Anthony Braxton - For Alto
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Artist: Anthony BraxtonBrand: BRAXTON,ANTHONY
Edition: Music CD
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language)
CD Release Date: 2000-07-25
Music Label: Delmark
Soundtracks:
- Dedicated To Multi-Instrumentalist Jack Gell
- To Composer John Cage
- To Artist Murray De Pillars
- To Pianist Cecil Taylor
- Dedicated To Ann And Peter Allen
- Dedicated To Susan Axelrod
- To My Friend Kenny McKenny
- Dedicated To Multi-Instrumentalist Leroy Jenkins
Music reviews of For Alto
Music Review: A little history for ya.
Rating: 5 Stars
I thought I would provide a little history on this CD and its reception before I offer some mildly phrased opinions.
I had thought the story behind For Alto was fairly well known but maybe not. I believe I read about this in Forces in Motion by Graham Locke. If you are interested in anything AB, that is a good place to start. I am going off memory since I cannot find my copy so if I misrepresent what happened, please correct me in the comments.
Anyway, sometime back around 1967, AB was giving a solo sax concert in Chicago and found himself nonplussed. He had thought it would be easy to improvise soli for an hour or so but found himself very quickly repeating himself.
The result was a period of practise wherein he developed his saxophone languages concept. If I remember correctly, AB came up with the idea of using certain qualities of saxophone sound as the basis for improvisation. "Buzzing" was one of them, I think "trills" was another.
These pieces are the result.
This CD fell on the jazz public, media and fellow musicians like a bomb. I bought a copy of the double CD back in early 1969 and I had the usual reaction to it. Some of it I didn't understand at all and some of it I loved. But I kept listening to it (along with a ton of other stuff that annoyed my parents no end).
The controversy over AB's music can be gauged by following his rep in Downbeat from that period. They ignored him until he started appearing in their Talent Polls. This CD was not reviewed until 4 or 5 years after it appeared! The writers and many of AB's fellow musicians complained about his tone or his fingering or ego or his sanity.
Here is the deal. This is not music that is meant to entertain. It is meant to challenge, to educate, to explore, to suggest and to foster change. Not least, to foster change in the way we hear the possibilities of what are musical materials. Not least, to change how we hear the possibility of melody and what is harmonious. The pieces that the other reviewers complain about, the ones dedicated to Cage and Jenkins are not what I listen to everyday but when I do I still love them. They still sound radical and fresh. The Cage piece in particular still sounds incredibly skillful, oddly melodious and fascinating.
If you are new to AB or to solo sax, I recommend the later CDs of his devoted to his solo work. Something like Wesleyan (12 Alto Solos)1992 or Solo Willisau. They are more accessible. But if you have the courage to musically explore then, for the love of doG, get thee a copy of this bad boy and listen to it. Then wait a month or two and listen to it again. And then wait another month or two and do it again. You may never learn to really tap your feet to it but it will change the way you hear the possible in music.
Mingus did one of Downbeat's Blindfold tests in 1960 during which he insisted on commenting on Ornette Coleman. He concluded by saying, "I'm not saying everybody's going to have to play like Coleman but they're going to have to stop copying Bird." (Quoted from George Lewis's A Power Stronger Than Itself, p.46). Well, I'm not saying you have to like AB or enjoy what he does, but I am saying that AB and his AACM associates changed the music. This CD is a masterpiece. Whether you like it or not.
Description of For Alto
Recorded in 1969, this historic album was the very first lengthy document of solo saxophone improvisation. Originally available as a 2 LP set, all 73 minutes are now on one CD. When initially issued, For Alto received a five star rating in Down Beat which called the album ''revolutionary''.A review of the LP re-issue in Downbeat read ''Though For Alto was only Braxton's second recording, his solo vocabulary of multiphonics, pointillistic intervals, and scalar lyricism was already in place. This set of breathy balladic fragments, streams of molten sound, and reconstituted blues elements has stood the test of time.''
Originally released as a two-LP set in 1969, For Alto is 73 minutes of unaccompanied saxophone solos by a young musician issuing just his second recording under his own name. Solo saxophone was then a rarefied tradition in jazz. Coleman Hawkins had done it once in the 1940s and Sonny Rollins in the '50s. More to the point, Eric Dolphy and Jimmy Giuffre had done it a few times in the early 1960s. Braxton was being more than brash, however, and doing something very different. He was applying fresh structural concepts to sustain extended improvisations, and he was exploring John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, as well as the jazz tradition, to mark a new direction in the avant-garde.
Forgoing the "energy music" school, Braxton was exploring silence, noise, and forms of serialism with an analytical, almost sculptural, approach to sound. Each piece here explores a different approach or set of materials. There's buzz-saw saxophone on "To Composer John Cage," while "To pianist Cecil Taylor" is heartfelt blues that delves back before bebop for its sources. Tracks 5 and 6 are breathy, extended improvisations, the former exploring pianissimo understatement, and the latter developing elliptical complexity, with both drawing on and redirecting the jazz-ballad tradition. The concluding piece, nearly 20 minutes long, builds dialogue from contrasts between brittle, abrasive overblowing and the merest suggestions of notes. For Alto is one of those rare works that point to new possibilities, and it's been one of the most influential recordings of the past 30 years. It remains brilliant, challenging--perhaps even daunting--music. --Stuart Broomer
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