by Paul Klemperer

At this year's Austin Jazz & Arts Fest, world-renowned trumpeter Bobby Bradford will return to Austin for his first concert here since 1963. He stopped at the capital city once in 1978 on his way to Paris, Texas ("I just got off the freeway for sentimental reasons"), but this year marks his official return after some 35 years. In the interim, he has produced an extensive and influential body of musical work. He has been a witness and contributor to almost five decades of jazz, but some of the most formative of those years were spent right here in Austin.

Bradford was born in Cleveland, Miss., but like many black families during World War II, his family moved out of the south to Los Angeles in 1943, then to Detroit, before Bradford finally settled in Dallas. He recalls that his high school there was "a real hotbed for aspiring young jazz musicians," including pianist Cedar Walton and saxophonist David "Fathead" Newman. He also was exposed to jazz at home. His father was a Baptist minister, but played the clarinet and piano and liked to listen to big band jazz on the radio.

Jazz became his obsession in high school:

I had already started listening to Miles, Kenny Dorham, Fats Navarro, Charlie Parker, Thelonius Monk, Sonny Stitt...All those guys were meaningful to me, so in the 9th grade I was already "hip." I was listening to all the modernists, because there was a serious population of jazz musicians in Dallas, Texas. Some retired professionals even. Couple of guys who had been with Duke Ellington.

Bradford attended Austin's Sam Houston College (before it became the combined Houston-Tillotson College) in 1952. Band director and music teacher Bert Adams arranged a scholarship for him. Bradford remembers:

He was one of my serious teachers and came to Dallas recruiting students, and afforded me an opportunity. Without him I don't think I would have been able come to college. And of course coming to Sam Houston at that time, you had to play in the concert band, the football pep band, the jazz band, and whatever else they needed you to do...I knew nothing about Austin before I got there. When I got there at like three or four o'clock in the morning with my big steamer trunk, I had no idea what to expect. But I was determined to go to college.

Austin at that time, like other parts of Texas, had a well-developed jazz scene. "Of course you took music classes, but as far as playing jazz every weekend, oh man, there was all kinds of little beer joints on [11th Street]," he said. Bradford found other kindred souls at Sam Houston. Alto sax player Leo Wright was there; he went on to play with Dizzy Gillespie. They played together in the 18-piece college jazz band:

We played two or three times a month around town. Usually at places like the University of Texas or the country clubs around town. It was a big dance band, kind of a Count Basie type of dance band, and an awfully good band. I mean not just some little wimpy band, I'm talking about a really good band. In fact that was my introduction, through Bert Adams, to what it meant to be a professional musician, what it took to sit there and be able to play a part and play it dependably so people could count on you...and to play the music with precision. I was introduced to that at Sam Houston College under the tutorship of Bert Adams, who himself played the trombone and was an arranger.

During this time Bradford also got to hear visiting artists:

Lionel Hampton would come to town sometimes, playing with his big band, maybe in San Antonio, and his musicians, sometimes in smaller groups, might appear in Austin. And a lot of rhythm & blues bands would come through there, really good ones, you know. The first time I ever saw Ike & Tina [Turner] was in Austin, when they were both obviously very, very young....You know the saxophone player who was with Sun Ra for years, John Gilmore. At the time I was a freshman at Sam Houston, John Gilmore was stationed just outside Austin at Bergstrom Air Force Base. And John Gilmore used to come in on weekends and hang around the college with the musicians and work in the clubs and jam with these guys.

It was also at this time that Bradford met Ornette Coleman. Coleman's friend Charles Moffett was getting married and Coleman came to Austin to be best man at the wedding. Moffett was a senior at Sam Houston at the time:

In fact, if my memory serves me, they had the wedding reception at the Victory Grill. Isn't that amazing? After the wedding they went there and had a buffet and then the guys had a big jam session. Ornette played and so did Leo Wright and John Gilmore and some of the others. When [Ornette] started to play we all perked up, hearing a guy who was playing in the Charlie Parker mold, but was already showing signs now of his own creativity, above and beyond what he'd learned from Charlie Parker. We were all dumbfounded once we heard this guy play.

In 1953, Bradford dropped out of school "and went on the road with a lot of rhythm & blues bands." He ended up in Los Angeles, ran into Ornette Coleman there, and began playing with him. Don Cherry was also playing with Ornette at the time:

I didn't know Don that well then. I would see him at the various jam sessions around town though...I got drafted and went into the military in the fall of 1954, so when Ornette got ready to put a band together and go to New York, Don was obviously the guy who was going to play trumpet with him. 'Cause there were only two of us around town who were willing and able to play with him. He was doing a lot of stuff that a lot of people found too radical for their ears, or their appetites. But I loved what he was doing.

Bradford found more kindred souls in the Air Force. He played in military bands for four years. He was in the same band with drummer Grady Tate and "sometimes, when I was travelling around with other bands, there was [trumpeter] Donald Byrd, who was in the Air Force during that period."

In 1956 Bradford returned to Austin and entered the recently desegregated University of Texas. He studied there for several years until the "money ran out," then joined up with Ornette Coleman again in 1961. The new "free jazz" sound met a lot of resistance from those who felt Coleman was straying too far from tradition. Bradford sees a lesson in the struggle he shared with Coleman, which is as important for jazz players now as it was then:

On a certain level you have to have some understanding and appreciation for the tradition, but you're not supposed to look at that as some sort of safety valve for you, where you're afraid to try to be who you are in your music. Who you are means who you are in time and space, who you are right now on the planet. So obviously, especially if you're a young player right now, how could you not...be prepared or willing or inclined to respond to the world that you are living in, in your own music. 'Cause it's such a different world than Charlie Parker was living in. So when people tend to go this conservative route they stifle the young people...about being adventurous enough to go out there. Because that's what jazz has always been about, isn't it? Go out there. Go out there on the edge. Right? And sometimes without a parachute. That's what makes the music what it is.

Bradford met clarinetist John Carter, a Fort Worth native, in 1965 and together they formed the New Art Jazz Ensemble. Their association lasted 25 years, much of it spent in Europe where their experimental music was generally better received than in the U.S. Bradford also continued his association with Ornette Coleman, collaborating on the 1971 recording Science Fiction.

Through the years, Bradford has found great satisfaction in teaching music, which he continues to do in Los Angeles. Bradford encourages younger musicians to make their playing an expression of their daily experiences: "Try to say something about the space and time that you live in, rather than going back and warming up old meatloaf." He acknowledges that being a musical experimentalist may be less lucrative, but it nonetheless has its rewards:

I didn't go into music business, or become a trumpet player with the idea that someday I'll be rich and famous. What I wanted to do was to have some command of this instrument and be a part of that big body of music that we're talking about. I wanted to be a member of that group and to be able to create something suitable for the level that the other people were doing. As Duke Ellington said, I wanted to be able to prepare something "suitable for the plateau." If I made money and became famous, wonderful; if I did not I was still going to do what I did. If I had to go back now and do it all over, I'd do the same thing again, without change.

[This article was supplemented with material from a radio interview by KOOP-FM DJ Torrance Gettrell.]