VOTD 02/06/2025

 Anthony Braxton: Creative Music Orchestra 1976 (Arista)

Purchased used decades ago

Back to Braxtonia.

Forgive me for namedropping Anthony yet again. After I worked with him in 2008, I returned to graduate school. I was flush with excitement from the experience, and devoted at least one of my assigned papers to his work. 

There was an interview I read in my research I intended to paraphrase in my previous blog post, but failed to do so. (These missives are largely unplanned and come close to an improvisation in themselves.) What he said was effectively that there was an essential challenge considered by some creative musicians of his era. The push in jazz was that the music had grown increasingly fiery. Once you get to Coltrane (and Shepp and Sanders), how much more fiery could you really go? Instead, some of his early work goes in the opposite direction: small, intimate, pointillist. Consider his debut LP on Delmark with a lineup of Leroy Jenkins, Wadada Leo Smith, and Muhal Richard Abrams, as well as his two BYG LPs, one can see this idea played out. It must have also been confounding to some people; where's the jazz?

Point being: For Trio (Composition 76) definitely is an extension of this idea. However, if you know his mid-70s quartet recordings though, there's fire aplenty. The quartets with Dave Holland, Barry Altschul, and either Kenny Wheeler or George Lewis, could blow flames with the best of them. I recommend Quartet (Dortmund) 1976 (unreleased until 1991) for a particularly good example.

Then there's this album. I guess at one time, similar to Ornette a generation or so earlier and John Zorn a few years later, there was the lingering question of whether Anthony actually knew what he was doing. If you wanted to provide evidence to the prove he did, it was probably this session. Braxton in his personal lexicon eschewed the term "big band" in favor of "creative music orchestra." The instrumentation is more-or-less similar to a big band throughout, even if track two (Comp. 56) includes clarinets, contrabass clarinet, soprano saxophone, timpani, and no standard drum set. 

The music itself covers a wide range of expression. It's programmed with every other work being either upbeat or more pointillist/textural. Atonal bop - - chorale and points - - march - - more points with group voicings - - more atonal bop - - long tones with and textures and yes, more points.

It's fair to say that the standout piece ends side one, his Sousa-inspired march. It starts almost shockingly straight forward, but heads into more Braxton-ish territory for solos, with a rousing (and again traditional) closing.

I've always loved this piece dearly. It's as openly funny as Braxton gets, but there's no doubting that he enjoys marches. I managed to get my hands on an arrangement of the score and played the piece with OPEK twice; the first (and better) time is posted to Youtube.

He shared with me one anecdote from that session. The percussionist wasn't playing the bass drum part correctly. Frustrated, pianist Fred Rzewski took the mallet and read the part down, enabling the ensemble to get through that tough passage. 

In the liner notes of the Creative Orchestra (Köln) 1978, the liner notes refer to the march as "the greatest closer ever." I'd love to play it again but it would require more rehearsal. Really, a dream show of mine would be to play this album in its entirety, plus maybe add one or two more recent creative music orchestra pieces into the mix. But such a show would cost a lot of time and money, and if I'm going to throw money at a vanity performance, I'll make it my own music. 

But no question, if I did stage such a show, we'd end with the march.