Label: Delmark Records – DS-415
Format: Vinyl, LP, Album / Country: US / Released: 1968
Style: Free Jazz, Free Improvisation
Recorded at Sound Studios: Track A1 on March 27, 1968; Tracks B1 &
B2 on April 10, 1968.
Cover, Artwork – Zbigniew Jastrzebski
Liner Notes – John Litweiler
Photography By [Cover] – Ray Flerlage
Producer [Album Production And Supervision] –
Robert G. Koester
Recorded By – Ron Pickup
A - 840M (Realize)
................................................ 19:50
(Composed
By – Anthony Braxton)
B1 - N-M488-44M-Z
............................................... 12:50
(Composed
By – Anthony Braxton)
B2 - The Bell ...........................................................
10:20
(Composed
By – Leo Smith)
Anthony Braxton – alto, soprano saxophone,
clarinet, flute, bagpipes [musette], accordion,
bells, drums [snare], mixed
Muhal Richard Abrams – piano, cello, alto clarinet
Leo Smith – trumpet, mellophone, xylophone,
percussion [bottles], kazoo
Leroy Jenkins – violin,
viola, harmonica, bass drum, recorder, cymbal, whistle [slide]
Anthony Braxton’s
debut LP introduced an unconventional, often controversial new talent whose
career – spanning decades and still going, without nearly enough
attention, today – has been one of the most fascinating in jazz. At the
time this was recorded, Braxton was just under 23 years old, an affiliate of
the Chicago-based Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM),
which had been active (but barely documented on record) since 1965. The boldly
titled 3 Compositions of New Jazz was among the first
statements of the group, preceded by AACM co-founder Muhal Richard
Abrams’ Levels and Degrees of Light (on which Braxton made
his first recorded appearance; his own debut was his second) and some of the
albums that would lead to the formation of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, with
records by Roscoe Mitchell and Joseph Jarman featuring the extended AACM
family.
3 Compositions resonated
with the aesthetic being forged on these late ’60s albums. This was a radical
new sound in free jazz, paring back the unrelenting energy and frenzied blowing
sessions that had become de rigueur in
favor of space, extreme dynamics, humor, and versatility in both
instrumentation and style. Ironically, given the chilly reception with
which this scene was greeted at the time, Braxton’s late ’60s/early ’70s work
made in the orbit of the AACM was one of the last times in his career that the
iconoclast composer would actually fit comfortably into any larger tradition or
collective.
The AACM formed a solid foundation for Braxton’s
early musical experiments. He joined the group in 1966, immediately after
returning from a stint with the Army Band, stationed in South Korea. At this
point, the AACM was very active in Chicago, with a huge membership whose
activities frequently overlapped and intersected. Braxton played with many of
his AACM peers during this time, putting in his apprenticeship in the groups of
Abrams, Jarman, Mitchell, Gerald Donovan, and others. These groups weren’t
recorded and didn’t make much impact outside their hometown at the time, but
the wildly creative atmosphere encouraged Braxton to push himself; he was both
directly influenced by many of these musicians and inspired by them to come up
with his own unique contributions.
The AACM’s influence started to expand beyond
Chicago towards the end of the ’60s, as some documentation of these
musicians finally trickled out. From 1968-1970, Braxton recorded a string
of albums with likeminded musicians from the AACM. In particular, he formed a
regular trio with violinist Leroy Jenkins (who like Braxton had debuted
on Levels and Degrees) and trumpeter Leo Smith, sometimes
adding Abrams (as on the B-side of 3 Compositions) or
drummer Steve McCall. Once this group moved to Paris in mid-1969, they were
known, for a short time, as the Creative Construction Company, but while the
Art Ensemble (who also went abroad) flourished in that milieu, the CCC
quickly broke up and Braxton briefly gave up on music, moving to New York to
play chess.
Regardless, this was a vital and productive era for
all these musicians, who were rapidly developing new musical ideas and
expanding the possibilities of jazz, at times making music that pushed beyond
even the most liberally defined boundaries of the genre. Such concerns would be
a hallmark of Braxton’s career, and this album proves both a valuable document
of early AACM ideas and a first hint of Braxton’s own idiosyncratic aesthetic.
The Braxton/Jenkins/Smith trio was characterized,
like many of the AACM musicians, by their multi-instrumentalism, and none of
them stick to any one instrument for very long, particularly on this album’s
side-long first piece. Among other variations, Braxton and Jenkins insert
primitive drumming, Jenkins plays harmonica, Smith plays bottles, and Braxton plays
accordion and bells in addition to his saxophones and clarinet. This kind of
instrument-switching and insertion of unusual sound-making devices was a key
innovation of the early AACM. It enriches and complicates the texture of
the music, introducing novel and even lowly sounds, challenging the idea of
jazz virtuosity with a palette that’s as open to junk and clatter as it is to
speed-blurred sax solos. This trio was also, like the early Art Ensemble before
Don Moye joined, unmoored from rhythm by the absence of a regular drummer: all
the musicians contribute percussion, but there’s no one keeping time or
providing a steady percussive backdrop of any kind, so the music floats freely
and time seems to stretch while they’re playing.
The A-side of 3 Compositions is
a 20-minute piece written by Braxton, titled, like most of his
compositions, with a combination of graphic symbols and abbreviations, though
it’s easiest to refer to his work using the retroactively applied opus numbers;
this is “Composition No. 6E.” The LP opens with what might be thought of as the
“head” of the tune, except that it’s carried by the musicians harmonizing
“tra-la-la” and gradually adding instruments like slide whistle and kazoo. The
playful instrumentation on “6E” suggests this group’s determination to toy with
tradition. This piece, especially, was a remarkably risky way for the young
trio to introduce themselves. The music is spiky but languid, spacious but not
without momentary bursts of aggression. It’s meandering music that gradually
wanders its way into being.
The composition is a “vocal piece for trio,” a
likely callback to Braxton’s youthful love of doo-wop. That interest in
non-jazz forms of black music was another point of correspondence between
Braxton and the rest of the AACM musicians, one that’s not often attributed to
him. He’d subsequently come to be seen as quite distinct from the rest of the
AACM, and the Art Ensemble would be the group most known for gleefully mixing
R&B with jazz, but even from this early stage an awareness of, and
affection for, a broad spectrum of black music has always been one current
in Braxton’s music as well. (Braxton even toured with the soul duo Sam &
Dave in the mid-’60s, though they quickly fired him for playing too free.)
The vocals mostly appear at the beginning and end
of “6E,” as the group sings the theme in rough harmony, then echoes the melody
on a slide whistle with jangling bells in the background. From there, the
simple melody provides a jumping-off point for further elaborations and
improvisations. The basic structure isn’t too dissimilar from the
head-solos-head format of much earlier jazz, but the thematic material, and the
way the group approaches it, deviates substantially from what’s expected in the
form.
It takes almost two
minutes for Braxton to enter on sax, high and sweet, stating the melodic figure
more conventionally – and even then, his rich, full line is assaulted from
every side by Jenkins’ parodically simple harmonica, clanking percussion, and
continued out-of-tune mumbling/singing. After another couple of minutes of
this, Smith finally picks up his trumpet and Jenkins switches to violin,
meaning that it takes four minutes for all three players to actually play their
primary instruments.
Braxton, of course, drops out almost immediately to
play a crude martial drum beat. The music is constantly shifting in this
manner, with new combinations and textures being introduced at every moment.
There’s a sense of delightful, mischievous amateurishness to a lot of the proceedings;
all three men are masters of their main instruments, but they’re constantly
throwing so much else into the mix that it makes the very idea of instrumental
technique seem like a distant secondary concern at best. The music is balanced
between the strange beauty of its often submerged thematic material, the eerie,
haunting quality of many passages, and the charming humor with which the
musicians undercut and subvert those more serious, emotional currents.
There’s a particularly sublime passage almost
halfway through where Braxton, Smith and Jenkins actually do converge as a
sax/trumpet/violin trio. Smith’s guttural trumpet interjections prompt Braxton
to push his own line from melodic improvisations into squealing upper-register
explorations, and Jenkins joins with screechy violin patterns serving as a
makeshift rhythm section. The thick, dense sound becomes difficult to probe,
with the trio seamlessly melding their individual sounds into a single grand
clamor.
When, after all this woolly, wandering improvisation,
the “head” finally returns in recognizable form at the very end of the piece,
it beautifully completes the joke. The piece is both a parody of traditional
jazz structure and an affirmation of the form’s possibilities. “6E” at least
kind of sticks to the rules – its theme statements bracket group improvisation
– but it does so much within those loose boundaries that would never be
expected or tolerated in even the most “out” jazz performances of the time.
Abrams joined the trio for the record’s B-side,
which is split between another Braxton composition (“6D”) and Smith’s “The
Bell.” Abrams plays piano on “6D,” laying down a steady, almost unceasing bed
of frenzied chords, occasionally sweeping scales up the keyboard and generally
filling every available space. In Braxton’s terms, the piece is concerned with
“fast pulse relationships,” an apt summation of Abrams’ percussive playing
here. One of the only rests comes, with a sly wink, after the chaotic
10-second fanfare that opens the piece: a few seconds of dead silence, and then
it’s back to the maelstrom. Because of this constant foundation, this track
winds up being far less radical than “6E.” It’s a more conventionally
structured piece, especially by the standards of late ’60s free jazz: after the
initial chaos with everyone playing at once, the musicians politely take turns
soloing atop Abrams’ pounding base, sticking to their primary instruments and
laying out when another soloist is playing. This is not a structure that would
appear often in Braxton’s ouevre. Much of the challenge and originality of his
ensemble work is rooted in his quest for new structures and new
composition/improvisation and composer/performer balances within his music.
Even with only Abrams and one other musician playing
at any given time, the group makes an impressive racket. Smith is up first with
a concise, confident trumpet line, varying the dynamics between bold, clean
notes and passages that have a muffled quality, as though played from a
distance. These shifts actually work quite well with Abrams’ piano: the trumpet
vacillates between speaking clearly over the background or shyly letting its
statements disappear into the accompaniment. Jenkins’ violin solo, by contrast,
is lengthy and meandering, quickly running out of ideas as he scrapes the
strings in a manner that coheres all too well with Abrams’ relentless
virtuosity.
Unsurprisingly, Braxton’s alto sax solo is lively
and vibrant, flexibly shifting from rapid streams of notes to harsh squeals and
little playful asides before heading imperceptibly back to the main line.
Inspired by Abrams and AACM horn players like Mitchell and Jarman, Braxton was
starting to perform solo alto sax concerts around this time, and within a year
he’d record his landmark For Alto, a double
LP of solo saxophone music. Already it’s obvious that he’s something special as
a soloist, but Abrams doesn’t give him much room to play with the pacing or
dynamics. When Braxton pauses for effect, the space is merely filled in with
relentlessly hammering piano. Abrams’ own solo spot, at the end of the piece,
before another burst of chaotic group playing, varies a bit from the carpet of
sound, introducing some loping rhythms and dynamic shifts, but the overall
effect is still monotonous. If “6E” represented this band satirizing and
playfully expanding the parameters of late ’60s free jazz, “6D” finds them
cohering to the status quo, a rarity in Braxton’s work.
The final piece on the album is the Smith-penned
“The Bell,” which returns to the restraint and dynamics of the A-side, albeit
without quite the same raucous sense of humor. This is, rather, a stately and
relaxed piece that documents Smith – a great and sadly undervalued composer and
musician – at an early stage of his evolution, much as the rest of the album
does for Braxton.
The first half of the piece is dominated by
Jenkins’ violin, played gently and softly, emitting long, mournful tones that
quiver and fade. The other musicians similarly play in ways designed to let
tones decay and waver towards silence. Braxton inserts breathy, rustling sax
interjections, Smith plays slow, interrupted lines with plenty of space and
pauses, and Abrams switches between piano, cello, and clarinet but contributes
only momentary shadings no matter which instrument he’s on. The overall mood of
the music is hushed and expectant. In the second half, the sound becomes even
more sparse and pointillist, with occasional jarring horn blurts intentionally
adding an uneasy quality, shattering the peace. A metronome ticks away
relentlessly in the background, setting the steady time that would usually be
supplied by a conventional rhythm section; here, the group seemingly ignores
even that rudimentary rhythm, setting their own patient pace.
Despite its quietness and seeming simplicity, this
is intense, involving music, torn between serenity and tension, playing with
space and silence in ways that anticipate Smith’s subsequent ’70s recordings,
both solo and as leader of the shifting-membership ensemble New Dalta Ahkri.
It’s much less indicative of the directions in which Braxton himself would head
after his initial forays under the AACM aegis. As a result, the inclusion of
this piece here adds to the album’s eclecticism and contributes to the sense
that it’s a true document of a few different currents within the varied early
AACM, not just a snapshot of the young Braxton’s interests.
Indeed, the AACM is so fascinating precisely
because it represented the intersection of so many strong, individualist
visions, so many musicians pursuing their own ideas in many different ways,
united mainly by a commitment to following their own idiosyncratic visions,
rather than by the specifics of the visions. 3 Compositions is
notable for introducing Braxton, one of jazz’s most singular composers and
musicians, but with the input of Smith, Jenkins, and Abrams (the latter a
crucial mentor to all these musicians and many more) it’s also a valuable
cross-section of the AACM during its unruly, inventive, under-documented first
phase, before the collective, with all its disparate intellects and ideas,
became virtually synonymous with the Art Ensemble of Chicago.
50 Years of AACM - Association for the Advancement
of Creative Musicians
If you find it, buy
this album!
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