>>126722708
He sure was, in those years he was trying to push this intellectual/nerdy aesthetic with the glasses, the turtleneck, the pipe and the smug look.
It was a far cry from the mainstream idea of the suffering and reckless jazzman who is probably going to shoot all of his meager pay into heroin. He didn't want to look like that and he wasn't interested in that kind of stuff. Nowadays many people forget that the jazz aesthetic was deliberately searched by musicians because it was cool. Chet Baker, while being effectively on fucking heroine, made a business out of that: in the 80s everyone wanted to see Chet Baker, with the secret hope that he would die during the concert. It is no secret.
Anyway, can you really blame him? He was a black man with a saxophone in the late 60s. What else could a negro with a horn play if not jazz? Braxton wanted to be a composer like Stockhasuen, Webern, Ligeti but because of his skin and his instrument he always had this label imposed on him by the music business. Like other black musicians (Mingus comes to mind) he was relegated to the jazz circuit, because god forbid a n... a black man could enter a concert hall as composer.
In the excellent book by Graham Lock "forces in motion" about his life and his tour in the 80s (that Lock followed on the road) Braxton himself explains that he was forced to tour with a classic jazz quartet while he would have preferred a group or an ensemble of classically trained musicians: such a contract was, for him, out of discussion. He couldn't afford that and even in tour he was living out of McDonalds' meals. It was the effect that Braxton himself describes as "what makes you think you can play classical music, nigger?"
