Anthony Anthony Braxton

Anthony Braxton - The Complete Braxton (1973) is a landmark box set by the American composer and saxophonist Anthony Braxton, a pioneering figure in the world of avant-garde jazz. Released as a multi-album set, it compiles recordings from 1973 that showcase Braxton's exceptional abilities as a composer, improviser, and bandleader, encapsulating his complex approach to music that blends free jazz, atonality, experimentalism, and formality.

Nate Young and John Olson as Wolf Eyes have worked with pretty much everybody from alternative rockers like Sonic Youth and Andrew W.K. to fellow noise totems like Merzbow, Black Dice and Prurient or the experimental hip hop-adjacent duo Model Home, yet there are few artists as formidable or as apparently well suited to their sound as the legendary saxophonist Anthony Braxton, with whom they first collaborated at a music festival in Quebec in the spring of 2005. Braxton had reportedly cleared out their merchandise table a year earlier at a festival in Sweden upon his first introduction to the band, and at the Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville the following May he found time to sit in on their set between his own scheduled performances with Fred Firth and his sextet, as part of an event curated by the Sonic Youth frontman Thurston Moore. The resulting album was released in 2006 as the critically acclaimed Black Vomit, with Olson stating ‘his language on the saxophone is just insane. There is nothing he can’t do on the horn. It was a perfect match’ while Braxton remarked Wolf Eyes to him ‘felt like family immediately. The communication was immediate’.

Prolific multi-reedist/composer Anthony Braxton is an immensely influential jazz artist who has covered just about every conceivable area of creativity during the course of his extraordinary career. Beginning with jazz's essential rhythmic and textural elements, Braxton combines them with all manner of experimental compositional techniques, from graphic and non-specific notation to serialism and multimedia. Largely considered a genius, his self-invented (yet heavily theoretical) approach to playing and composing jazz has as much in common with late 20th century classical music as it does jazz, and therefore has alienated some who consider jazz at a full remove from European idioms.