Anthony Braxton - The Essential Anthony Braxton: The Arista Years (2018)

Prolific multi-reedist/composer Anthony Braxton is an immensely influential jazz artist who has covered just about every conceivable area of creativity during the course of his extraordinary career. Beginning with jazz's essential rhythmic and textural elements, Braxton combines them with all manner of experimental compositional techniques, from graphic and non-specific notation to serialism and multimedia. Largely considered a genius, his self-invented (yet heavily theoretical) approach to playing and composing jazz has as much in common with late 20th century classical music as it does jazz, and therefore has alienated some who consider jazz at a full remove from European idioms. Although Braxton exhibits a genuine if highly idiosyncratic ability to play older forms (influenced especially by saxophonists Warne Marsh, John Coltrane, Paul Desmond, and Eric Dolphy), he has never really been accepted by the jazz establishment, due to his manifest infatuation with the practices of such non-jazz artists as John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Some critics have even insisted that Braxton's music is not jazz at all. Whatever one calls it, however, there is no questioning the originality of his vision; Braxton has created music of enormous sophistication and passion that is unlike anything else that has come before it. He is able to fuse jazz's visceral components with contemporary classical music's formal and harmonic methods in an utterly unselfconscious and therefore convincing way. The best of his work is on a level with any art music of the late 20th or early 21st centuries, jazz or classical.