Anthony Braxton

The mid-'60s formation of Chicago's musician collective, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), proved a watershed event for jazz, providing a springboard for some of the next few decades' most influential performers, including the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Muhal Richard Abrams, and Anthony Braxton. In many ways, Braxton's Three Compositions of New Jazz is that movement's manifesto. Seeking a new degree of abstraction and purity, Braxton opted to eschew drums or bass on these small group sessions, urging the musicians to concentrate on ensemble textures rather than tempo, forcing them to listen and interact without the support of steady, preconceived rhythms and melodies. The lineup, which includes pianist Muhal Richard Abrams on one side, and trumpeter Leo Smith and violinist Leroy Jenkins throughout, produces music that is at once organic and totally unlike the typical notion of a song or performance. Even Braxton's system of titling his work is radical: he assigns diagrams and numbers to each performance rather than a name. Braxton, who would become one of the most recorded composer/performers of the '70s and '80s, demonstrates a warmth of playing here that was often absent in his later albums.