VOTD 02/04/2025

 Anthony Braxton: For Trio (Arista)

Purchased from Jerry's Records

I've been taking advantage of the university's robust interlibrary loan system to access some scores unavailable to me in the general Pittsburgh area. The public library has its own ILL, but the school has one portal that allows me to search specific libraries and select request with a single mouse click. Very convenient. Specifically, I've been using this to access scores by Stockhausen and Braxton. Perhaps I'll think of others, but there isn't much that comes to mind that I can't already access locally that I want to view.

The published Braxton scores are a more recent development and extension of the Tri-Centric Foundation, the non-profit devoted to Braxton's work. There isn't a long list of published scores, and some of them I already had copied. When I worked with Anthony in 2008 (! time rushes by) he invited me to make copies of anything we used for myself. I made a point of printing up everything. 

One of the scores I ordered was the basis of this recording, Composition 76 in his opus list. The pictographic title is represented on the cover. No mention of the instrumentation appears on the cover, which I suspect was intentional. It's a different lineup on each side with no rhythm section in either case, only reed players. In addition to Anthony, side one has Henry Threadgill and Douglas Ewart, side two Roscoe Mitchell and Joseph Jarman. All AACM-associated players, the latter two of the Art Ensemble of Chicago.

Putting on the record I thought, hey! I can follow the score! The score begins with an identical passage for all three players, and side one begins completely differently. Okay, maybe the record labels are switched. Side two: no, same story. Returning to side one, I made no attempt to locate where they might be in the score, which is probably how one should listen to it anyway.

Is either side a complete realization of the work? I suspect not. I speculate that there could have been a complete reading by both ensembles edited to LP length. It would be easy to achieve. Both performances are pockets of activity separated by significant silences; excising material would be simple. It is in keeping with Braxton's stated aesthetic that the piece could begin anywhere and end anywhere, or fold back onto the start. The Threadgill/Ewart side is more spare, pointillist, fragmentary, probably with longer silences. On the Mitchell/Jarman side, the ensemble sounds as though it comes together for group passages more often and clearly, most notably a loud bass/contrabass saxophone passage.

The description on the score reads "twenty-six pages of three dimensional notation.' It's all printed on flat paper, though some staves lean up, down, expand, contract, and connect in ways that are meant to suggest three dimensions. Could there be a holographic rendering of the score that would make this happen?

It's amazing enough that Anthony would have been signed to a major label. If he didn't use the opportunity to release decidedly non-commercial recordings like this, would he have had a longer contract with Arista? I suspect not. He was never going to make money for the label, and a producer's faith and stock in an artist can only go so far. Even his most jazz-like sessions, New York, Fall 1974; Five Pieces 1975; Creative Music Orchestra 1976; The Berlin/Montreux Concerts are never completely in the free-jazz mode entirely. And as the joke goes, there's a reason they call it free jazz, because nobody can sell it. It's when he veered into entire LPs of improvisational chamber music with this and the Composition 95 for Two Pianos (performed by Fred Rzewski and Ursula Oppens, no less) or the sprawling three-LP For Four Orchestras that he challenged what a major label could release from a so-called jazz artist. The multi-orchestra work probably bankrupted him, likely not for the first or last time.

To be perfectly honest, I'm not a fan of the multi-orchestra piece, but I'll be damned if I don't admire it. In the notes he suggested there'd be works for orchestras on three planets by 1988, five planets by 1990, different star systems by 1995, and different galaxies by 2000. It's a beautiful thought, I wish I could muster that level of optimism.