Anthony Braxton
Live

Honestly, it wasn't in my plans to write this review, but tonight I found myself in a semi-sleep laden with ideas related to the theme of improvisation, accompanied by the memory of this album which, ironically, isn't exactly improvised.

So, let's leave the discussions about improvisation for another review, even though Braxton is a master of it, and let's try to understand something about these six compositions performed live.

Well! It's not easy at all. First, because if they weren't literally called compositions and if in some moments of them a certain flow, accompanied by perfect coordination among the musicians, wasn't recognizable, I could certainly have thought they were improvisations. Second, because instead of giving them simple titles, our anti-hero of simplicity identifies them with drawings made of geometric shapes connected by continuous and/or dashed lines, letters, and numbers.

The six compositions are divided into four tracks, the first two were performed live at the Montreux Jazz Festival in '75 and the last two in Berlin in '76. The musicians featuring with Braxton are the same ones who emerged from the experimental group "Circle" after Chick Corea dissolved it to form "Return to Forever," namely the great Dave Holland on bass and Barry Altschul on drums. Accompanying the trio is Kenny Wheeler on trumpet in the first part and a then-young George Lewis on trombone, a musician who, in my opinion, deserves more visibility.

It's no light task to approach Braxton's music; I had to work hard to familiarize myself with it, and for those who indulge in rapid listens, download and discard, it's not recommended at all. However, for those who are well-equipped with patience, trained ears, and an open disposition, listening is recommended. In the compositions, we can indeed find moments of relative immediacy, extreme complexity, and episodes, albeit limited, in which our artist regurgitates primordial sounds from his instruments, particularly unusual and profound are those coming from his contrabass sax.

Of course, to be a good connoisseur of jazz and its surroundings, one must chew on a lot of it and perhaps not indulge in too many genres of listening. I don't count myself among these, so forgive me for any shortcomings; I just wanted to contribute to embedding a few precious stones in the Debaserian crown.

Braxton is a first-rate musician, wonderfully in symbiosis with his instruments, gifting us sounds generously for those who know how to collect them patiently. I know among you there are many Zornians; you cannot shy away from Braxton's sax nor ignore the talent of Ornette Coleman. Perhaps the two greatest "desecrators" of reeds.