My entry point into the wide, wild wonderful world of Anthony Braxton came in the mid-80’s from a rather easily digestible album, Seven Standards 1985, Volume II. For that date backed by Hank Jones, Rufus Reid and Victor Lewis, Braxton’s renditions basked in these evergreen melodies, bopping and swinging with an easy confidence. I also liked the high reedy quality of Braxton’s alto saxophone. To this day, I regard these renditions of “Yardbird Suite” and “Moment’s Notice” as one of the more definitive ones.
As I later discovered, Anthony Braxton had been recording standards as a side project since the 70s and he returns to this from time to time (I also soon discovered that Braxton’s original works are another thing entirely, but that’s a whole separate discussion). He obviously believes that mastering the classics as a foundation for furthering the art form is an ongoing process even in his mid-seventies.
Braxton has been feeling nostalgic again for old, popular jazz tunes lately — even pop tunes, which I’ll get into below — and he scratched that itch in his grandest way yet. At the beginning of 2020 before the world shut down, Braxton toured Europe fronting a basic quartet the rest of whom all hail from the UK: Alexander Hawkins (piano), Neil Charles (bass) and Stephen Davis (drums). This provided the source for Quartet (Standards) 2020, a collection of sixty-seven tracks that takes twelve hours to listen through. There are more discs — 13 — than there are songs on most albums.
Braxton’s alto sax is as warm, comfortable and vibrant as I found it to be on his ’85 recordings. His trio make a point of presenting the timeless melodies in unmistakably identifiable ways and then sometimes later proceed to deconstruct them, doing so by varying degrees from song to song (one notable exception is “Thanks For The Memory,” where the theme is finally played after an extensive time spent outside). Because these are all performed live, there’s a looseness that’s a wide departure from the NEA Jazz Master’s intricately composed and arranged works, and you can sense he’s fully relishing letting his hair down in playing other people’s songs.
The term “standards” can be a nebulous one and it doesn’t always have to be ‘jazz’ standards. To be sure, Braxton draws several pieces each from Thelonious Monk, The Modern Jazz Quartet, Sonny Rollins, Dave Brubeck, even a couple from Paul Desmond’s Take Ten album and Andrew Hill’s Black Fire.
There is, however, one contemporary pop artist Braxton from which sourced material, for three songs: Paul Simon. Two Simon & Garfunkel songs are chosen for a re-cast: “The 59th Street Bridge Song” has the same happy-go-lucky bounce of the original and “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” is given a mid-tempo funk treatment.
There are a few more songs you won’t find in any jazz fakebook; Braxton is able to make his sax mimic the high pitched singing that characterizes the old Disney tune “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf” and even when he goes off script to improvise, the same cartoon-ish playfulness remains. Braxton even dipped into the Country & Western canon, performing the Oscar-winning song from High Noon, “Do Not Forsake Me, O My Darling.” That song gracefully breaks apart into freedom, remaining ever-slightly connected to the theme.
When Braxton covers Monk — as well as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Mingus — it’s a jazz radical of contemporary times paying homage to jazz radicals of a long-ago time. He doesn’t always chooses to play these songs ‘straight’, either; Mingus’ “Sue’s Changes” is presented as a bossa nova that soon goes into abstraction. Braxton and his band state the theme of Monk’s “Evidence” using their own pulse that differs a bit from the one Monk had imagined. But soon afterwards, the band blows it up and plays dispersed notes in its wake.
Anthony Braxton shows no sign of slowing down; just two weeks prior to the release of the 13-CD standards box set, he put out a 12-CD box set of fresh originals (12 Comp (ZIM) 2017). As he continues to push forward one of America’s greatest art forms, Braxton also takes opportunities to demonstrate just how jazz got to be so great. And there is no other living artist today who simultaneously does both with such authority.
Quartet (Standards) 2020 will be available on June 18, 2021 at New Braxton House.
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