The History of Jazz

by Ted Gioia

In contrast to the Art Ensembles’s motto of “Great Black Music,” Braxton daringly embraced European as well as African American visions of contemporary music and was not afraid to include Schoenberg, Webern, Cage, and Stockhausen among his influences, alongside Coltrane, Coleman, and Ayler. Further, he broke down the barriers between free and straight-ahead jazz, raising eyebrows by a series of “in the tradition” recordings featuring mainstream renditions of standards. He defied the dichotomies of white and black, still a stubbornly pervasive divide in the jazz world, by frequently lauding the music of Paul Desmond, Lee Konitz, and Warne Marsh and by working in racially diverse ensembles such as the Circle quartet (featuring Braxton, Chick Corea, Barry Altschul, and Dave Holland) or alongside Dave Brubeck, or with various European musicians. He ignored the categorization that separated free players into New York energy jazz advocates and Chicago sound landscapists. Finally, Braxton refused to recognize any conflict between the emotional and cerebral aspects of jazz, even inviting ridicule by his embrace of intellectual mannerisms— playing chess, smoking a pipe, dressing like an Ivy League academic, discoursing on philosophy, using pseudo-scientific diagrams rather than conventional titles for his compositions—a thoughtfulness that also permeated his music. One of the ironies of Braxton’s career was that his tearing down of these Berlin Walls within the jazz psyche, this ac...