"When Anthony Braxton performed this concert in Bern, Switzerland in July 1984, his musical career, fueled by an ambitious, steadfastly investigative, painstaking and multifaceted creative nature, up to this point had included an AACM apprenticeship; a wide-ranging European sojourn; a roller-coaster ride with the cooperative quartet Circle; the first "classic" Braxton quartet (an extension of Circle where Kenny Wheeler replaced Chick Corea); a sequence of subsequent short-term quartets with changing personnel leading to the formation of his second "classic" quartet (with Marilyn Crispell, Gerry Hemingway, and Mark Dresser); the initiation of his "In the Tradition" explorations; guest appearances and ad hoc collaborations with musicians as diverse as Derek Bailey and Dave Brubeck, Max Roach and Frederic Rzewski; rare but rewarding opportunities to perform his works for string quartet and large ensembles (especially the epic Composition No. 82 for four orchestras); and a sporadic but significant documentation of solo saxophone recitals and studio recordings. His catalogue of compositions had reached No. 118 (with several of these numbers being collections of related works). He was 39 years old.

Despite the exceptional breadth of Braxton's musical perspective, and the sometimes overwhelming specifics of his concepts (think operas, multimedia spectacles, and evolving compositional restructuring), the importance of solo saxophone in Braxton's oeuvre should not be underestimated. This is, in part, because his solo saxophone theories encompass the foundational material - the substructures, essential techniques, and combinatorial premises (they are his "Language Studies," as he has often explained) - of all of his music, but also have much to do with the creative dynamic, the artistic and aesthetic tension, that results from the fluid, mutable, unpredictable relationship between compositional determinism and performance spontaneity (of which improvisation is merely a part).

For the most part, Braxton's compositions for solo saxophone are not formally predetermined or fully notated; they offer the performer various guidelines (melodic contours, rhythmic shapes, sound indications, instrumental techniques, register requirements, and so on) to focus their commitment to the piece at hand. But although these are open-ended instructions which leave specific decisions to the performer, they are not solely improvisational because of the need to establish a compositional identity to the experience. The challenge at the heart of Braxton's solo saxophone music is to discover a way - and a different way each time - for indeterminate qualities and compositional formality to coexist.

With the exception of the atypical studio recording of Composition No. 113 in December 1983 (atypical because it was limited to sopranino saxophone, and in reality was intended as a multimedia presentation with "story instructions," special staging, and photographic backgrounds), this Bern concert is the sole documentation of solo Braxton we have in the two-year period between summer 1983 and summer 1985. In hindsight, the makeup of this program has proven to be an auspicious one, as it contains three pieces - No. 99Q, No. 106R, and No. 118Q - that seem not to have been further documented, and eight that received their first hearings here, including the standards "I Remember You" and "Naima." Others, like No. 77D, No. 77G, No. 77H, and No. 118F, are among those Braxton would return to with some frequency. In its entirety, the concert is lively and penetrating evidence of Braxton's remarkable facility, powers of invention, and commitment to his principles at this point in time, with special emphasis on saxophone techniques energizing variables of tone color, texture, and timbre to affect separate phrases, extended lines, and sectional contrasts.

If there is one piece which most exemplifies these characteristics, it is the oldest and, perhaps, oddest, Composition No. 26B, designed in Paris in the early '70s, first appearing on the 1972 solo recording session issued as Saxophone Improvisations Series F. In his book Composition Notes B (Frog Peak, 1988), Braxton thoroughly describes its multiple components and methodology, and attaches a list of 15 sound resources - beginning as a "staccato line," and eventually featuring "multiphonic sound complexes," "shadow sound lines," "whispered sound statements," and "circular line streams" - to be used to construct the "architectural dynamics" of each performance. The available examples of Braxton's performances do differ greatly - the expanded 16-plus minute version on Series F (which fades out, so there's no indication of how long his initial reading actually was); a seven-minute realization on Alto Saxophone Improvisations 1979, choosing different pitches but with similar ideation, arriving at the key points quicker; a nearly nine-minute 2002 New York City performance that is even more angular in pitch but tightly argued and less extreme in its projections; and the one at hand, sharper, more aggressive, with intense dynamic levels. In this instance, Composition No. 26B, as a metaphor for the music and its composer/performer, circa 1984, becomes not just a musical experience, but a test of control, coherence, and character. It, like the rest of this recital, shows Anthony Braxton at his most exposed and transparent, acute and earnest."-Art Lange, Chicago, August 2015, revised 2024

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