included Muhal Richard Abrams, Henry Threadgill, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago and that combined the explosive free-jazz explorations of Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, and Cecil Taylor with a new attention to form. His Delmark recordings 3 Compositions of New Jazz and For Alto helped define the era, especially the latter, a double-disc solo saxophone recital, the first of its kind, which would lead to similar recordings (and concerts) by the AEC’s Roscoe Mitchell and European expat Steve Lacy. Beginning with New York, Fall 1974, Braxton released one stunning album after another on major label Arista. He assembled a virtuoso quartet, first with Canadian trumpeter Kenny Wheeler, and then with bassist Dave Holland, drummer Barry Altschul, and the great young American trombonist George Lewis.

The pieces on those albums were a high expression of what’s sometimes called "free bop" — tight ensemble unison melodic themes, driving swing rhythms, and solos that alluded to chord changes but often took off into vast, jagged stretches of harmonic and rhythmic freedom. They were spelled by the occasional lovely asymmetrical ballad or spacy pieces of sputtering bird-call collective improvs. Braxton, meanwhile, in the AACM manner, deployed a wide array of reeds and flutes, and his humor was evident (and still is) when he took to the flapping-jowl mutterings of the huge contrabass saxophone. His 1975 Creative Orchestra Music was a rollicking update of big-band swing, Sousa, and New Orleans.

And then, the sea change: the Arista deal came to an end and jazz’s center of gravity shifted toward Wynton neo-classicism. Braxton continued to release a torrent of recordings, almost exclusively on import labels (with the notable exceptions of Chicago’s Delmark and San Francisco’s Music & Arts), and in 1990 he took a position at Wesleyan. In 1994 he won a hefty MacArthur Foundation "genius" fellowship.

He still worked in all formats — duets, orchestras, small ensembles, electronics, opera, and another celebrated quartet in the late ’80s and early ’90s with pianist Marilyn Crispell, bassist Mark Dresser, and drummer Gerry Hemingway. And he continued to play standards by Charlie Parker and others, as he had since the beginning of his career. But he had also pledged allegiance to avant-gardists of the European classical strain — Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage, Harry Partch. There were epic pieces for large groups that were loose and aleatory. Except for the occasional standards recitals, there was less standard swing.

Braxton calls his latest phase "Ghost Trance Music," and he says it began about 11 years go, at first with strict staccato pulses that the band would play in unison with breaks for small solo phrases. The "abruptions" in the pulse, as Braxton calls them, have grown more rhythmically elaborate. The beautifully recorded Four Compositions (GTM) 2000 (Delmark, 2003) is attractive for the delicacy and detail of the playing (a quartet with pianist and melodica player Kevin Uehlinger, bassist Keith Witty, and percussionist Noam Shatz). It is daunting at the end of one 15-minute piece to hear the next begin with the same staccato, amelodic pulse, but before long you’re again lulled into Braxton’s sound world.

"It really is trancy," laughs Bynum over the phone from Connecticut. He moved to Boston in part to establish some independence from Braxton and play in bands like the Fully Celebrated Orchestra, the Aardvark Jazz Orchestra, and others. (His résumé also includes Cecil Taylor’s band.) Now, he says, the complex rhythms of those abruptions have taken over the trance structure. "It’s very different from the Ghost Trance Music of ten years ago, like going from Louis Armstrong to Charlie Parker. It’s all related, but a completely different rhythmic concept."

He adds that Braxton’s music is all "incredibly difficult and incredibly challenging and incredibly Braxton — his stuff is never mistaken for anyone else’s, but there’s very few other musics I’ve ever been in that I can as completely express my own individuality. And that’s one of his magics. He has this specific and complex system, but somehow he manages to have set up that system so you can completely be yourself in it. You don’t have to play like Braxton; you can play like yourself."

Clarinettist Don Byron, who’s both played in traditional European-derived new music ensembles and recorded with one of Braxton’s large groups, says, "A lot of people that write a lot of notes like that don’t really hear all the notes. But he definitely does — it’s definitely about hearing a certain way. And how he got to that discipline is probably not so different from how a lot of classical composers that write in a similar way got to that discipline. But the perception of who he is and how he got there is really different because he’s black." In his way, says Byron, Braxton is "our [Pierre] Boulez figure, standing up for creative music in a dramatic way."

When I reach Braxton himself on the phone, he’s voluble, ingratiating, speaking in the kind of science-fiction language that fans know from his liner notes and voluminous musical writings, patiently translating himself as he goes along. The sextet at the ICA, he says (with himself, Bynum, violinist Jessica Pavone, tuba player Jay Rozen, bassist Carl Tefta, and percussionist Aaron Siegel), will "demonstrate" two compositions of the "accelerator class, third species" of Ghost Trance Music. He explains and sings the "first species" Ghost Trance Music, with its staccato pulse, and the second species ("like what the quartet played"), with its metric pulses and abruptions ("in this case, an abruption in the rhythmic flow from metric even eight-note pulses into, say, five-over-two or seven-over-three pulses, then back to metric pulses"). The third species involves "imbalance contours," and "third species accelerator class" mixes compositions in a collage-like manner. From liner notes, interviews, and Braxton himself — as well as listening to his recordings — I can only assume that the "multi-hierarchical action space" of his pieces is an elaborately orchestrated polyphony involving a mix of notation and collective improv. Bynum says, "He’ll bring in an 80-page score in eight colors and maybe we’ll touch 20 pages on a good gig, and then we’ll have another piece by the next gig." One of the things Bynum says he’s learned from Braxton — aside from things like how to organize "sub-ensembles" playing different material in the same piece — is a kind of obstinate individuality.

Finishing a long explanation of the "trans-temporal" organization of his music, Braxton points out that it’s not "post-Stockhausen or post-Cage, though of course I’ve learned everything from them and I love them. My music celebrates what I have learned from my heroes, and I’ve tried to celebrate it in a way so as not to overly imitate them."

Anthony Braxton Sextet | ICA, 955 Boylston St, Boston | Nov 5 | 7:30 + 10 pm | $15 | 617.354.6898