Fifty years in the past, L.A. free-jazz titan Bobby Bradford moved right into a rambling, verdant home in Altadena. The cornet and trumpet virtuoso, who carried out in Ornette Coleman’s band and taught jazz historical past at Pomona School and Pasadena Metropolis School for many years, selected the neighborhood partly as a result of it was bustling with artists. He lastly had sufficient bedrooms for his younger household to thrive in a bucolic nook of the town with deep Black roots.
In January, Bradford’s home burned down within the Eaton hearth, alongside 1000’s of others in his cherished Altadena. At 91, he by no means imagined beginning his life over once more in tiny rented residences, with many years of reminiscences in cinders.
Regardless of all of it, he’s nonetheless taking part in music. (He mentioned that whereas he didn’t obtain grants from main organizations resembling MusiCares or Candy Reduction, a GoFundMe and others efforts by fellow musicians helped him change his cherished horn.)
On the Hammer Museum on Thursday, he’ll revisit “Stealin’ House,” a 2019 suite of unique compositions impressed by his lifelong hero — the baseball legend and Dodgers’ color-line-breaker Jackie Robinson, a person who knew about persevering via sudden, unrelenting adversity.
“That’s all I’ve left,” Bradford mentioned, pulling his horn out of its case to observe for the afternoon. “I’m [91] years outdated. I don’t have years to attend round to rebuild.”
For now, Bradford lives a small again home on a quiet Pasadena residential avenue. It’s his and his spouse’s fifth short-term residence for the reason that Eaton hearth, they usually’ve finished their greatest to make it a house. Bradford hung up classic posters from outdated European jazz festivals and corralled sufficient tools collectively to peaceably write music within the storage.
Nonetheless, he misses his residence in Altadena — each the bodily neighborhood the place he’d run into buddies on the submit workplace and the dream of Altadena, the place working artists and multigenerational households may reside subsequent to nature on the fringe of Los Angeles.
“We knew who all of the musicians have been. Even when we didn’t spent a lot time all collectively, it did really feel like one huge neighborhood,” Bradford mentioned. “We knew gamers for the L.A. Phil, painters, dancers.”
L.A.-based jazz composer/musician Bobby Bradford performs the cornet whereas rehearsing his unique composition in his Altadena residence in 2019.
(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Instances)
Lately, there’s a weariness in his eyes and gait, comprehensible after such a profound disruption within the twilight of his life. He’s grateful that smaller native establishments have stepped as much as present locations for him to observe his craft, at the same time as insurance coverage firms dragged him via a morass. “The corporate mentioned they received’t insure me once more as a result of as a result of I filed a declare on my home,” he mentioned, bewildered. “How is that my fault?”
However he attracts resilience from his latest music, which evokes the large accomplishments and withering abuse Robinson confronted as the primary Black participant in Main League Baseball. As a toddler in 1947, Bradford remembers listening to the second Robinson took the sphere, and whereas he has all the time admired the feat, his understanding of Robinson has developed with age.
“It was such a revelation to me as a child, however later I used to be extra serious about who the individual was that will conform to be the sacrificial lamb,” Bradford mentioned. “How do you flip that into flesh-and-blood music? I started to consider him being referred to as up, with a form of call-and-response within the music.”
The problem Bradford gave himself — evoking Robinson’s grace on the sphere and fears off it — caps an extended profession of adapting his artwork type to replicate and problem the tradition round him.
With Coleman’s band within the ’50s and ’60s, and on his personal formidable catalog as a bandleader, he helped pioneer free jazz, a method that subverted the studied cool of bebop with blasts of atonality and mercurial track buildings. He performed on Coleman’s 1972 LP “Science Fiction,” alongside Indian vocalist Asha Puthli. “Ornette performed with a lot uncooked feeling,” Bradford mentioned. “He confirmed me how the identical notice may very well be utterly completely different if you happen to performed it in a distinct chord. I needed to be taught that to play his songs.” His longstanding collaboration with clarinetist John Carter set the template for post-bop in L.A., charged with risk however lyrical and craving.
American jazz trumpeter Bobby Bradford performs onstage circa 1980.
(David Redfern / Redferns)
He’s equally pleased with his many years in academia, introducing younger college students to centuries of the Black American music that culminated in jazz, and the brand new methods of being that emerged from it. At each Pomona School and Pasadena Metropolis School (the place Robinson attended and honed his athletic prowess), Bradford helped his college students inhabit the double consciousness required of Black artists to outlive, invent and advance their artwork varieties in America — from slavery’s subject songs to Southern sacred music, to Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Sarah Vaughan and into the wilds of modernity.
“You all the time had that one child who thinks he is aware of extra about this than I do,” he mentioned with fun. “However then you definately make him perceive that to get to this new Black id, it’s a must to perceive what Louis Armstrong needed to overcome, how he needed to carry out in sure methods in entrance of white folks, so he may create this music.”
He’s been rehearsing with a mixture of older and youthful native musicians at Therapeutic Power of the Universe, a beloved Pasadena report retailer and venue that reminds him of the makeshift jazz membership he owned close to Pasadena’s Ice Home within the ’70s.
Locations like which can be on edge in L.A. lately. Native golf equipment resembling ETA and the Blue Whale (the place Bradford recorded a reside album in 2018) have closed or confronted arduous instances postpandemic. Others, like the brand new Blue Word in Hollywood, have huge aspirations. He’s hopeful L.A. jazz — ever an improvisational artwork type — will survive and thrive even after the lack of a neighborhood like Altadena displaced so many artists. “I bear in mind somebody coming into our membership within the ’70s and saying he hated the music we have been taking part in. I requested him what he didn’t like about it, and he mentioned, ‘Effectively, the whole lot.’ I advised him, ‘Perhaps this isn’t the place for you then,’” Bradford laughed. “You’ll be able to’t reside in Los Angeles with out that spirit. There are all the time going to be new locations to play.”
Bobby Bradford rehearses in Pasadena.
(Michael Rowe / For The Instances)
He’s apprehensive concerning the nation, although, as many once-settled questions on who belongs in America are referred to as into doubt underneath the present president. January’s wildfires proved to him, very intimately, that probably the most fastened factors in a single’s life and neighborhood are weak.
Even Jackie Robinson, whose feats appeared an indeniable level of pleasure for all Individuals, had his navy profession briefly scrubbed from authorities web sites in a latest purge towards allegedly “woke” historical past.
“I assumed we had rowed ourselves throughout the River Jordan,” Bradford mentioned, shaking his head. “However now we’re again on the opposite facet once more. We thought we had arrived.”
Who is aware of what number of years of performing Bradford has left. However because the sound of his melancholy horn arced via a sweltering Pasadena afternoon, one couldn’t assist however be grateful to nonetheless have him right here taking part in, even after shedding the whole lot.
“You already know, in his first recreation, in 3 times at bat, Jackie Robinson didn’t get a success,” he mentioned. “Of us mentioned, ‘Oh, it’s so unhappy. We advised you he couldn’t play on an expert degree.’ However whenever you dig into it, you uncover that he didn’t get a success on the recreation, however he laid down a sacrifice to attain the profitable run.”
