Anthony Braxton

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…

Celebrating Anthony Braxton on his 75th birthday, THUMBSCREW digs into the Tricentric Archives, focusing on previously unrecorded pieces by the legendary composer, multi-wind master and bandleader. The all-star collective trio releases its fifth album for Cuneiform, The Anthony Braxton Project. For fans familiar with Braxton’s music the project offers a whole new window into his genius for designing protean musical situations pregnant with possibilities. Those less acquainted with his work might find themselves enthralled and amazed by the sheer diversity of rhythmic and melodic material explored by Thumbscrew.

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…

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…

Composition 113 is an early recorded example of Braxton's "ritual" music; a dramatic, storytelling piece that, when performed live, involved specific staging instructions and visual accompaniment. The album is in six sections, representing six characters, each with a certain sound strategy/character tendency: humor, acceptance, strength, dependability, courage, and belief. As much as this information may provide an interesting background to the work, one listening to the record is left simply with six stunning solo performances by Braxton on soprano saxophone. While he has recorded numerous solo excursions on alto, this is the only time he devoted an entire release to solo soprano and one could only wish for more…