Anthony Braxton - Quartet (GTM) 2006 - 4CD

This specially priced 4xCD box set is packaged in a deluxe ten-panel digipak with a twelve page essay from Anthony Braxton.

Quartet (GTM) 2006 is Anthony Braxton's first release for Important Records. GTM stands for Ghost Trance Music and this four cd box set contains four Ghost Trance compositions recorded in quartet with Anthony Braxton playing reeds, Carl Testa on bass, Aaron Siegal on percussion and Max Heath on piano. This 4xCD box also contains a definitive essay by Braxton on his Ghost Trance compositions.

Anthony Braxton (born June 4, 1945 in Chicago) is an American composer, saxophonist, clarinettist, flautist, pianist and philosopher. Inspired by John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen as much as by John Coltrane and Charlie Parker, Anthony Braxton has crafted an immense body of highly complex work. Though Braxton is hardly known to the casual listener, he is certainly one of the most prolific American musicians/composers to date, having released well over 100 albums since the 1960s. In 1994 he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. Braxton plays a multitude of instruments including the flute; the sopranino, soprano, C-Melody, F alto, E-flat alto, baritone, bass, and contrabass saxophones; and the E-flat, B-flat, and contrabass clarinets.

Early in his career, along with trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith and violinist Leroy Jenkins, Braxton led a trio and was involved with the AACM, or the Association For the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Never genuinely accepted into the Jazz establishment, the Association was aptly titled. In 1968 Braxton recorded the highly influential For Alto, the first full length album for unaccompanied saxophone.

Braxton joined pianist Chick Corea's existing trio with Dave Holland (double bass) and Barry Altschul (drums) to form the short-lived avant-garde quartet "Circle," around 1970. When Corea broke the group up to form Return to Forever and pursue a fusion-based style of composition and recording, Holland and Altschul remained with Braxton for much of the 1970s as part of a quartet, with the rotating brass chair variously filled by trumpeter Kenny Wheeler, or trombonists George Lewis or Ray Anderson. This group recorded on Arista Records. The core trio plus saxophonist Sam Rivers recorded Holland's Conference of the Birds (ECM). In the 1970s he also recorded duets with Lewis and with synthesizer player Richard Teitelbaum. In the late 1970s he recorded two large ensemble recordings, "Creative Orchestra Music 1976," inspired by American jazz and marching band traditions, and "For Four Orchestras." Both of these records were released on Arista.

Anthony Braxton studied pilosophy at Roosevelt University in Chicago. He has taught at Mills College and is now a a Professor of Music at Wesleyan University. He teaches music history, improvisation and music composition.