Anthony Braxton

Anthony Braxton’s research into the possibilities of lineage present an audio snapshot of jazz music as a continuous arc that has had its reference points in sometimes uncomfortable juxtapositions. Braxton and his ensemble have consolidated a major chunk of the trajectory that jazz-inflected music has taken and presented it as a seamless performance. In this 70-plus-minute concert, programmed as part of the 2007 Victoriaville Festival, one hears logical extensions of Ellingtonia, as they might meet in one of the best of the Third Stream movement’s work: Jazz Abstractions by Gunther Schuller. This is made notable in Braxton’s sophisticated fusion of composed music in relation to fully improvised sections accessed by conduction. There are skronk solos juxtaposed with meditative ensemble playing, various groupings of players emerging and submerging out of the whole, as well as full measures of density, space, atonality and consonance. Above all, there is the unified sound of a band that have a thorough understanding of the materials and method of Braxton’s sound world. The integration of all these elements in context provides one of the best examples of the true possibility of the music we have come to know as jazz.