Anthony Braxton Quartet Birmingham (1985)

Anthony Braxton - Quartet (Standards) 2020 (2021) {New Braxton House Records}
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© 2021 New Braxton House Records
Jazz / Experimental / Modern Jazz / Avant-Garde Jazz / Saxophone

On June 18, 2021, the Tri-Centric Foundation and New Braxton House Records will release Anthony Braxton's "Quartet (Standards) 2020", a 13-CD deluxe box set documenting Braxton’s European tour in January last year. Armed with a songbook of over one hundred tunes, Braxton crossed the Atlantic and assembled a stellar ensemble of British musicians – Alexander Hawkins on piano, Neil Charles on bass and Stephen Davis on drums. The box set comprises sixty-seven tracks culled from nine evenings of performances in London, Warsaw and Wels representing decades of American music, from the Great American songbook to Paul Simon via music by jazz luminaries including Dave Brubeck, John Coltrane, Andrew Hill, Sonny Rollins, Wayne Shorter, and many more.

Braxton had long been fond of working with improvising wind ensembles. In fact, the earliest incarnation of what would become the World Saxophone Quartet appeared on his landmark Arista album, New York, Fall, 1974. So his collaboration with the ROVA quartet, perhaps the most important practitioners of the form after the WSQ, came as no surprise…

On June 21, 2019, Firehouse 12 Records is proud to release Anthony Braxton's "Quartet (New Haven) 2014", a deluxe 4-CD box set documenting the one-time meeting of an all-star quartet featuring the legendary saxophonist and conceptualist alongside Nels Cline (guitar), Greg Saunier (drums), and Taylor Ho Bynum (brass).

Performance (Quartet) 1979 is a live album by American composer and saxophonist Anthony Braxton recorded in Switzerland in 1979 and released on the hatART label. The album has also been issued as Performance 9/1/79 and Performance for Quartet.

Anthony Braxton (who on this set plays alto, soprano, C-melody sax, clarinet, and flute) met up with his longtime pianist Marilyn Crispell for the first time on this Black Saint release. With bassist John Lindberg and drummer Gerry Hemingway forming what would be (with Mark Dresser in Lindberg's place) a regular group for nearly a decade, his quartet was off to a strong start. Braxton seems quite comfortable playing this complex music, and his diagrams (which serve as song titles) are actually fairly humorous.

Recorded at the Institut fur Elektronische Musik und Akustik in Graz, Austria during the first week of August 2003, Anthony Braxton's (+ Duke Ellington) Concept of Freedom is a dazzling exercise in collective creativity. Braxton does not perform on this recording. Neither does Ellington, for that matter. Both men and their substantial accomplishments are honored and invoked by a quartet of skilled improvisers. These are trombonist Roland Dahinden, pianist Hildegard Kleeb, violinist Dimitris Polisoidis, and electronics artist Robert Holdrich. Kleeb, like her life partner Dahinden, has worked with Braxton's music in other contexts, most importantly perhaps her four-CD set devoted to 20 years' worth of his notated piano music which was released on the hatNOW series in 1996…

The band Anthony Braxton assembled for this unique exploration of the compositions of Thelonious Monk is one of the wonders of the composer's retinue. Braxton, pianist Mal Waldron, bassist Buell Neidlinger, and drummer Bill Osborne use six Monk tunes and go hunting for harmonic invention; in order, they are "Brilliant Corners," "Reflections," "Played Twice," "Four in One," "Ask Me Now," and "Skippy." From the jump, the listener can tell this is no ordinary Monk tribute. The music is fast, skittering along at a dervish's pace on "Brilliant Corners," and Braxton's horn - an alto on this album - moves right for that street where interval meets modulation and sticks his solo in the center, careening over the arrangement - which is what the tune is in essence, an arrangement rather than a "song"…

A live duo performance by musicians of this extraordinarily high caliber occasionally results in something incredible but perhaps more often describes a battle of egos with neither side giving in. In this case, the participants appeared willing to compromise and to some extent lay aside their commitment to the vast and idiosyncratic musical structures that they had developed over the year. If the recording still fails to live up to impossibly high expectations, it is nonetheless a fine album on its own merits. The session consists of five improvisations of varying moods, textures, and intensities. Much of the time is spent in areas of surprising lyricism and restraint, as on "ParkBrax #3," a lush, contemplative piece. But even when things become somewhat frenetic, as on the second and fourth tracks, the absolute control of these masters over their instruments is clear…