In a crowded Army barracks in South Korea in the mid-1960s, a young soldier sat in headphones because his roommates could not stand the experimental music he played day and night. That soldier was Anthony Braxton, future MacArthur fellow and NEA Jazz Master. This episode traces how a kid from Chicago’s South Side, born in 1945 and obsessed with rocket ships, television technology and wiring schematics at Chicago Vocational High School, came to view music as a system to be engineered rather than a script to be recited. After dropping out of junior college for lack of tuition, he found instruments, practice time and fellow improvisers in the Fifth and Eighth Army Bands before returning to Chicago and joining the AACM through Roscoe Mitchell.

The hosts cover his 1968 debut Three Compositions of New Jazz, with influences ranging from Ornette Coleman and Stockhausen to James Brown and the Chicago Transit Authority, and the landmark 1969 double LP For Alto, the first full-length album of unaccompanied saxophone. They follow him from hustling chess in Washington Square Park to Chick Corea’s group Circle and teaching posts at Mills College and Wesleyan, then break down the mechanics of his Language Music system with its twelve sound types and live hand cues, the collage approach and graphic pulse tracks, Ghost Trance Music with its geometric off-ramps and accelerator-class pieces, and Echo Echo Mirror House music, in which performers play iPods loaded with his entire discography. The conversation also touches on his 2005 collaboration with the noise band Wolf Eyes and what his human-driven generative systems suggest about today’s algorithms.

• How drafting and wiring schematics became the blueprint for his scores
• Why the rigid U.S. Army was an unlikely incubator for boundary-free art
• For Alto and the birth of the solo saxophone album
• Acoustic Legos: the constructor-set logic behind Language Music
• Trans-idiomatic music from Ghost Trance rituals to the album Black Vomit