Anthony Braxton (born June 4, 1945) is an American composer and multi-instrumentalist who is known in the genre of free jazz.Since the 1960s, he has released more than 100 albums. He plays many types of saxophone (soprano, alto, tenor, baritone, bass, contrabass, sopranino, C-melody, mezzo-soprano) and clarinet (E-flat, B-flat, contrabass), in addition to flute, alto flute, and piano.Braxton studied philosophy at Roosevelt University. He taught at Mills College in the 1980s, and was Professor of Music at Wesleyan University from the 1990s until his retirement at the end of 2013. He taught music composition and music history, with a concentration on the avant-garde, as well as leading ensembles in performances of his compositions. In 1994, he was given a genius grant by the MacArthur Foundation. In 2013, he was named a 2014 National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master.

演艺经历

LifeEarly in his career, Braxton led a trio with violinist Leroy Jenkins and trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith and was involved with the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians founded in Chicago.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 album's tracks were dedicated to Cecil Taylor and John Cage, among others. The album influenced other artists like Steve Lacy (soprano sax) and George Lewis (trombone), who would go on to record their own solo albums.In 1970 Braxton joined pianist Chick Corea's trio with Dave Holland (double bass) and Barry Altschul (drums) to form the short-lived avant garde quartet Circle. He toured in France, and some concerts were recorded, such as the show in Châtellerault on March 11, 1972. After Corea broke up Circle to form the fusion band Return to Forever, Holland and Altschul remained with Braxton for much of the 1970s as part of a quartet, playing with Kenny Wheeler, George Lewis, and Ray Anderson. The core trio plus saxophonist Sam Rivers recorded Holland's Conference of the Birds. In the 1970s Braxton recorded duets with Lewis and Richard Teitelbaum.In 1975, Muse released his album Muhal with Creative Construction Company, a group consisting of Richard Davis (bass), Steve McCall (drums), Muhal Richard Abrams (piano, cello), Wadada Leo Smith (trumpet), and Leroy Jenkins (violin).Creative Orchestra Music 1976 was inspired by jazz and marching band traditions. His 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 the Woodstock Jazz Festival to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Creative Music Studio. In 1994, he was granted a MacArthur Fellowship. 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 final Ghost Trance compositions were performed with a "12+1tet" at Iridium club in New York City in 2006. The four-night residency was recorded and released in 2007 by Firehouse 12.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 had frequently performed such material in the 1970s and 1980s but only recorded it occasionally. He released multidisc sets, including two quadruple-CD sets for Leo that were recorded on tour in 2003. He worked with several groups, one where bassist Mario Pavone was credited as a co-leader with Thomas Chapin on saxophone and Dave Douglas on trumpet.His compositions the Falling River Musics were documented on 2+2 Compositions (482 Music, 2005). In 2005, he 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."MusicAt AllMusic, Chris Kelsey wrote that Braxton's approach to music is experimental and theoretical and shares characteristics with 20th Century classical music and composers such as John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Trumpeter Wynton Marsalis said Braxton's music isn't jazz. Kelsey called it "art music". Braxton called it "creative music". He has said that he is not a jazz musician. But he has also said, "even though I have been saying I'm not a jazz musician for the last 25 years; in the final analysis, an African-American with a saxophone? Ahh, he's jazz!"Braxton has composed works for large-scale orchestras, including two opera cycles. He has written several volumes to explain his theories and pieces, such as the three-volume Triaxium Writings and the five-volume Composition Notes, both published by Frog Peak Music. He is notorious for naming his pieces as diagram and with cryptic numbers and letters. Sometimes these diagrams have an obvious relation to the music. On the album For Trio the title indicates the physical positions of the performers. The titles can themselves be musical notation indicating to the performer how a piece is played. Sometimes the letters are identifiable as the initials of Braxton's friends and musical colleagues. But in many cases the titles remain inscrutable. By the mid-to-late 1980s, Braxton's titles began to incorporate drawings and illustrations, such as in the title of his four-act opera cycle, Trillium R. Others began to include lifelike images of inanimate objects, namely train cars. The latter was most notably seen after the advent of his Ghost Trance Music system. Braxton settled on a system of opus-numbers to make referring to these pieces simpler, and earlier pieces have had opus-numbers retroactively added to them.In the twenty-first century, he performs with ensembles of varying sizes and has written well over 350 compositions. After the Ghost Trance Music compositions, he became interested in three other music systems: The Diamond Curtain Wall Trio, in which Braxton implements the aid of the computer audio programming language SuperCollider; Falling River Musics; and Echo Echo Mirror House Music. Braxton wrote Echo in 2007 and performed it in 2009 at Wesleyan University where he was a teacher. During the performance every musician in an ensemble of six to twenty people held an iPod that contained Braxton's discography. All of them hit play on their iPods as the performance began to broadcast old works into the live performance.

小简介

可爱的容格试图为幻觉经验做辩护，他对诗人的透彻理解使他剥开了阴暗世界的神秘。诗人夸张的暗示在人们习惯了诳语的深夜发出进攻，那是真正的不可一世，以排山倒海的精神放纵述说每个人心里面都存在的自由。Anthony Braxton昂着头，嘴里塞进了一把向外发射的现代火炮。这是一个鲜血淋淋的早晨。城市还是以往日的姿态修改着每个人身上的记号，机械地、下贱地在无常的通道里释放着一些老旧的野心。Anthony Braxton有做室内乐的功底，一些不可能的事实被婉转地告诉了我们。我想我们都会发疯，是我们的妥协保留了我们的生存机会。他的自由乐章分成了几条走向，以扇形的分布向外扩散，一直忽这忽那，这种支离破碎的绝妙让我们无法平静，无法在平常的世界里分解我们的莫名冲动。而Anthony Braxton突然间的温和又令我无比感动，生命里的东西就这样没有理由。人群是靠气味相投的。在这样一座城市里，你发现没人可以倾诉，即使是戴着假面具。那是一种新鲜，人与人之间的联系很快便会互相无法忍受。把屋顶打开来，迎接我们瞬间的玩笑。Evan Parker就在这样的密室里，一笑一颦，如空气做着鬼脸。他的吹奏弯弯曲曲朝着深处无限地前进。我们做过很多被迫的事情，让我们把灵魂里的肮脏晾出来，我们即刻便瘦得像黑影，随着Evan Parker的爵士语调隐匿。自由的玩意，自由的禁忌，自由的创伤，自由的爱与恨，随着形体的敏感一起出没。Evan Parker的身份并非是暧昧的，他的吹奏滑润，是很有都市诗情的。Evan Parker的爵士令我们这些没有灵魂的人急着去做一些灵魂的索引。灵魂的图书馆，灵魂的借阅者，在缺少灵魂出口的地方转圈。把爵士的现代派当作了都市的灵魂。他人死了，我也随之而亡。当城市里的所谓知识分子撑大着胃口，我被Evan Parker领着在地面上挖了一个废坑。在里面不断地翻动着习惯，以及可能成为习惯的东西。这也是都市生活。这也是都市生活，我们为此骄傲。你们继续成为时尚的奴隶吧，用你们那双双白皙的手抓住一切看得见的东西。而我，而我们对此无动于衷，我们在隐形的地点自由地进出。一切都死了，才有彩色的恶魔拉扯着美丽。Genius is a rare commodity in any art form, but at the end of the 20th century it seemed all but non-existent in jazz, a music that had ceased looking ahead and begun swallowing its tail. If it seemed like the music had run out of ideas, it might be because Anthony Braxton covered just about every conceivable area of creativity during the course of his extraordinary career. The multi-reedist/composer might very well be jazzs last bona fide genius. Braxton began with jazzs essential rhythmic and textural elements, combining them with all manner of experimental compositional techniques, from graphic and non-specific notation to serialism and multimedia. Even at the peak of his renown in the mid- to late 70s, Braxton was a controversial figure amongst musicians and critics. His self-invented (yet heavily theoretical) approach to playing and composing jazz seemed to have as much in common with late 20th century classical music as it did jazz, and therefore alienated those who considered jazz at a full remove from European idioms. Although Braxton exhibited a genuine — if highly idiosyncratic — ability to play older forms (influenced especially by saxophonists Warne Marsh, John Coltrane, Paul Desmond, and Eric Dolphy), he was never really accepted by the jazz establishment, due to his manifest infatuation with the practices of such non-jazz artists as John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Many of the mainstreams most popular musicians (Wynton Marsalis among them) insisted that Braxtons music was not jazz at all. Whatever one calls it, however, there is no questioning the originality of his vision; Anthony Braxton created music of enormous sophistication and passion that was unlike anything else that had come before it. Braxton was able to fuse jazzs visceral components with contemporary classical musics formal and harmonic methods in an utterly unselfconscious — and therefore convincing — way. The best of his work is on a level with any art music of the late 20th century, jazz or classical. Braxton began playing music as a teenager in Chicago, developing an early interest in both jazz and classical musics. He attended the Chicago School of Music from 1959-1963, then Roosevelt University, where he studied philosophy and composition. During this time, he became acquainted with many of his future collaborators, including saxophonists Joseph Jarman and Roscoe Mitchell. Braxton entered the service and played saxophone in an Army band; for a time he was stationed in Korea. Upon his discharge in 1966, he returned to Chicago where he joined the nascent Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). The next year, he formed an influential free jazz trio, the Creative Construction Company, with violinist Leroy Jenkins and trumpeter Leo Smith. In 1968, he recorded For Alto, the first-ever recording for solo saxophone. Braxton lived in Paris for a short while beginning in 1969, where he played with a rhythm section comprised of bassist Dave Holland, pianist Chick Corea, and drummer Barry Altschul. Called Circle, the group stayed together for about a year before disbanding (Holland and Altschul would continue to play in Braxton-led groups for the next several years). Braxton moved to New York in 1970. The 70s saw his star rise (in a manner of speaking); he recorded a number of ambitious albums for the major label Arista and performing in various contexts. Braxton maintained a quartet with Altschul, Holland, and a brass player (either trumpeter Kenny Wheeler or trombonist George Lewis) for most of the 70s. During the decade, he also performed with the Italian free improvisation group Musica Elettronica Viva, and guitarist Derek Bailey, as well as his colleagues in AACM. The 80s saw Braxton lose his major-label deal, yet he continued to record and issue albums on independent labels at a dizzying pace. He recorded a memorable series of duets with bop pioneer Max Roach, and made records of standards with pianists Tete Montoliu and Hank Jones. Braxtons steadiest vehicle in the 80s and 90s — and what is often considered his best group — was his quartet with pianist Marilyn Crispell, bassist Mark Dresser, and drummer Gerry Hemingway. In 1985, he began teaching at Mills College in California; he subsequently joined the music faculty at Wesleyan College in Connecticut, where he taught through the 90s. During that decade, he received a large grant from the MacArthur Foundation that allowed him to finance some large-scale projects hed long envisioned, including an opera. At the beginning of the 21st century, Braxton was still a vital presence on the creative music scene.