ANTHONY BRAXTON THE COMPLETE ARISTA RECORDINGS OF ANTHONY BRAXTON (MOSAIC)
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In the early 70s there was still some overlap between progressive jazz and progressive rock, and jazz had a significantly larger popular audience than it does today—it wasn’t outlandish for a big label to expect to make money on a jazz reedist. And as trombonist and music scholar Mike Heffley writes in the box set’s extensive liner notes, Braxton “was once the prime candidate for the crossover marketing and promotion offered by a major label.” In some ways that’s hard to imagine now—Braxton, currently tenured at Wesleyan, has become famous for his hyperintellectual bent, the bruising rigor of his music, and his blatant disregard for marketability.
But the picture was different in ’74. At that point Braxton had already established his radical bona fides. He’d recorded the first-ever solo saxophone record, For Alto, for Delmark in 1969, and shortly afterward left Chicago for Paris as part of the crucial exodus by members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, that also included the Art Ensemble, Wadada Leo Smith, and Leroy Jenkins. But he’d also made his mastery of mainstream jazz perfectly clear—in ’70 and ’71 he’d played in Circle, a dynamite postbop collective with Holland, pianist Chick Corea, and drummer Barry Altschul, and in ’72 he appeared on Holland’s seminal ECM album Conference of the Birds. Corea became a crossover star shortly after Circle disbanded, and when Braxton returned to the States in ’74, having just recorded his first standards album in Denmark, Arista signed him.
Next came the sprawling three-LP set For Four Orchestras, recorded in May 1978, for which Braxton enlisted four conductors and four groups of 39 Oberlin College students—he composed its dense, challenging two-hour symphony but didn’t play in the massive multiple ensemble. He was clearly trying to take advantage of his major-label resources while he could, and Steve Backer, the forward-looking executive producer of the Arista jazz series, deserves credit for devoting time, energy, and money to such an over-the-top venture.
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