Anthony Braxton - For Alto (1972 Japanese Delmark / Trio Records Gatefold 2LP)

Vinyl: EX/EX
Sleeve: VG+
Obi: VG+

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Anthony Braxton - For Alto | 2 x Vinyl LP - 1972 Japanese Delmark / Trio Records (PA-7021~2, Trio Electronics, Inc.)

Anthony Braxton recorded "For Alto" in the summer of 1969 in the basement of the Parkway Community Center on Chicago's South Side, playing entirely alone with no other musicians, no overdubs, and no fixed compositional framework in the conventional sense. He was twenty-three and had been a member of the AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians) for several years alongside Muhal Richard Abrams, Roscoe Mitchell, Leroy Jenkins, and Wadada Leo Smith. The eight pieces on the double LP are each dedicated to a figure from Braxton's personal and artistic world: composer John Cage, pianist Cecil Taylor, multi-instrumentalist Leroy Jenkins, and several friends and colleagues who were part of the Chicago creative music scene. The music that Braxton makes across the record is genuinely difficult to characterise. It draws on Charlie Parker's bebop fluency, on the extended techniques and extended structures of Cage and the post-war European avant-garde, and on the free improvisation approaches that Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler had developed in the preceding decade. The piece dedicated to John Cage, which occupies all of side B on disc one, is the most extreme: a sustained, shifting exploration of the saxophone's tonal range that uses breath control, multiphonics, and extreme register shifts as structural devices. Coleman Hawkins had recorded an unaccompanied saxophone piece, "Picasso", in 1948, but nothing of this duration and ambition had been attempted before. Delmark released the album in 1971; the critical response was divided, and some established jazz musicians, including bebop alto saxophonist Phil Woods, were dismissive. The subsequent history of solo saxophone recording, from Joe McPhee and Evan Parker onward, is a direct continuation of what Braxton opened here.

Delmark Records, Chicago's independent jazz and blues label founded by Robert G. Koester, licensed the album to Trio Electronics in Japan for the 1972 pressing that forms part of their dedicated Chicago A.A.C.M. Series. Trio Records had been systematically documenting the Chicago avant-garde for Japanese audiences who had shown a consistent appetite for the more demanding end of American jazz, and this pressing was issued the year after the original US edition appeared. The cover photography is by Peter Blue, the cover design by Zbigniew Jastrzebski (who also worked on the original US release), and the pressing includes Japanese liner notes not present in the Delmark original. The album was produced by Koester and recorded by Braxton himself.