Braxton

can someone help explain the ethos of this guy? he's always called "free jazz" or "free improvisation" but his song titles and album covers always have some weird algebraic shit that make me think there is a method to his madness other than just dynamic contrast and overblowing

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It's your typical WE WUZ MATHEMATICIANS shit, it doesn't actually mean anything

I mean it has as much meaning as you want it to have. Free Jazz is just having the freedom to play what ever you want in a jazz setting.

i know what free jazz is. i'm basically asking "what did he mean by this" referring to his song titles and musical philosophy

>Free Jazz is just having the freedom to play what ever you want in a jazz setting
Pic related

>"what did he mean by this" referring to his song titles and musical philosophy
He's trash, Graphic notation is so gimicky. While I do appreciate what you can do with serialism and even indeterminacy, only a hack uses it often. The reason he named his pieces drawings is because he want's to seem smart and unique. He's trash and one of the absolute worst least interesting musicians to play Free Jazz or really any of the genres that spawned off from the post-bop/hard bop era.

Spotted the jazz puritan. Conference of the Birds was a great album even though it was lead by Dave Holland. Now, I'm going to listen to some free improvisation. Wanna join, Stanley Crouch?

>Graphic notation is so gimicky

I'm guessing you're not a Cornelius Cardew fan either lol. I think graphic notation is interesting if there's some symbolic logic between what is written and what is played.

>Spotted the jazz puritan
I mean yeah the more I listen to jazz the more I'm drawn to post-bop, cool jazz, hard bop and the 50's and 60's avant-garde/free jazz stuff. But I do enjoy some "European" free jazz and even free improvisation. I just take issue with that when someone like say John Zorn goes, were making a free improv record and the record gives you nothing new from record to record. Like there comes a point to where you can credit yourself and not the other people actually creating the music so many times and not consider it stealing. Like it's kind of infuriating to be honest. Maybe once or two times, but multiple times.. Come on bru. It's more like being lazy.

But as for Anthony, outside of maybe adding techniques to the saxophone, like a Derek Bailey, his music is super weak. His best record is that Donna Lee album.

>Cornelius Cardew
To be fair I have not heard enough by him so I don't want to speak on him. But I will say I can see some things like, oh this is a cool idea lets try this out. I even have a piece I wrote for school that was a chance piece but it had specific rules and had a very clear direction. The chance came in the players and what instruments and some other things but it was chance lite.

But I then I had to do a piece what was graphic and I was so pissed because I would rather just leave it vague and let the person interpenetrating it do their thing than draw a picture and pretend it's great art. You know. But I haven't listened to Cardew enough so I don't again want to call him anything without first knowing I guess.

Is that Richard Ayoade?

>Derek Bailey
>weak
groan

doens't read
>But as for Anthony, outside of maybe adding techniques to the saxophone, like a Derek Bailey
Probably should have put a period. But I was more talking about how saxophone players might listen and go, you can do that. Much how guitar players do for Derek or can. I never said he was good or bad.

YEAH MAN fuck high concepts in art, fuck progression of sounds and styles, fuck innovation and experimentation, gimme that good all 40s bebop that I can DANCE to all day bro! God free jazz fans are so pretentious, where's my bowl??

who would you recommend for free jazz then?

Oh okay. Your punctuation caused me to misread it then because that clause after the mention of Bailey came across as a dig at his music but appreciation of his technical additions to the instrument. I gotcha

Free jazz as a high art concept is a lil silly since its goal was a return to the African roots of free improv and not giving a fuck desu

Art Ensemble of Chicago is essential free jazz

I think the best way to explain is though a quick history lesson.

So jazz began around the early 1900's. We had swing, ragtime, dixieland, big band yah dah yah dah yad dah. Okay so lets fast forward to Bebop, which was a big deal because it expanded the harmonic vocabulary and kind of set up what would be the golden era of jazz with the set up. So in response to this we had Cool Jazz, which was a more laid back take on Jazz, come out and later Modal Jazz (using modes), Hard Bop (in simplest terms more blues and 'rocking' think Art Blakey) and Post-bop (sort of lite free jazz).

I really don't know how to describe Post-bop as anything other than a mix of like modal and hard bop and kind of a step before avant-garde jazz.

So then Avant-garde Jazz comes in and it uses weird rhythms, harmonies, melodies (think Ornette Coleman on his Shapes of Jazz record) or Out to Lunch!

The reason Free Jazz is free jazz though is because it still follows the jazz "rules" set up for it but it's a lot loose and freer. You can also say some of the melodies have a free feeling to them. But it's not simply playing whatever you want in a jazz setting. You still kind of follow the rules, just very loosely. It's the precursor to the free improvisation that got rid of everything.

Hopefully this makes sense because I think the best way to differentiate is just being able to pick up on what you hear and what's going on and kind of exposure.

It's all good, yeah that was my mistake.
Also I can't get into the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and ironically I'm from Chicago.

I'd suggest

*Ornette
*Cecil
*Andrew Hill
*Don Cherry
*Manfred Schoof (has a great record with Derek Bailey and Evan Parker and all the heavy hitters of the European Free Jazz scene)
*Sun Ra
*Albert Ayler
*Coltrane
*Frank Lowe (had a record I liked which is the first album John Zorn played on)
*

I like the AEOC musicians more solo than together—Roscoe Mitchell has some cool albums and an amazing 20 minute piece on one of the Wildflowers comps of those live recordings from Sam Rivers’ loft. Lester Bowie has a great one called Ropeadope too.

>Manfred Schoof
nice. Don’t hear him too often but his shit in the 70s/80s is phenomenal

I’d contribute Chick Corea’s early work to the list too because he was a madman before Scientology got to him

>his son is Tyondai Braxton of Battles
How can one family be so based?

Can someone explain who his songs are free jazz or what ever?
It just sound like random garlic noises to me, if someone record their kid blasting a piano is jazz? or i suppose to take it with the "the intentions is important" meme here?
I like jazz but anyways i dont have musical education...

>Hack, trash, trash, trash, trash
You could've at least tried to be taken somewhat seriously.

What do you think of Peter Brotzmann, Despite being associated with European free improv, he still follows some of the American free jazz despite being some of the most ferocious and noisy music in the genre. Machine Gun is my favorite free jazz album of all time so I'm biased, but I love how bombastic it is.

As for Cornelius Cardew, he has a piece called Treatise, which contains 193 pages of graphic score and most performances only focus on a page at a time. He was also in the free improv group AMM with Keith Rowe, Lou Gare and Eddie Prevost. He went crazy during the seventies, became a Maoist and went on about how avant-garde music is "imperialist" or some bullshit.

kek

I've only understood Derek Bailey today and that's when I've actually tried playing one of his compositions. His music is extraordinary unintuitive to be played on guitar. It makes perfect sense, given that he's had to reinvent the instrument for himself by transcribing Webern when he started.
youtu.be/YkrM1djDWiU
Playing this aggressively and increasingly loud makes those pieces sound chaotic and like they could be performed by a random person on the street.

Someone explain indeterminancy to me pls

post an example cover

well, it depends

rateyourmusic.com/release/album/anthony-braxton/anthony-braxton-b-x-n-o-i-47ᴬ/

or just read any of the liner notes from his albums

tricentricfoundation.org/musical-systems

Thank you for this. The boundary between free improv and free jazz was always sketchy to me.

I actually love Peter, fucking Machine Gun hits harder than some metal music. While I still got a ways to go to dent the discography, those first 5 albums (For Adolphe Sax-Brotzmann/Van Hove/Bennink) are classics and all great in their own way. The rush is amazing.

He's one of the players, like Evan Parker, Coltrane and Eric Dolphy, where I'd check out a record solely for the fact they're a side man on it

I never knew about the Webern transcription thing but that makes sense. yeah I'm a guitarist, though I'm much better at composing, but yeah I do dig a number of his records.

see
those are both me XD. And yeah I know I enjoy those first three solo records the most. Return to Forever does have solid stuff but I'm not as into fusion as I used to be. Not dissing it, just saying I've grow apart form it so to say.

Manfred is great, I actually dig him so much I've made it my mission to listen to all his records and to make sure I have them all tagged on RYM so I can. It's a shame the only record on streaming is European Echoes. But I have downloaded a vast majority of his albums (just need to listen front to back though most).

Heartplants is a great record he plays on and wrote a track for (it's a Gunter Hampel record)

Just don’t listen to it

I mean I think the best way would be to do this
rateyourmusic.com/artist/anthony-braxton
now look for the records that are tagged free jazz