Doek Festival blog #2

Braxton’s Birthday: Blog #2 by Kevin Whitehead
Photography by Sara Anke Morris

Anthony Braxton turns 70 today, 4 June 2015, and I may not have to tell you he will be celebrating in high style at the Bimhuis tonight, as part of the ongoing Doek Meets Tri-Centric festival. Braxton the saxophonist will be playing some of his recent Falling River Music—ensemble improvising guided or stimulated by his abstract images and open-ended narrative elements, a way to tap into the intuitive side of music-making. He will also conduct some of his classic music for large groups (including at least one piece, Composition 89, which as far as I can determine has never appeared on record). That first segment will mostly involve the nine musicians who came over with him from the United States; the latter pieces will be played by the full 20 piece Amero-Dutch ensemble. There will also be improvisations exploring the musical vocabularies Braxton has developed over 40-some years in creative music.

It is sure to be a good day, kicking off what is likely to be another good year. At 70 Braxton is sitting pretty. A year and a half ago he retired from academia, after 23 years at Wesleyan University (and a few years at Mills College before that)—something he’d been looking forward to, to give him more time to work on his compositions. A month later—after many years of being badmouthed by certain members of the jazz community (cough Wynton Marsalis cough) for his broad-minded ways, he was declared an official Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts, inducted at the same time as Keith Jarrett and others. Braxton’s spontaneous 25-minute acceptance speech—in which he namechecked such diverse heroes as Dave Brubeck and Cecil Taylor, doo-wop singer Frankie Lymon, singing cowboys the Sons of the Pioneers, and the University of Michigan halftime band—achieved instant notoriety, and can be found on YouTube.

Thanks to his Tri-Centric Foundation, principally administered by his trusty aide, festival co-coordinator and ace cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum, Braxton has been able to stage several operas from his ongoing Trillium cycle—playful, philosophical, even science-fictiony tales that explore his worldview, derived from his three volumes of Tri-Axium Writings from the 1980s. He’s always been incredibly productive, and shows no intention of slowing down.

Wednesday afternoon at Zaal 100, he conducted an open-to-the-public rehearsal of the big band/large ensemble music to be played in the Bimhuis tonight, and it was a great window into his operating method. His music can be dense and challenging, with melody lines that leap and zigzag and may begin on odd beats. But he has always favored robust interpretation with rough edges over note-perfect readings devoid of the right feeling. I daresay a little chaos around the edges suits his bustling esthetic.

He is great at setting the performers at ease, and giving them confidence to tackle such difficult music. Rehearsing sections of his boisterously swinging big-band opus Composition 92, at first he’d count the music off at a forbidding tempo, then on subsequent passes slow it down to a manageable level. “Okay—this is going to be fun,” he said, before moving on to the very different, chamber music-y Composition 56 (first heard under a graphic title as track 2 on his milestone album Creative Orchestra Music 1976). Here the time is floating, throughout the course of several notated episodes (to be interspersed with improvisations on the concert). Rehearsing Composition 89 with its collage effects—a piece “three-dimensional rather than linear”—he did his best to keep the interpreters’ enthusiasm in check. He directed them to perform it “in the pianissimo issimo issimo world.… Think in terms of transparency; if you can’t hear the piano or cello, you’re probably playing too loud. When indecision comes, default to the pianissimo.”

He lavishly complimented the players (with good reason—they are very fast learners). Two hours had been allotted for these run-throughs, but he called it a day well before that time ran out. Better that the music not be too fully cooked before the players hit the stage; he wants that creativity in the moment, to allow for surprising things to happen. “Now I think you have enough information to kick it about and have some fun—and to let it open up into a multi-dimensional space,” he told them. And finally, he told any multi-instrumentalists in the band to bring whatever instruments they would like: “I’m open to any variety of timbre that will come up.”

The players are primed, fully up to the challenge, and rarin’ to go. Okay—this is going to be fun.