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 Co ...