Critical Alchemy; Anthony Braxton and the Imagined Tradition

This chapter draws on the analysis of musical improvisation, as practiced within “free jazz,” in order to shed light on a politics of the multitudes. It suggests that we should consider media-intensive Western “democracies” as “mediocracies,” within which political affects are carried through the communication of gestures. A Spinozist analysis of collective agency in societies of control leads to articulating nine steps toward a political sharpening of the reference to “improvisation.” For politics to benefit from the powers unleashed and theorized by improvisers, it needs to devise a new vocabulary and a new imaginary of human cooperation, which this chapter attempts to sketch in its broadest lines, inspired by authors and creators like Guerino Mazzola, Anthony Braxton, Derek Bailey, Lawrence “Butch” Morris, Michel Foucault, Bruno Latour, and Antonio Negri.

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Traditionalists and Postmodernists

The History of Jazz ◽

10.1093/oso/9780190087210.003.0009 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 447-476

Author(s):

Ted Gioia

Keyword(s):

New Music ◽

Jazz Music ◽

The Future ◽

Younger Generation ◽

Traditional Approaches ◽

First Time ◽

Mix And Match ◽

Anthony Braxton

In the 1980s, more traditional approaches to jazz reasserted themselves, most notably in the work of trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. For the first time in the music’s history, the most celebrated jazz artist of the younger generation seemed just as determined to celebrate the genre’s past as forge a new path into the future—and the resulting tension stirred up the still simmering jazz wars. But Marsalis’s ascendancy was only part of a much larger reassertion of the importance of the history and tradition in jazz music, which also included the rise of record labels such as Pablo and Concord, focused on mainstream swing and bop styles. At the same time a more experimental postmodern movement emerged in jazz, also drawing on past styles, but in a more deconstructive and playful mix-and-match manner. This chapter explores these two ways of integrating the jazz tradition into new music, and covers key artists such as the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Carla Bley, Anthony Braxton, and John Zorn.

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