Braxton grew up in Chicago and came up through the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians — the AACM — in the mid-1960s. That organization was a genuinely important incubator, a collective of African American musicians on the South Side who were building their own institutions, their own aesthetic, their own idea of what serious music could be. Muhal Richard Abrams was a key mentor. The AACM gave Braxton both a community and a kind of permission to think big and weird without apology.

His early recordings for BYG Actuel and then Delmark announced something unusual right away. For Alto (1969) is a double album of solo alto saxophone — unaccompanied, no rhythm section, no net. It was released to a lot of confused silence and is now considered a landmark of the form. It's a genuinely challenging listen: long, knotty, swinging one moment and serially organized the next. But it's also more personal than it sounds on paper. There's real blues feeling in there if you stay with it long enough.

Through the 1970s he worked with Chick Corea in Circle and built his own quartet recordings for Arista that reached something like a mainstream audience — mainstream being relative here. New York, Fall 1974 (1975) is probably the most accessible entry point: tight, intense free jazz with Dave Holland and Barry Altschul that has real swing underneath the abstraction. He also started titling his compositions with diagrams and symbols instead of words, which either strikes you as pretentious or genuinely interesting depending on your tolerance for systems thinking. The system is sincere — it's not a gimmick.

The scope of his projects got bigger over the decades. He developed something called Tri-Axium theory, a vast philosophical framework for his music that fills multiple volumes. He built Ghost Trance Music, a compositional method where pieces can be overlaid and performed simultaneously by different ensembles. He has organized what he calls his Trillium opera cycle, a sprawling multi-opera project he has been working on for most of his adult life. You don't have to understand any of this to enjoy the music, but knowing it's there changes how you hear the ambition behind even a single note.

He taught at Mills College for years and has influenced an enormous number of younger musicians who came through his orbit — people working in free improvisation, contemporary classical, experimental electronics. His alto saxophone sound is distinctive enough that you recognize it in about ten seconds: bright, a little edgy, capable of both hard swing and total abstraction inside the same phrase. He is one of those musicians where the catalogue is genuinely overwhelming, so most people either dive in and get obsessed or bounce off and never return. If you're the kind of listener who likes their music with some friction, he rewards the investment.