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November 2009
yes, even if the job spec is left at its most open. Braxton’s aim, to provide aesthetic form for the highest thought of which one is capable, is absolutely instinct with the nature of ‘composition’. For more than forty years now, Anthony Braxton has shaped a body of work which at a quick glance seems to divide into the episodic immediacy of post-bop jazz and a corpus of work whose eye rests on posterity. At 65 (the anniversary falls in 2010) Braxton is one of the most important composers at work today, not because he navigates apart from the familiar stylistic islands but because, Odysseus-like, he has visited most of them already, and escaped. ‘New Complexity’? He has been there. ‘Minimalism’, ‘Reductionism’, ‘post-jazz’: landfall on all of them, and unnerving adventure on most. There is some small satisfaction in seeing that twenty years after taking flak for having included him in a run of composers that included Bernstein, Boulez, Brant (and Braxton is one of the rare few to cite the Canadian as an influence), Bryars and Bussotti, no one much questions his right to be
HCMF 2009
there any more. It has been a long and slow process of recognition, but Braxton no longer requires a cabaret card. His work reaches across genre and across continents. Whether it yet reaches out beyond planet Earth into those empty spaces he once promised to fill remains to be seen. HCMF’s focus on Anthony Braxton runs 20-22 November. www.hcmf.co.uk