Anthony Braxton - The Fred Simmons Trio
9 Standards (Quartet) 1993
Anthony Braxton opens this one with a blues on alto. And does he play the blues. Not the neat, buttoned-down, arrogantly self-possessed kind of blues that epitomized jazz in the '90s, but the dirty, lowdown, heavily expressionistic blues that hearkens back to the music's beginning -- a blues that communicates something more than just an attitude. It's not slick, it's not pretty, but it's eminently real. This double-disc set, recorded live at Wesleyan University with the quite capable straightahe…