Saturday, November 7, 2009

Bobby Bradford: Self-Determination in the Great Basin

Born in Cleveland, Mississippi in 1934 and raised between Dallas and Los Angeles, trumpeter Bobby Bradford began playing with Ornette Coleman in Los Angeles in the 1950s, and replaced Don Cherry in an unrecorded Coleman quartet during the early 1960s. However, the most significant partnership in Bradford's musical life was with the clarinetist and composer John Carter (1928-1991), with whom he worked and recorded from 1969 into the 1980s a very different brand of free-bop. Now a professor at Pomona College, Bradford continues to lead his Mo'Tet and is being celebrated at the 2009 Festival of the New Trumpet in New York.

Bobby Bradford

All About Jazz: Could you talk a bit about who you're working with presently?

Bobby Bradford: I have a group called the Mo'tet, and for a while we were working about once a month in this Italian restaurant in Sierra Madre, but we could play whatever we wanted--no restaurant music or anything. That band has William Jeffrey on drums; Roberto Miranda on bass; I use Don Preston on piano and on saxophone Chuck Manning; Ken Rosser on guitar; and Michael Vladtkovitch on trombone.

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