Anthony Braxton

“So, yes, I am in the underground, but actually, it feels like home.”

“Growing up in the '50s and being in the '60s, in that revolutionary time space, I thought freedom was what I was looking for. Slowly but surely, it became clear that the last thing I was interested in was freedom. Because if you're going to be free, you have to be free from something.”

“My work has been marginalized as far as the jazz-business complex is concerned, or the contemporary-music complex.”

“I had never thought that I would be involved in narrative structures. As a young guy, I was more interested in abstract modeling. But as I got older, I began to see that there was no reason to limit myself to any intellectual or conceptual postulate, when in fact I'm a professional student of music.”

“I would find myself backing away from all of the 'isms', all of the communities. I have always been able to be misused by every community But that is OK. I would rather be misused than neglected.”

“The word music is a convenient way to talk about what I'm interested in, but actually, in some ways, it's a limitation.”

“I'm seeking to have an art that is engaged as a way for saying, 'Hurray for unity.'”

“I am viewed as the Negro who has gone outside of the categories assigned to me.”

“Everybody in America is angry about something.”

“Most African Americans, especially the men and women from my generation, would accept the nationalist gambit that says only European Americans can be racists, which is an interesting gambit.”

“I thank the Creator of the universe to have discovered the discipline of music was the greatest gift that I could have been given, the possibility to be a student working in the world.”

“I have learned through time that not everyone is interested in the kinds of things that fascinate me.”

“I am interested in the study of music and the discipline of music and the experience of music and music as a esoteric mechanism to continue my real intentions.”

“For the most basic assumption that dictated my early attempts to respond to creative music commentary was the mistaken belief that western journalists had some fundamental understanding of black creativity—or even western creativity—but this assumption was seriously in error.”