Anthony Braxton (born June 4, 1945) is an American composer, multi-reedist and pianist.

He has created a large body of highly complex work. Much of Braxton’s music is jazz oriented, but he has also been active in free improvisation and orchestral music, and has written operas. Among the vast array of instruments he utilizes are the flute, the sopranino, soprano, F alto, E-flat alto, baritone, bass, and contrabass saxophones; and the E-flat, B-flat, and contrabass clarinets.

Critic Chris Kelsey writes that “Although Braxton exhibited a genuine — if highly idiosyncratic — ability to play older forms (influenced especially by saxophonists Warne Marsh, John Coltrane, Paul Desmond, and Eric Dolphy), he was never really accepted by the jazz establishment, due to his manifest infatuation with the practices of such non-jazz artists as John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen [and though Kelsey doesn’t mention it, Braxton has long been interested in Arnold Schoenberg’s music]. Many of the mainstream’s most popular musicians (Wynton Marsalis among them) insisted that Braxton’s music was not jazz at all. Whatever one calls it, however... (+) expand

Anthony Braxton (born June 4, 1945) is an American composer, multi-reedist and pianist.

He has created a large body of highly complex work. Much of Braxton’s music is jazz oriented, but he has also been active in free improvisation and orchestral music, and has written operas. Among the vast array of instruments he utilizes are the flute, the sopranino, soprano, F alto, E-flat alto, baritone, bass, and contrabass saxophones; and the E-flat, B-flat, and contrabass clarinets.

Critic Chris Kelsey writes that “Although Braxton exhibited a genuine — if highly idiosyncratic — ability to play older forms (influenced especially by saxophonists Warne Marsh, John Coltrane, Paul Desmond, and Eric Dolphy), he was never really accepted by the jazz establishment, due to his manifest infatuation with the practices of such non-jazz artists as John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen [and though Kelsey doesn’t mention it, Braxton has long been interested in Arnold Schoenberg’s music]. Many of the mainstream’s most popular musicians (Wynton Marsalis among them) insisted that Braxton’s music was not jazz at all. Whatever one calls it, however, there is no questioning the originality of his vision; Anthony Braxton created music of enormous sophistication and passion that was unlike anything else that had come before it.” It is important to note that even Braxton himself does not consider his works ‘jazz’. In a 1998 radio interview, he claimed he liked the term ‘creative music’ better, and it stuck.

Braxton is notorious for naming his pieces as diagrams—often with no textual or numeric titles. Some of these diagrams indicate positions of the performers in the piece, a variation on aleatory music that presaged his follower John Zorn’s “game pieces.”

As of early 2007, Braxton has finished composing his Ghost Trance Music pieces, and is now moving on to his Diamond Curtain Wall (his venture into electronic composition) and Falling River (his compositions meant to construct “dream states”) musics. He has also recently mentioned an even newer music system, called Echo Echo Mirror House Musics, which is to unify many art disciplines into one composition/performance.

Moreover, Braxton is the father of Tyondai Braxton, who is a member of Battles (-) collapse