I MUST ADMIT that half the time I don't know what the hell Anthony Braxton is talking about. I've been listening to his records for 30 years, and I've attended dozens of the concerts and club dates he has performed in the Bay Area during the past two decades. But when the MacArthur "genius" composer-saxophonist-clarinetist explains the philosophy and strategies behind his music making, writing about the "tri-centric holistic system" (the " 'body of experiences/materials/affinities' that demonstrate 'agency/mechanics/vibrational disposition' ") and compounding the challenge of a virtually private syntax ("cosmic time point phenomenon") with mazes of slashes, parentheses, and quotes-within-quotes, I get as lost you probably just did.

The booklet for the new four-CD set Anthony Braxton: Six Compositions (GTM) 2001 (Limited Sedition/Barely Auditable/Rastascan) includes 16 pages of Braxton's murky elucidation, samples of his scores, and a two-page breakdown of schemes and states represented by his graphic symbols (squiggly, broken, and crosshatched lines, triangles, home plate-like pentagons), plus his diagrammatic composition titles, which now include photographs of grandfather clocks and armoires.

If all this makes Braxton's music seem like it's going to sound extraordinarily dense and complicated, well, it does. There's abundant "noise" on these discs, made by overblown saxophones, clarinets, oboe, and flute, bleating trumpet, buzzing electronics, clanging percussion, thumping bass, and contorted guitar. But there's also an amazing sense of communication, unified purpose, and breathing space. The music roils with entangled emotions and advances with rhythms that emulate the stolid cadence of a marching band and the joyful steps of child who has just learned to play hopscotch. At the core is a pure, unsullied quality that's hard to pin down. The closest I can get is naïveté or innocence. Whether playing in a tentet, quintet, quartet, trio, or duo, the musicians who joined Braxton for these sessions at Wesleyan University (in Middletown, Conn.) clearly grasped Braxton's strategy. They include reed players Scott Rosenberg, Jesse Gilbert, and Justin Yang, brass players Taylor Ho-Bynum and Greg Kelley, and such familiar figures on the Bay Area creative music scene as Dan Plonsey (reeds), Matthew Sperry (contrabass), Gino Robair (percussion), and John Shiurba (guitar).

Shiurba (who works at and has written for the Bay Guardian) set the multifaceted collaboration in motion when he gave CDs of his music to Braxton, who came back with a concrete proposal for this project. Shiurba says understanding Braxton when he talks about music isn't nearly as difficult as it might seem from his writings. When the musical troupe arrived at Wesleyan, Braxton spent most of the rehearsal giving a pep talk. "When he speaks about the music and how to play it, he says very little about the technical aspects, unless specifically asked," Shiurba explains. "He mostly talks about it metaphorically. His big analogy for the GTM [Ghost Trance Music] was the choo-choo train. He also talked about ski lifts, theme parks, and those video-arcade driving games. He thinks of the GTM [or even his music in general] as a sort of amusement park for the 'friendly experiencer.' He wants the F.E. to be open/able to choose different entry points and paths through the music – like one of those video games where once you jump through a certain hoop, you're on to a different level, and then you navigate that for a while, until you jump to another; but you might have instead chosen a different hoop to jump through, which would have taken you to an altogether different level, which you then would have to navigate, and eventually you'd probably end up crossing paths again."

Shiurba's comments made me go back and reread Braxton's notes to Six Compositions (GTM) 2001. Sure enough, besides dedications to Max Roach, Harry Partch, Joe Frazier, Don Van Vliet (Captain Beefheart), and others, Braxton writes about looking to "the great work of the American master Walt Disney" to better understand "the challenge of multi-diversity for imaginary space experiences." And when Shiurba told me one of Braxton's favorite restaurants in Middletown is the Red Lobster, and, "When I took sandwich orders, he asked for a roast beef sandwich and three large coffees," I gained invaluable new insight into the profound and mundane human qualities at the heart of a thorny listening experience that gives me so much pleasure.