Jazz On 3: Anthony Braxton's Falling River Music Quartet

What do you get if you cross one legendary composer, four abstract paintings and some of America's finest improvising musicians in a pig-barn in Upper Austria? The answer, you'll be somewhat revealed to hear, is a rather brilliant gig! In fact, so brilliant we couldn’t resist giving you a second chance to hear this performance, originally broadcast back in January.

Anthony Braxton is a towering figure on the landscape of twentieth-century music in America, a musician who – having honed his craft amongst the jazz visionaries of Chicago's Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians – has developed a variety of musical languages that blend jazz, contemporary classical music and improvisation. Jazzatelier, on the other hand, is a humble four-hundred-year-old building on the remote landscape of the Rohrbach region's rolling countryside, but turned out to be an ideally-intimate performance space for Braxton's latest brand of composition: Falling River Music.

Interpreting his graphic scores (have look at the gallery on the programme page) were a quartet of improvisers from the younger generation comprising guitarist Mary Halvorson and brass-virtuoso Taylor Ho-Bynum (both Braxton disciples who studied with him at Wesleyan University) alongside saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock. It is some performance – the music ebbs and flows in one single seventy-minute piece, with duet pairings and a variety of extended techniques contributing to a diversity of texture – and before it there's the chance to hear the band members quiz their leader on the creative processes that lay behind it.

Philosopher, improviser, intellectual, entertainer... Anthony Braxton is all of these things, whether in Schnapps-fuelled artistic debate or in the process of spontaneous music-making on stage. Join me and walk the line between "known, unknown and mystery" on Monday 8 July from 11pm, or listen online for seven days after broadcast.

Jez

If you have comments about the show, or requests for music you’d like to hear, do get in touch at jazzon3@bbc.co.uk or on Twitter '@BBCJazzon3'.