Anthony Braxton

Anthony Braxton (born June 4, 1945) is a composer, multi-reedist and pianist. He has created a large body of highly complex work. Much of Braxton's music is jazz oriented, but he has also been active in free improvisation and orchestr

Anthony Braxton (born June 4, 1945) is a composer, multi-reedist and pianist. He has created a large body of highly complex work. Much of Braxton's music is jazz oriented, but he has also been active in free improvisation and orchestral music, and has written operas. Among the vast array of woodwind instruments he utilizes are the sopranino, soprano, F alto, E-flat alto, baritone, bass, and contrabass saxophones; and the E-flat, B-flat, and contrabass clarinets.

One critic has written that "Although Braxton exhibited a genuine — if highly idiosyncratic — ability to play older forms (influenced especially by saxophonists Warne Marsh, John Coltrane, Paul Desmond, and Eric Dolphy), he was never really accepted by the jazz establishment, due to his manifest infatuation with the practices of such non-jazz artists as John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Many of the mainstream's most popular musicians (Wynton Marsalis among them) insisted that Braxton's music was not jazz at all. Whatever one calls it, however, there is no questioning the originality of his vision; Anthony Braxton created music of enormous sophistication and passion that was unlike anything else that had come before it."