This morning’s New York Times, page E5, Arts section.
Overhead view of the Sunday, June 4 Bang On a Can avant-garde music Marathon at the World Financial Center. Performance of Anthony Braxton’s “Composition No. 19 for One Hundred Tubas.”
There’s about 14 of us in the pic, wending through the crowd: One of the conductors comes first, then a bald guy with a tuba and red shoes, then three euphoniums with right-facing bells, then a euphonium with a left-facing bell, then ME! Black jeans and shoes, shiny 1952 CC Conn upright with left-facing bell. Right in da middle of da piksh!
Yeah! THERE I am! The guy with his feet at a nine o’clock angle!
(The photo in the actual brick-and-mortar newspaper is somewhat larger. C’mon, you know you can find a copy in Dallas! It’s well worth the three or four bucks, trust me. You can do the crossword after.)
Well, this may have been the best part of the whole thing.
Braxton’s Creative Orchestra Music 1976 was one of the first jazz albums (and THE first avant-garde classical album) I bought as a teenager in Cleveland, just getting into the whole scene.
I think he’s a bloody genius – and so do the MacArthur Foundation people, because they gave him one of their “genius grants” several years back.
I was surprised and pleased to learn that he’s a tenured professor of music at Wesleyan University, one of the “Little Ivies.”
Incidentally, June 4 was Braxton’s 61st birthday. It was a nice present to give the guy.
