AKAMU representation: Worldwide exclusivity
For info and cost please contact Alberto Lofoco
• projects •
Anthony Braxton Fusion Duo + guests Anthony Braxton - alto, soprano, sopranino saxophones, live electronics and composition James Fei - sopranino and alto saxophones
+ guests
Anthony Braxton Fusion Trio Anthony Braxton - alto, soprano, sopranino saxophones, live electronics and composition James Fei - sopranino and alto saxophones
Alexander Hawkins - piano
Anthony Braxton Lorraine Quartet Anthony Braxton - alto, soprano, sopranino saxophones, live electronics and composition
Adam Matlock - accordion and vocals Carl Testa - double bass
Mariá Portugal - drums
Anthony Braxton Lorraine Sextet Anthony Braxton - alto, soprano, sopranino saxophones, live electronics and composition
Steph Richards - trumpet
Angelika Niescier - soprano and alto saxophones
Tomeka Reid - cello Carl Testa - double bass
Mariá Portugal - drums
Anthony Braxton Saxophone Quartet Anthony Braxton - alto, soprano, sopranino saxophones, live electronics and composition James Fei - sopranino and alto saxophones Chris Jonas - soprano and tenor saxophones George Brooks - alto and tenor saxophones
Anthony Braxton Saxophone Nonet Anthony Braxton - alto, soprano, sopranino saxophones, live electronics and composition James Fei - sopranino and alto saxophones
Angelika Niescier - soprano and alto saxophones
Mette Rasmussen - alto saxophone
Silke Eberhard - alto saxophone
Lotte Anker - alto saxophone Chris Jonas - soprano and tenor saxophones George Brooks - alto and tenor saxophones Andre Vida - tenor and baritone saxophones
Anthony Braxton Lorraine Double Trio Anthony Braxton - alto, soprano, sopranino saxophones, live electronics and composition James Fei - sopranino and alto saxophones
Steph Richards - trumpet
tba - trombone
Adam Matlock - accordion and vocals
Carl Ludwig Hübsch - tuba
Anthony Braxton ZIM Music Sextet/Septet/Octet Anthony Braxton - alto sax, soprano sax, sopranino sax and composition
Jean Cook - violin James Fei - sopranino and alto saxophones Erica Dicker - violin and baritone violin
Adam Matlock - accordion and vocals
Milana Zaric - harp (for Europe) Miriam Overlach - harp Jennifer Ellis - harp (for America) Dan Peck - tuba
Anthony Braxton 12+1tet Anthony Braxton - alto sax, soprano sax, sopranino sax and composition
Nicole Mitchell - flutes James Fei - sopranino and alto saxophones Chris Jonas - soprano and tenor saxophones
Andrew Raffo Dewar - saxophones Erica Dicker - violin and baritone violin
Jean Cook - violin
Jessica Pavone - viola
Sara Schoenbeck - bassoon
Katherine Young - bassoon
Adam Matlock - accordion Carl Testa - double bass Dan Peck - tuba
The Sonic Genome is one of the most thrillingly ambitious experiments by musical visionary,
saxophonist and composer Anthony Braxton: less a concert than the creation of an interactive
musical environment, almost an avant-garde theme-park for performers and listeners alike.
For 6 to 8 continuous hours, over 60 performers use the compositions and improvisational
languages developed by Braxton through his 40 years of artistic investigation to create a
living sound world. The Ghost Trance Music that has been Braxton's primary compositional
focus for the past 2 decades serves as the connecting principle for the musical structure.
The musicians can move in a big space (large hall, museum with several rooms, library,
factory/shed etc.) as a music cells (little ensembles) that change time by time, or
individually from an ensemble to another. Ensembles form and split apart like cells dividing
and reforming into new organisms; likewise, the members of the audience are invited to be
active participants, choosing who and what to listen to as they move about the space and
between the music cells. All of this involved the audience showing in the hearth of creative
production and dip it in a strong way.
Trillium Opera Anthony Braxton - alto sax, soprano sax, sopranino sax, electronics and composition Kyoko Kitamura - vocals Anne Rhodes - vocals Kamala Sankaram - vocals
Elizabeth Saunders - vocals
Lucy Dhegrae - vocals
Kristin Fung - vocals
Tomas Cruz - vocals
Adam Matlock - vocals
Vince Vincent - vocals
Roland Burks - vocals
Chris DiMeglio - vocals Nick Hallett - vocals
+ local orchestra
Anthony Braxton Tri-Centric Orchestra - 20/25 piece Orchestra with a selection of musicians below Erica Dicker - concertmaster
Matthew Welch - conductor
Sarah Bernstein - violin
Olivia De Prato - violin
Julianne Carney - violin
Scott Tixier - violin
Andie Springer - violin
Skye Steele - violin
Amy Cimini - viola
Jessica Pavone - viola
Erin Wight - viola
Tomas Ulrich - cello
Shanda Wooley - cello
Ken Filiano - double bass
Mark Helias - double bass
Domenica Fossati - flute
Nicole Mitchell - flute
Leah Paul - flute
Christa Robinson - oboe
Kathy Halvorson - oboe
Libby Van Cleve - oboe
Katie Scheele - english horn
Sara Schoenbeck - bassoon
Katie Young - bassoon
Mike McGinnis - clarinet
Oscar Noriega - clarinet
Josh Sinton - clarinet James Fei - sopranino, alto saxophones and conduction
Jim Hobbs - alto saxophone Andre Vida - tenor, baritone and bass saxophones
Vincent Chancey - french horn
Nathan Koci - french horn
Steph Richards - trumpet
Gareth Flowers - trumpet
Jacob Garchik - trombone Dan Peck - tuba
Amy Crawford - piano
Cory Smythe - piano
Shelley Burgon - harp
Chris Dingman - vibraphone
Tyshawn Sorey - percussion
David Shively - percussion
Anthony Braxton is born in Chicago (Illinois) on 4 June 1945.
American composer as well as sax, clarinet, flute and piano player. He has created
a large body of highly complex work.
While not known by the general public, Braxton is one of the most prolific American
musicians/composers to date, having released well over 100 albums of his works
since the 1960s.
Among the vast array of instruments he utilizes are the flute; the sopranino,
soprano, C-Melody, F alto, E-flat alto, baritone, bass, and contrabass saxophones;
and the E-flat, B-flat, and contrabass clarinets.
Braxton studied at the Chicago School of Music
and at Roosevelt University. At Wilson Junior College, he met Roscoe Mitchell
and Jack DeJohnette.
After a stint in the army, Braxton joined the AACM.
After moving to Paris with the Anthony Braxton Trio (which evolved into the Creative
Construction Company), he returned to the US, where he stayed at Ornette Coleman's
house, gave up music, and worked as a chess hustler in the city's Washington Square
Park.
In 1970, he and Chick Corea studied scores by Stockhausen, Boulez, Xenakis and
Schoenberg together, and Braxton joined Corea's Circle.
In 1972, he made his bandleader debut (leading duos, trios, and quintets) and
played solo at Carnegie Hall.
In the early 1970s, he worked with the "Musica Elettronica Viva", which performed
contemporary classical and improvised music.
In 1974, he signed a recording contract with Arista Records.
One of the first black abstract musicians to acknowledge a debt to contemporary
European art music, Braxton is known as much as a composer as an improviser. The
output ranges from solo pieces to For Four Orchestras, a work work that
has been described as "a colossal work, longer than any of Gustav Mahler's symphonies
and larger in instrumentation than most of Richard Wagner's operas."
His 1968 solo alto saxophone double LP For Alto (finally released in 1971)
remains a jazz landmark, for its encouragement of solo instrumental recordings.
Other important recordings include Three Compositions of New Jazz (1968,
Delmark), his 1970s releases on Arista, Composition No. 96 (1981; Leo),
Quartet (London) 1985; Quartet (Birmingham) 1985; Quartet (Coventry) 1985 (all
on Leo), Seven Compositions (Trio) 1989 (hat Art), Duo (London) 1993 &
Trio (London), both on Leo.
Critic Chris Kelsey writes that "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".
The timing of this crowning achievement couldn't be better for Braxton's most
recent professional goals: he is the founding Artistic Director of the newly incorporated
Tri-Centric Foundation, Inc., a New York-based not-for-profit corporation including
an ensemble of some 38 musicians, four to eight vocalists, and computer-graphic
video artists assembled to perform his compositions.
The ensemble's debut at New York's The Kitchen sold out the last and most of the
first two of three nights, through the press excitement it generated; the reviews--in
Down Beat and the Chicago Tribune (John Corbett), the Village Voice (Kevin Whitehead),
and the New York Times (Jon Pareles)--ranged from positive to ecstatic.
Most importantly, the musical success of the event inspired Braxton to pursue the “three-day
and -night” program concept for this ensemble, including lectures/informances,
and splinter chamber performances, around the world.
The second New York event, indeed, expanded on the concept: The Knitting Factory
presented six nights of Anthony Braxton and his music, in all the variety of its
vision. The first night showcased the composer's solo alto saxophone playing;
the second his treatments of jazz-traditional material, both as reeds player and
pianist; the third, his music for solo piano, and for synthesizer and acoustic
sextet; the fourth showcased his new “Ghost Trance” music for small-to-medium
groups; and the fifth and sixth his large-ensemble music, including Composition
102, with giant puppets. As with The Kitchen, all six nights included a full house
and enthusiastic response.
This successful first season paid off: the second season has been virtually paid
for by grants from the Mary Flagler Carey Charitable Trust and the Rockefeller
Foundation in New York City. It will feature the world premiere of the four-hour
opera Trillium R at the John Jay Theater in New York, and the theatrical Composition
173 (for actors, improvisers, and ensemble) in collaboration with New York's Living
Theater members, at The Kitchen.
Anthony Braxton is widely and critically acclaimed as a seminal figure in the
music of the late 20th century. His work, both as a saxophonist and a composer,
has broken new conceptual and technical ground in the trans-African and trans-European
(a.k.a. “jazz” and “American Experimental”) musical traditions
in North America as defined by master improvisers such as Warne Marsh, John Coltrane,
Paul Desmond, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, and he and his own peers in the historic
Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM, founded in Chicago
in the late '60s); and by composers such as Charles Ives, Harry Partch, and John
Cage.
He has further worked his own extensions of instrumental technique, timbre, meter
and rhythm, voicing and ensemble make-up, harmony and melody, and improvisation
and notation into a personal synthesis of those traditions with 20th-century European
art music as defined by Schoenberg, Stockhausen, Xenakis, Varese and others.
Braxton's three decades worth of recorded output is kaleidescopic and prolific,
and has won and continues to win prestigious awards and critical praise. Books,
anthology chapters, scholarly studies, reviews and interviews and other media
and academic attention to him and his work have also accumulated steadily and
increasingly throughout those years, and continue to do so. His own self-published
writings about the musical traditions from which he works and their historical
and cultural contexts (Tri-Axium Writings 1-3) and his five-volume Composition
Notes A-E are unparalleled by artists from the oral and unmatched by those in
the literate tradition.
Braxton is also a tenured professor at Wesleyan University, one of the world's
centers of world music. His teaching career, begun at Mills College in Oakland,
California, has become as much a part of his creative life as his own work, and
includes training and leading performance ensembles and private tutorials in his
own music, computer and electronic music, and history courses in the music of
his major musical influences, from the Western Medieval composer Hildegard of
Bingen to contemporary masters with whom he himself has worked (e.g. Cage, Coleman).
Braxton's name continues to stand for the broadest integration of such oft-conflicting
poles as “creative freedom” and “responsibility,” discipline
and energy, and vision of the future and respect for tradition in the current
cultural debates about the nature and place of the Western and African-American
musical traditions in America. His newly formed New York-based ensemble company
is bringing to that debate a voice that is fresh and strong, still as new as ever
even as it takes on the authority of a seasoned master.
Short presentation
Anthony Braxton is recognized as one of the most important musicians, educators,
and creative thinkers of the past 50 years, highly esteemed in the creative music
community for the revolutionary quality of his work and for the mentorship and
inspiration he has provided to generations of younger musicians.
Drawing upon a disparate mix of influences from John Coltrane to Karlheinz Stockhausen
to Native American music, Braxton has created a unique musical system that celebrates
the concept of global creativity and our shared humanity.
His work examines core principles of improvisation, structural navigation and ritual
engagement-innovation, spirituality and intellectual investigation.
His many accolades include a 1981 Guggenhiem Fellowship, a 1994 MacArthur Fellowship,
a 2013 Doris Duke Performing Artist Award and a 2014 NEA Jazz Master Award.
