Bobby Bradford, 85, played with Ornette Coleman. Now, in league with a quirky, baseball-focused non-profit, he's composed a suite for Jackie Robinson's centennial.
A bunch of musicians are kicking back on an Altadena patio. It’s a Sunday night after rehearsal assembled by trumpeter, cornetist, composer and bandleader Bradford. And now, as instruments are put away, Bradford settles into some outdoor furniture and starts explaining things, like the sage and teacher that he is.
He offers a rendition of the only way you can compliment a woman at Pomona College these days on her dress and describes seeing minstrel shows in Mississippi as a youth. He talks about Jim Crow he encountered as a college student in Texas and how much money parents pay today to get their kids into college. “It’s pretty clear by this lady who just got sent to jail for 14 days that if the kid’s not up to snuff you got to make it happen … if you want your kid to be a member of that ‘other’ group.
Bobby Bradford was 11 the first time he came to L.A. He was born in Cleveland, Miss., in 1934, and he arrived with his mom and stepfather while they were looking for work in the factories booming during World War II. Booming so much, in fact, that they didn’t mind hiring black workers who were streaming in from all over the South.
The masks are everywhere, then and now, he adds. He’s talking about all the stuff — rage, for sure, but also the blues and informality and dice and more — that had to be hidden by the barrier-breakers for fear of how it would look to the masses. Progress is ongoing, he says as he gets up. “But somebody had to make a move, like Jackie.”
“I was looking to create some sort of an organizational structure to meld baseball and the arts,” he says as if that explains anything. What he came up with was a sort of fraternal society that bowed down to the magic of the game and also to its power to change society.
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