From hearing Sun Ra and Pharoah Sanders as a teenager to 501 Canal Street, the rediscovery of ‘Valley of Search’ and the new ‘Anthem for Peace’, Alan Braufman looks back on a lifetime spent searching for his own sound.

Alan Braufman was still a teenager when he began spending long stretches in New York, staying with his older sister and going out to hear the musicians whose records had filled his family home.

One summer he found a job tearing tickets at the Bleecker Street Cinema. The cinema had an arrangement with the Village Gate down the street, so its staff could hear concerts there for free. Braufman would finish work, practise for hours in the empty cinema and then head out to hear Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, Roy Haynes and whoever else happened to be playing. At Slugs’, he heard Pharoah Sanders, McCoy Tyner, Sun Ra, Gary Bartz and Tony Williams Lifetime.

By 1973 he had moved into 501 Canal Street with Cooper-Moore, David S. Ware and bassist Chris Amberger. The rent was cheap enough that Braufman and Ware could get by at first on a few hours of work each day, delivering lunches from a deli to Wall Street offices, leaving the rest of the day for music. There was no heat in the building and winter winds came straight off the Hudson, but they could practise as much as they wanted.

In late 1974, Bob Cummins set up microphones in the storefront downstairs and recorded Braufman with Cooper-Moore, Cecil McBee, David Lee and Ralph Williams. The music became ‘Valley of Search’, released the following year by India Navigation.

For years the album was difficult to find. In 2018, Braufman’s nephew Nabil Ayers started Valley of Search to put it back into circulation. The reissue led to Braufman and Cooper-Moore playing the music together again, and two years later Braufman released ‘The Fire Still Burns’, his first new album under his own name in 45 years.

‘Infinite Love Infinite Tears’ followed in 2024, and this year came ‘Anthem for Peace’, recorded in a single day with Patricia Brennan, Luke Stewart and Chad Taylor.

Nearly fifty years after ‘Valley of Search’, Braufman still talks about the same thing that occupied him when he was young: tone. He heard something in Gato Barbieri’s tenor sound when he was about 15 and has spent much of his life trying to find some of those qualities on the alto.

He is still working on it.

“Every day, I still feel like I’m clarifying the sound and still improving.”

Jazz was already around you when you were growing up on Long Island. When did your parents’ records begin to become your own music?

Alan Braufman: I was a bit of a loner growing up. There was a great vibe in my house when growing up, made all the better by my Mom’s choice of music. As far back as I can remember, the sounds of Dolphy, Coltrane and Mingus filled the house. Seeing my interest, my mom took me to see the MJQ and Duke Ellington live. Big impact.

By the time I was 13, I started saving my money from chores and started buying my own records. I had a subscription to DownBeat, so I got my info on which records seemed interesting from their record reviews. The first album I chose was Andrew Hill’s ‘Point of Departure’. The horn line of Dolphy, Henderson and Dorham caught my eye.

Up to this point, I had wanted to basically spend my time with music or baseball. Listening to Eric Dolphy’s solo on the first tune put music in the lead, and I never turned back.

A little story: being only 13, I had some funny notions, one being that the album I was to buy had to have gotten at least four stars from DownBeat. Thinking back to this, I gave a little smile when my album ‘Infinite Love Infinite Tears’ got four stars in its DB review. Guess I may have bought my own album when I was 13.

<a href="https://alanbraufman.bandcamp.com/album/anthem-for-peace">Anthem for Peace by Alan Braufman</a>

By your last year of high school, you were spending a lot of time in Manhattan and hearing musicians at the Village Gate and Slugs’. What do you remember most about those nights?

Yes, my older sister lived in NYC, so my last year in high school, I would quite often stay with her. Plus, entire summers.

One summer, I got a job at the Bleecker Street Cinema. The movie theater had a reciprocal deal with the Village Gate, which was down the street. Their employees could see movies for free, we could hear music at the Gate for free.

So, my routine after getting done tearing tickets, I would close the theater up, then could practice in the empty theater for hours or check out music at the Gate on the way home. Got to see my heroes, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Mingus, Miles, Roy Haynes and so many others. An amazing musical education.

And the nights spent at Slugs’, so amazing. Pharoah, McCoy, Sun Ra, Gary Bartz, Tony Williams Lifetime, Hank Mobley! Yeah, I was pretty lucky as to hearing live music!

You met Cooper-Moore at the Western Front in Cambridge and soon began playing at his regular sessions, where David S. Ware was also playing. What drew you to them?

I first met Cooper-Moore when I sat in with him at his gig at the Western Front in Cambridge. I loved his music, his writing was so beautiful. I was really happy when he invited me to come play at his weekly sessions at his house, at which David S. Ware used to regularly play. Little did I know this would turn into a lifelong friendship and musical relationship.

You moved into 501 Canal Street in 1973. People now tend to romanticise the loft period, but what was an ordinary day actually like there?

A normal day at 501 Canal, for me: I’m an early riser, so I’d get up by 10 in the morning and already have three hours of practicing done.

That first year, David Ware and I worked at a deli delivering lunches to Wall Street executives. We’d walk down to the South Bay to deliver them. I’d have practicing and work done by 2 in the afternoon, but then I’d have more time to practice if I wanted.

What was liberating was that it was so cheap to live there that we didn’t have to work more than those three hours a day that first year. After that, we were doing enough with music that we didn’t need day jobs at all. That was totally liberating.

The difficulties, I guess, were that the place had no heat, and since it was right by the Hudson River, you’d get these winds off the river in the winter, and it was pretty cold. But that was easy to enjoy, for everything we got from it.

You’ve spoken about finding the sound you hear in your head as a lifelong pursuit. What were you looking for on alto when you were young, and are you still looking for it now?

Tone is so important for a saxophone player, more important than for any other instrument, because the variety of sounds and gifts on saxophone is so vast. There are so many ways you can go with your tone on alto. You can sound like Paul Desmond, you can sound like Cannonball Adderley or Marshall Allen.

I was greatly affected by Gato Barbieri’s sound. I first heard him when I was about 15, and it completely knocked me out. He was playing tenor, and I play alto.

It’s been a lifelong pursuit to try to find the qualities of his tenor sound on the alto. I ultimately think it can’t literally be done, but the pursuit of it has guided my sound to what it is. So it doesn’t sound like tenor on alto, and I’m glad it doesn’t, because it’s more my own sound.

This tone guides everything for me, the notes I play, everything. It’s like: if you have a bad reed and can’t get a good tone, you don’t even want to play.

Alan Braufman in New York City, 2020 (Photo by Gabriela Bhaskar)

Your latest album is called ‘Anthem for Peace’. Did the idea of peace come first, or did you only understand what the piece was saying after you had written it? And after all these years, what are you still searching for when you pick up the instrument?

I don’t have a non-musical idea to try to express through music. It’s pure music for me. But the music expresses something that I may even be unconscious of, and I try to find that afterward.

So, for example, with ‘Anthem for Peace’, I wrote the tune first. The notes came to me. Once I had it, I asked myself, what does this tune feel like it’s expressing? It felt like ‘Anthem for Peace’ would be a good description of what it expressed to me.

So it’s not that the title came to me first and I tried to write music to match it. I wrote the music, and then said, this sounds like an anthem for peace.

So the political stuff is all there, but I don’t necessarily put it into words. The spiritual stuff, the political stuff, it’s all in the music. That’s why it’s music, and not writing.

I’m still trying to clarify that sound. Every day, I still feel like I’m clarifying the sound and still improving. That’s the best way for me to express the music I’m writing, through that sound.

Klemen Breznikar

Headline credit: Alan Braufman in New York City, 2020 (Photo by Gabriela Bhaskar)

Alan Braufman Website / Facebook / Instagram / Bandcamp
Valley of Search Website / Facebook / Instagram / X / Bandcamp