Following the Tradition of Being Untraditional

By BEN RATLIFF Published: December 16, 2012

WASHINGTON — Jason Moran’s vision for jazz programming at the Kennedy Center here, since his appointment as an adviser to the center last year, has been playful and inclusive. His first programmed season, which started in October, runs from jazz’s straight-ahead, 1950s-based languages and traditions to more recent, and less American, examples — from, say, the Basie-band saxophonist Frank Wess to the Norwegian pianist Tord Gustavsen, to pick two examples on the schedule. But it’s up to something else too.

Yassine El Mansouri

Anthony Braxton at the Kennedy Center on Saturday. He is someone who started from jazz and has gone outside it without much concern for tradition or audience.

He seems to want to loosen up the definition of jazz performance itself, both the jazz part and the performance part. Among recent concerts were a night mixing up jazz and comedians and an election-night jam session on old American folk songs and campaign anthems. And on Saturday night Mr. Moran presented Anthony Braxton, with his Diamond Curtain Wall ensemble, performing “Composition #367F plus #241.”

Mr. Braxton at the Kennedy Center has a ring to it: it signifies Mr. Moran is playing ball, that he is going there. Mr. Braxton, the saxophonist and composer, has been sorted as a rebel abstractionist, a builder of original languages combining composition and improvisation, someone who started from jazz and has gone outside it without much concern for tradition or audience. But he’s part of a few traditions, particularly that of experimental and free jazz in the ’60s and ’70s. And he has his own, devoted audience.

He’s been around official buildings before. His previous two performances in Washington were at the Library of Congress in 1998 and in 1992, also at the Kennedy Center, in a duet with the electronic musician Richard Teitelbaum.

Why not Braxton at the Kennedy Center? Abstraction at the institution! Anarchist on the Potomac! Also, and more seriously, music without much practical connection to swing rhythm and the blues, presented under the banner of jazz. Many knew in a general sense what they were coming for. Mr. Braxton, 67, is an American musical force with hundreds of records. But the Kennedy Center is a subscriber-based institution, patronized partly by those who might not follow jazz beyond the institution’s mailings. And so, by Minute 5 or 6 of a 75-minute performance, the grumbling began, robust and aggrieved, from those who thought they were going to hear something similar to what they knew.
Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/17/arts/music/anthony-braxton-at-the-kennedy-center.html?_r=0