ANTHONY BRAXTON - Saxophone Improvisations, Series F

“I'm interested in the study of music, the discipline of music, the experience of music, and music as an esoteric mechanism for continuing on the path of my real intentions…”

“I wanted a system that could be compared to the dynamics of curiosity. I wanted to have a music where I could find enjoyment”

When he made his debut in the world of African-American music, Anthony Braxton was 23 years old; it was 1968, and the founder of Chicago's AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians), Muhal Richard Abrams, called him in to record his masterpiece, "Levels And Degrees Of Light". His style was still slightly unripe, but it already hinted at all the expressive potential that would shortly find its first decisive confirmation in that "3 Compositions of New Jazz" which, together with Roscoe Mitchell's "Sound", must be regarded as the big bang of all avant-jazz to come. A dismantling of structures and a broadening of horizons, complete with an epoch-making foray into European avant-garde music. And, meanwhile, there was already the idea of using diagrams (in the wake of Webern and Stockhausen's "formulas") instead of simple titles for the various compositions: diagrams that define the field of action for the various musicians, as if they were scores written in mathematical characters. Many of these diagrams remain, in any case, utterly inscrutable, and, as if that weren't enough, they end up intersecting with mystical conceptions that truly convey the sense of an eccentric artist, prone to depressive crises, but also, in turn, extremely productive, anarchic, iconoclastic, elusive. A chess player, too. And that alone could say a lot, if only our imagination were in a state of grace for a moment…

The radical ideas that Braxton began developing in "3 Compositions Of New Jazz" are based on a "controlled" vision of improvisation, whose key points are philosophy and mathematics, two concepts that are not convergent but complementary. The former, in fact, allows man to "see beyond"; the latter, meanwhile, is what tries to organize that "beyond". Moreover, that "chamber-like" sound also highlighted Braxton's inclination toward the ideas of Lukas Foss, the American composer who in 1957 founded a chamber group that employed a kind of improvisation that was itself "controlled" — that is, based on predetermined variation procedures. Well, if Braxton drew on these ideas, he gradually made them so personal (see also works like "B-Xo/ N-O-1-47A" and "This Time") that he steered them toward a notion of solo improvisation that was bound to cause a stir and spark a genuine revolution with the release of the epoch-making "For Alto" (1968).

“I think constantly about the distance separating music as it is from music as it should be.”

The first-ever album for solo saxophone (there had only been “scattered” attempts before it, including those by Coleman Hawkins and Eric Dolphy), “For Alto” upends the syntax of one of the most important instruments in jazz (which, by extension, meant striking at the very syntax of African-American music), using silence as a genuine musical building block (“To Composer John Cage”), peering into the abyss from which noise casts its most ambiguous light, and reconnecting with Albert Ayler across the nearly twenty minutes of “Dedicated To Multi Instrumentalist Leroy Jenkins”, in which the “poetics of the scream” is dissected and then crystallized into a cerebral game of stop-and-go, obsessions and spasms that surely also looks to Coltrane's “Interstellar Space”. Thus, in the ebb and flow — now calm, now intense — of his meditations, this “structured” stream of consciousness reveals the full value of organizing sound and noise within an empty space ruled, sibylline, by silence. And in this whirlwind of rage and melancholy, even the clicking of fingers on the keys finally acquires musical value — a value that is, above all, rhythmic and structural, amid nuances and timbral explorations, treading the same ground as Helmut Lachenmann.

With this wealth of experience and achievement behind him, exiled in France like many of his peers (“I went to France for the first time. I had a one-way ticket and fifty dollars”), Braxton continued working to develop a new improvisational language, searching for an actual “method”, later defined, in the liner notes to “Alto Saxophone Improvisations” (1979), as “conceptual grafting”. Based on this sort of synesthetic representation, which assigns specific visual representations to particular sounds, the act of improvising is, at first, considered only in terms of its “infrastructures”, whereby various factors are isolated and made significant during the musical event. “Conceptual grafting” has nothing to do with conventional harmony, nor is there a theme in the classical sense of the term. Rather, it aims to clarify the “dynamic implication” of the basic elements (timbre, pitch, etc.). If this “rationalistic” or “mathematical” approach, call it what you will, seems to freeze any passionate impulse, it is nevertheless Braxton himself who makes clear that the dynamics of sound are not, and must not be, separated from their spiritual implications (which have to do, above all, with the existential state of a given moment) and physical ones (essentially, the relationship forged between the musician and his instrument) — aspects that, he stresses, have always been at the foundation of various African and Asian cultures.

“Okay, I'm underground, but I feel at home…”

So, between a game of chess, a bout of depression and moments of blazing ardor, in a Paris made icy by a winter colder than usual, on 25 February 1972 the Chicagoan recorded in a single session “Saxophone Improvisations, Series F” (in keeping with his mathematical approach, Braxton assigns a series number to each round of improvisations), one of the most incredible and far-sighted musical works (if we may say so…) of the 20th century. The ultimate extension of countless experiments on alto saxophone, the work eclipses the entire conceptual apparatus underpinning it, revealing the towering stature of a truly singular musician. Just listen to the first three stages of “Composition 8I” to grasp the extent of the upheaval achieved. The very timbre of the instrument undergoes a genuine torture, as the sound is dismembered into micro-cells that follow one another in a spastic, fragmented construction, pitting the most fragile melodic accents against the most violent slap-tonguing.

The boundless lyrical horizons of “Composition 26 A (Dedicated to Marie–Claude Conet)” sketch the first outlines of the more meditative, “nocturnal” Braxton. A single sinuous line is shaped with exceptional emotional skill, with the odd small vibrato shiver toward the close. It is an incomparable immersion into the artist's soul, grappling with a soliloquy that never tips into psychic autism. In the ballad “Composition 26 J (Dedicated to Dave, Claire and Louise Holland)” the sound is enriched by the retroactive nuances of the environment (Evan Parker would remember this for his “Monoceros”). The background seems, at once, to drown in silence and to serve as a limitless container for the most subtle expansion of notes. The “spatial” imprint of sound… the importance of the tonal residues that arise from the stratification of sound and physical context… “It's an extension of my love for melody. It's an extension of my love for ‘poetic space’…”

The first record closes with what is very probably the absolute peak of his “solo” output: “Composition 26 B (Dedicated to Maurice McIntyre)”. The quivering notes that open it are suddenly assailed by agonizing contortions, in a drunken interplay of horror and euphoria, to paraphrase what Ekkehard Jost wrote about Ayler's style. The breath mutates into atonal metallic outbursts; Paul Desmond's “cool” sound and Roscoe Mitchell's vibrant drifts converge into a “percussive”, syncopated carpet that dives in and resurfaces from a rising tide of anguished ecstasy. We hear, then, notes held on the brink of the abyss, as breath turns into liquid steel. Frenzied forays and sonic whirlpools claw furiously at themselves, pounding the base series and rearing up dizzyingly to the limit of audibility, right where the notes risk giving way to a piercing hiss, ready to dissolve at any moment. These are genuine descents into the unknown, with slap-tonguing like whip-cracks and chords grated against metal. In this ceaseless disintegration of invention, the recoding of the saxophone's improvisational syntax collides with that of timbre, pitch and dynamics. In the hall-of-mirrors play between “soft” and “loud”, of thread-like, hysterical spirals, a monstrous edifice is erected — an absolute, definitive palingenesis of jazz, made of guts, splutters, gasps and harmonic/melodic abominations, right up to the violent final onslaught, exemplary and obsessive in its radical upheaval. Countless musicians would take note; few would ever match the master.

“Composition 26 D (Dedicated To Ann Taylor)” is another of his superb ballads, hushed in tone and tinged with melancholy, here built on a refrain as simple as it is touching. In “Composition 8 J (Dedicated to Buckminster Fuller)”, Braxton works around an 8-note pattern, moving in and out of the enclosure built anew each time. The language examined in “Composition 26 C (Dedicated To George Conley)”, on the other hand, harks back to bebop: fast, angular phrases; a swirling, nervous, undulating narrative. The swirling, magmatic flow is interrupted only to hint at the briefest melodic phrases, whose sole purpose, ultimately, is to highlight the “rational” power of the composition as a whole. In the final analysis: an obsessive pulse that somehow transcends the old concept of “swing”. Tiny grooves cut into silence. A sharp silence, jagged with crepuscular accents. A “physical” silence: in “Composition 26 I (Dedicated to June Patton)”, the sound struggles against the vertigo of absence. A microscopic embrace of the said and the unsaid, for a “cerebral” ballad that discreetly probes the mystery binding sound to its coming-from/plunging-into/vanishing-into nothingness. “To return to where names are superfluous,” as John Cage put it; or, as Daniel Charles clarifies, “to silence, to the realm of the self-evident… to the place where names and things merge and are one: to poetry, the realm where to name is to be.”

The tribute to Philip Glass in “Composition 26 F” launches into nineteen minutes of obsessive repetition, its “horizontal” trajectory undergoing continuous mutations, like a hysterical cardiogram. The American composer's minimalism is here exalted in its most hypnotic traits. Beyond the “repetition structure”, the “additive process” is retraced with an almost claustrophobic ardor, allowing him to deconstruct, “destroy” and rebuild, from different and convergent perspectives, certain basic melodic figures, blending stylized minimalism and bebop, the freest Coltrane, Eric Dolphy and Desmond-like accents.

“After all, I often feel like the luckiest person in the world…”

Even though solo experiments would follow over the years (in works such as, for instance, “Alto Saxophone Improvisations” — his most theoretically accomplished work —, “Wesleyan (12 Altosolos) 1992”, “Solo (Koln) 1978” and “Solo (Milano) 1979 vol. 1 & 2”), the epiphany of “Saxophone Improvisations, Series F” remains unsurpassed to this day, not only within Braxton's own body of work. The legacy of this work proved, in fact, foundational for every subsequent development in “solo” improvisation, across every field and lineage: just think of Leroy Jenkins on violin, Albert Mangelsdorff and George Lewis on trombone, Greg Kelley on trumpet, Dave Holland on cello and double bass, Eugene Chadbourne on guitar, and so on. Moreover, many of these insights, while close to what Roscoe Mitchell was doing in his experiments inside and outside the Art Ensemble Of Chicago between the late Sixties and Seventies, would also prove crucial for the later evolution of Mitchell's music, which in works such as “Nonaah” and “LRG/ The Maze/ S2 Examples” would follow more markedly Braxtonian paths in redefining, once again, the experimental horizons of his musical research.

In short, the dawn of 1972 coincides with a particular moment in Anthony Braxton's life: he lives in a beautiful, very warm-hearted city among “misunderstood” artists; he often plays chess with friends, trying to keep a looming depression at bay; he takes part in impromptu jams with other African-American artists “in exile”.
It may have cost him something on a personal level, but with this work he gave us an indelible page of his personal diary…

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28/03/2007