Time and Anthony Braxton

Anthony Braxton may be the greatest creative force in contemporary music as well as one of the most controversial. In a forty-year career, he has reinterpreted most of the jazz repertoire while composing at the pace of Bach or Mozart.

Front cover photo by Martin Morissette: Anthony Braxton at FIMAV, Victoriaville, Quebec, May 20, 2007.

A musical futurist projecting multiple orchestras playing on different planets, Braxton has played duets with bop pioneer Max Roach, conducted his own opera and sat in with anarcho-punk noise band Wolf Eyes.

In Time and Anthony Braxton, Stuart Broomer looks insistently at time, whether in the shape of jazz history, time’s relationship to pitch, or the unique ways in which Braxton constructs the musical moment. In approaching the dense weave of Braxton’s musical thought, Broomer references figures like Nicola Tesla, St. Augustine of Hippo, Ezra Pound, and Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers.