Anthony Braxton Standard Quartet review – melodies twisted into unfamiliar territory
The standard is a quintessential concept in jazz. A canonical composition reinterpreted and disassembled by both new players and established elders, they are works that cement their place in tradition through virtue of their lasting capacity to be transformed yet maintain the essence of their identity.
Defined like this, saxophonist and composer Anthony Braxton is something of a standard himself. With more than 350 works to his name, he has been heralded as a luminary of free jazz, bearing influences such as John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy, as well as a radical composer of opera and orchestral pieces in the lineage of experimentalists such as Karlheinz Stockhausen. His music often encapsulates what might be seen as “difficult” in jazz – rattling bursts of energy, woozy and unpredictable harmony, outright guttural noise – yet he always keeps a guiding hand on melody, maintaining his ineffable sonic identity.
Things come full circle with his Standard Quartet and their three-day residency at London’s Cafe Oto. It’s a suitably intimate and welcoming space for the group, who take to the stage on evenings one and two for two sets of recomposed standards, a lithe and indefatigable 74-year-old Braxton commanding the sold-out crowds.
Testament to the group’s inventiveness, the music played each night is typically broad, from Bill Evans’s Waltz for Debby to Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water and Bing Crosby’s Out of Nowhere. Yet Braxton twists and pitch-shifts each melody into unfamiliar territory, pushing pianist Alexander Hawkins into a frenzy of chordal voicings before bringing it back to a cathartic familiarity, expertly straddling the line between tension and release.
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On ballads such as Waltz for Debby and Where Are You, there is a glacial awakening of melody through the rhythm section’s textural haze, while on more propulsive numbers such as Thelonious Monk’s Epistrophy, Braxton reaches a sky-scraping intensity, swapping out his alto for a sopranino sax. And each evening’s audience is transfixed – whooping, nodding and clapping along to the changes as Braxton breathes endless life into these compositions. It’s an understandable reaction: it’s hard not to feel as if we are witnessing the necessary vitality of jazz in action, a timely reminder that standards can always be bettered.
• At Cafe Oto, London, until 21 January.
