JAZZTIMES: YOU WERE RECENTLY NAMED AN NEA JAZZ MASTER. HOW DO YOU FIT INTO THE JAZZ WORLD?ANTHONY BRAXTON: In the last 40 years or so, I would come to refer to my music as “creative music.” That phrase conjures up trans-idiomatic possibilities as opposed to idiomatic possibilities. Even so, I am connected to the jazz tradition in the sense of growing up with that music. My connection to the jazz world would involve my interest in improvisation on the Tri-plane, that being extended improvisation, collective improvisation and synchronous improvisation, and I’ve tried, with other areas of my music, to look for ways to bring about elastic structural possibilities.All of this is connected to looking at the real-time moment in a way that is very different from my influences in the trans-world music tradition, which also contains improvisation. But I think the music that we call jazz is a uniquely American projection, in the sense of giving the individual more opportunities to be an individual inside of a collective space. So yes, I see my work as having a continued jazz influence—as one component of the influences that have helped me to find my own voice.HOW DID YOU BECOME INTERESTED IN SPIRITUAL MUSIC?As a young man, I was profoundly influenced by composers like Arnold Schoenberg, Alexander Scriabin, the great work of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Iannis Xenakis and, of course, John Cage and Alvin Lucier. I have never been a serialist, but I have been a geometrist in the sense of building structures and language. And as I came to this juncture in my life at 40 years old, I began to look for something more than intellectually interesting—something that would also have a spiritual component. At Wesleyan, I started taking classes on Native American musics and looking into the world of trance musics, looking for something more than intellectual, existential models. It would be at that point that I began to build what I now call the holistic structures.Fonte:
http://jazztimes.com/articles/132479-anthony-braxton-an-american-visionary