l.a. phil

Fifty years ago, L.A. free-jazz titan Bobby Bradford moved into a rambling, verdant house in Altadena. The cornet and trumpet virtuoso, who performed in Ornette Coleman’s band and taught jazz history at Pomona College and Pasadena City College for decades, chose the neighborhood partly because it was bustling with artists. He finally had enough bedrooms for his young family to thrive in a bucolic corner of the city with deep Black roots.

In January, Bradford’s house burned down in the Eaton fire, alongside thousands of others in his cherished Altadena. At 91, he never imagined starting his life over again in tiny rented apartments, with decades of memories in cinders.

Despite it all, he’s still playing music. (He said that while he did not receive grants from major organizations such as MusiCares or Sweet Relief, a GoFundMe and others efforts by fellow musicians helped him replace his cherished horn.)

At the Hammer Museum on Thursday, he’ll revisit “Stealin’ Home,” a 2019 suite of original compositions inspired by his lifelong hero — the baseball legend and Dodgers’ color-line-breaker Jackie Robinson, a man who knew about persevering through sudden, unrelenting adversity.

“That’s all I have left,” Bradford said, pulling his horn out of its case to practice for the afternoon. “I’m [91] years old. I don’t have years to wait around to rebuild.”

For now, Bradford lives a small back house on a quiet Pasadena residential street. It’s his and his wife’s fifth temporary residence since the Eaton fire, and they’ve done their best to make it a home. Bradford hung up vintage posters from old European jazz festivals and corralled enough equipment together to peaceably write music in the garage.

Still, he misses his home in Altadena — both the physical neighborhood where he’d run into friends at the post office and the dream of Altadena, where working artists and multigenerational families could live next to nature at the edge of Los Angeles.

“We knew who all the musicians were. Even if we didn’t spent much time all together, it did feel like one big community,” Bradford said. “We knew players for the L.A. Phil, painters, dancers.”

L.A.-based jazz composer/musician Bobby Bradford plays the cornet while rehearsing his original composition in his Altadena home in 2019.

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

These days, there’s a weariness in his eyes and gait, understandable after such a profound disruption in the twilight of his life. He’s grateful that smaller local institutions have stepped up to provide places for him to practice his craft, even as insurance companies dragged him through a morass. “The company said they won’t insure me again because because I filed a claim on my house,” he said, bewildered. “How is that my fault?”

But he draws resilience from his recent music, which evokes the gigantic accomplishments and withering abuse Robinson faced as the first Black player in Major League Baseball. As a child in 1947, Bradford remembers listening to the moment Robinson took the field, and while he has always admired the feat, his understanding of Robinson has evolved with age.

“It was such a revelation to me as a kid, but later I was more interested in who the person was that would agree to be the sacrificial lamb,” Bradford said. “How do you turn that into flesh-and-blood music? I began to think about him being called up, with a kind of call-and-response in the music.”

The challenge Bradford gave himself — evoking Robinson’s grace on the field and fears off it — caps a long career of adapting his art form to reflect and challenge the culture around him.

With Coleman’s band in the ’50s and ’60s, and on his own formidable catalog as a bandleader, he helped pioneer free jazz, a style that subverted the studied cool of bebop with blasts of atonality and mercurial song structures. He played on Coleman’s 1972 LP “Science Fiction,” alongside Indian vocalist Asha Puthli. “Ornette played with so much raw feeling,” Bradford said. “He showed me how the same note could be completely different if you played it in a different chord. I had to learn that to play his songs.” His longstanding collaboration with clarinetist John Carter set the template for post-bop in L.A., charged with possibility but lyrical and yearning.

American jazz trumpeter Bobby Bradford performs onstage circa 1980.

(David Redfern / Redferns)

He’s equally proud of his decades in academia, introducing young students to centuries of the Black American music that culminated in jazz, and the new ways of being that emerged from it. At both Pomona College and Pasadena City College (where Robinson attended and honed his athletic prowess), Bradford helped his students inhabit the double consciousness required of Black artists to survive, invent and advance their art forms in America — from slavery’s field songs to Southern sacred music, to Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Sarah Vaughan and into the wilds of modernity.

“You always had that one kid who thinks he knows more about this than I do,” he said with a laugh. “But then you make him understand that to get to this new Black identity, you have to understand what Louis Armstrong had to overcome, how he had to perform in certain ways in front of white people, so he could create this music.”

He’s been rehearsing with a mix of older and younger local musicians at Healing Force of the Universe, a beloved Pasadena record store and venue that reminds him of the makeshift jazz club he owned near Pasadena’s Ice House in the ’70s.

Places like that are on edge in L.A. these days. Local clubs such as ETA and the Blue Whale (where Bradford recorded a live album in 2018) have closed or faced hard times postpandemic. Others, like the new Blue Note in Hollywood, have big aspirations. He’s hopeful L.A. jazz — ever an improvisational art form — will survive and thrive even after the loss of a neighborhood like Altadena displaced so many artists. “I remember someone coming into our club in the ’70s and saying he hated the music we were playing. I asked him what he didn’t like about it, and he said, ‘Well, everything.’ I told him, ‘Maybe this isn’t the place for you then,’” Bradford laughed. “You can’t live in Los Angeles without that spirit. There are always going to be new places to play.”

Bobby Bradford rehearses in Pasadena.

(Michael Rowe / For The Times)

He’s worried about the country, though, as many once-settled questions about who belongs in America are called into doubt under the current president. January’s wildfires proved to him, very intimately, that the most fixed points in one’s life and community are vulnerable.

Even Jackie Robinson, whose feats seemed an indisputable point of pride for all Americans, had his military career temporarily scrubbed from government websites in a recent purge against allegedly “woke” history.

“I thought we had rowed ourselves across the River Jordan,” Bradford said, shaking his head. “But now we’re back on the other side again. We thought we had arrived.”

Who knows how many years of performing Bradford has left. But as the sound of his melancholy horn arced through a sweltering Pasadena afternoon, one couldn’t help but be grateful to still have him here playing, even after losing everything.

“You know, in his first game, in three times at bat, Jackie Robinson didn’t get a hit,” he said. “Folks said, ‘Oh, it’s so sad. We told you he couldn’t play on a professional level.’ But when you dig into it, you discover that he didn’t get a hit at the game, but he laid down a sacrifice to score the winning run.”

Need a model for how to thrive in the stranglehold of the modern music economy? How about a band of Australian garage-rockers who cut albums at the pace of an Atlanta rap crew, tour like peak-era Grateful Dead and who just told the biggest company in streaming to go to hell.

King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard are a fascinating phenomenon in rock. Over 15 years, their LPs have flitted between genres with insouciant musicianship, pulling from punky scuzz, regal soul, krautrock, electro-funk and psychedelia. These LPs come at an insane clip — sometimes up to five in a year, 27 so far. Their freewheeling live shows made them a coveted arena act, when few new rock bands can aspire to that.

Two weeks ago, they became probably the most high-profile band to take their music off Spotify in the wake of Chief Executive Daniel Ek’s investments in an AI-driven weapons firm. The band self-releases on its own labels — they needed no one’s permission.

King Gizzard returns to the Hollywood Bowl on Sunday, this time backed by the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra for a live read of its new album “Phantom Island,” a standout LP that adds deft orchestration to its toolkit. The band’s frontman, Stu Mackenzie, spoke to The Times about giving Spotify the boot, how the L.A. Phil inspired the new record’s arrangements and what they’ve figured out about staying afloat while artists get squeezed from all sides today.

What was your initial reaction to Daniel Ek’s investments in an AI arms company?

A bit of shock, and then feeling that I shouldn’t be shocked. We’ve been saying f— Spotify for years. In our circle of musician friends, that’s what people say all the time, for all of these other reasons which are well documented. We saw a couple of other bands who we admire, and thought “I don’t really want our music to be here, at least right now.” I don’t really consider myself an activist, and I don’t feel comfortable soapboxing. But this feels like a decision staying true to ourselves, and doing what we think is is right for our music, having our music in places that we feel all right about.

Was choosing to leave a complicated decision for the band?

The thing that made it hard was I do want to have our music be accessible to people. I don’t really care about making money from streaming. I know it’s unfair, and I know they are banking so much. But for me personally, I just want to make music, and I want people to be able to listen to it. The hard part was to take that away from so many people. But sometimes you’ve just got to say, “Well, sorry, we’re not going to be here right now.” In the end, it actually was just one quick phone call with the other guys to get off the ship.

As the sizes of everything gets larger, all of the stakes start to feel higher. I grapple with that, because that’s not the kind of band that I like to be in, where it feels like everything is high stakes. I do miss the time where we could just do anything without any consequences, but I still try really hard to operate like that. In the past, I have felt tied to it, that we have to be there. But with this band, we have been happy to take a lot of risks, and for the most part, I’m just happy to see what happens if we just choose the path that feels right for us.

Do you think Spotify noticed or cares that you left?

I don’t expect Daniel Ek to pay attention to this. We have made a lot of experimental moves with the way we’ve released records — bootlegging stuff for free. We have allowed ourselves a license to break conventions, and the people who listen to our music have a trust and a faith to go along on this ride together. I feel grateful to have the sort of fan base you’ll just trust, even when you do something a little counterintuitive. It feels like an experiment to me, like, “Let’s just go away from Spotify, and let’s see what happens.” Why does this have to be a big deal? It actually feels like we’re just trying to find our own positivity in a dark situation.

“Phantom Island” is a really distinct record in your catalog for using so much orchestration. I heard some conversations with the L.A. Phil planted the seed for it?

We played this Hollywood Bowl show a little over two years ago, and being the home stadium of the L.A. Phil, we naturally chatted with them at the show. It did plant a seed of doing a show there backed by the orchestra. We happened to be halfway through making a record at that exact time that we weren’t really sure how to finish. When we started talking about doing a show backed by an orchestra, we thought, “Let’s just make an album with an orchestra.” We rearranged and rewrote these songs with a composer, Chad Kelly. We knew the songs needed something, and we ended up rewriting the songs to work for a rock band in a symphonic medium.

Were there any records you looked to for how to make that approach work? I hear a lot of ELO in there, Isaac Hayes, maybe the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life.”

To be completely honest, I just don’t think there was a model for it. I think we landed on something that we only could have made because we wrote the songs not knowing there were going to be orchestral parts. When you ask me what were the touchstones, well, there weren’t any. I was probably thinking of a lot of music from the early ’60s, a lot of soul and R&B music at that time, which had often had orchestral arrangements. Etta James, for instance, was in the tone and the feel. This isn’t the perfect way to do it, but it was a really serendipitous process.

Your live shows are pretty raucous to say the least; how did you adapt to keep that feeling with orchestras behind you on this tour?

I was pretty anxious, to be honest. We only had one rehearsal the day before the first show. We had to go in and cross our fingers, like, “Okay, I think that’s going to work. I’m just going to hope that it translates.” Our rehearsal was the most intense two and a half hours, but for the show, you’re just like, “All right, this is it.” You’ve just got to commit to what’s on the page.

We’ve had some really awesome people collaborating with us — Sean O’Laughlin did the arrangements for the live shows, and Sarah Hicks is an amazing conductor. We’re just a garage rock band from Australia; we’re very lucky to get to honestly work with the best of the best.

On the other end of the venue spectrum, what was it like playing a residency in a Lithuanian prison?

It was a real prison until really recently [Lukiškės Prison 2.0 in Vilnius, Lithuania]. The history is very dark — like, very, very dark. But there are artist spaces there now, and it’s quite a culturally positive force. They’re the things that make you restore your faith in humanity. You spend so much of your life losing faith in it, and then you go to places like that, and you’re like, “Yeah, humans are okay.”

Speaking of threats to humanity, I think your band contests the idea that artists need to use AI to make enough music to be successful on streaming. You’re proof you can make a ton of music quickly, with real people.

Making music is fun as f—, especially making music with other people. That’s a deeply motivating factor, and we just have a ton of fun making music together. It feels human, it feels spiritual, it feels social. It’s deeply central to who we all are as human beings. And it doesn’t feel hard. It doesn’t feel like we’re fighting against some AI trend or anything. We just make music because it feels good.

You’re an arena act with your own label, and pretty autonomous as a band. Do you think you’ve figured out something important about how to be successful in the modern music economy?

I think we’ve been good at asking internal questions, and questioning what everybody else does and whether we need to do that or not. Sometimes we do the same thing that everybody else does. Sometimes we do something completely different because it makes sense to us. I think we’ve been quite good at being true to ourselves and being confident, or maybe reckless enough to do that.

I do think there’s some serendipity and fate in the personalities of the other guys in the band, and the people that we work with, who have have also been on a pretty unconventional journey and have faith that — in the least pretentious way possible — that other people will dig it, and not worry too much about the other other stuff.

Do you hope to see more and bigger bands striking out on their own, since the big institutions of the music business have yet again proven to not really reflect their values?

I just know what has worked for us, and I’m not sure that means that it’ll work for other people. I don’t know if there’s a model in it. If there is a model, it’s that you don’t have to follow a path if you don’t want to. The well-treaded path is going to work for some people, but you don’t have to stay on that.

I think one thing about this band is that we’ve all been at peace with failing. That if this all fell apart and we went back home and we got regular jobs, I think we would say, “Well, we’re proud of ourselves. We had a good time.” We did what we wanted to do and just suffered the consequences along the way. We’re probably being reckless enough to make potentially selfish decisions over and over again. But people, for some reason, want to come out and see us do that, and we’re super grateful.

Tuesday night, Gustavo Dudamel was back at the Hollywood Bowl. This summer is the 20th anniversary of his U.S. debut — at 24 years old — conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and becoming irrepressibly besotted with the amphitheater.

He walked on stage, now the proud paterfamilias with greying hair and a broad welcoming smile on his face as he surveyed the nearly full house. The weather was fine. The orchestra, as so very few orchestras ever do, looked happy.

For Dudamel, his single homecoming week this Bowl season began Monday evening conducting his beloved Youth Orchestra Los Angeles as part of the annual YOLA National Festival, which brings kids from around the country to the Beckmen YOLA Center in Inglewood. But it is also a bittersweet week. Travel issues (no one will say exactly what, but we can easily guess) have meant the cancellation of his Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela‘s trip to the Bowl next week. Dudamel will also be forced to remain behind with them in Caracas.

After 20 years, Dudamel clearly knows what works at the Bowl, but he also likes to push the envelope as with Tuesday’s savvy blend of Duke Ellington and jazzy Ravel. The soloist was Korean pianist Seong-Jin Cho, whose recent recording of Ravel’s complete solo piano works along with his two concertos, has been one of the most popular releases celebrating the Ravel year (March 7 was the 150^th anniversary of the French composer’s birth).

Ellington and Ravel were certainly aware of each other. When Ravel visited New York in 1928, he heard the 29-year-old Ellington’s band at the Cotton Club, although his attention on the trip was more drawn to Gershwin. Ellington knew and admired Ravel, and Billy Strayhorn, who was responsible for much of Ellington’s music, was strongly drawn to Ravel’s harmony and use of instrumental color.

On his return to Paris, Ravel wrote his two piano concertos, the first for the left hand alone, and jazz influences were strong. Cho played both concertos, which were framed by the symphonic tone poems “Harlem” and “Black, Brown and Beige, which Ellington called tone parallels.

There has been no shortage of Ravel concerto performance of late — or ever — but Ellington is another matter. Although the pianist, composer and band leader was very much on the radar of the classical world — “Harlem” was originally intended for Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony; Leopold Stokowski attended the Carnegie Hall premiere of “Black, Brown and Beige,” as did Eleanor Roosevelt, Marian Anderson and Frank Sinatra — Ellington never played the crossover game. The NBC “Harlem” never panned out and became a big-band score. Ever practical, Ellington, who composed mostly in wee hours after gigs, always wrote for the occasion and the players. He tended to leave orchestration to others, more concerned with highlighting the fabulous improvising soloists in his band.

The scores, moreover, were gatherings, developments and riffs on various existing songs. “Harlem” is an acoustical enrapturement of the legendary Harlem Renaissance and one of the great symphonic portraits of a place in the repertory. “Black, Brown and Beige” is an ambitious acoustical unfolding of the American Black narrative, from African work songs to spiritual exaltation with “Come Sunday” (sung by Mahalia Jackson at the premiere) to aspects of Black life, in war and peace, up to the Harlem Renaissance.

Both works are best known today, if nonetheless seldom heard, in the conventional but effective orchestrations by Maurice Peress and are what Dudamel relies on. The version of “Black, Brown and Beige” reduces it from 45 to 18 too-short minutes.

The primary reason for these scores’ neglect is that orchestras can’t swing. The exception is the L.A. Phil. With Dudamel’s surprising success of taking the L.A. Phil to Coachella, there now seems nothing it can’t do.

The time has come to commission more experimental and more timely arrangements. But even these Peress arrangements, blasted through the Bowl‘s sound system and with the orchestra bolstered by a jazz saxophone section, jazz drummer and other jazz-inclined players, caught the essence of one of America’s greatest composers.

Ravel fared less well. The left-hand concerto has dark mysteries hard to transmit over so many acres and video close-ups of two-armed pianists trying to keep the right hand out of the way can be disconcerting. This summer, in fact, unmusical jumpy video is at all times disconcerting.

Ravel’s jazzier, sunnier G-Major concerto is a winner everywhere. But for all Cho’s acclaim in Ravel, he played with sturdy authority. Four years ago, joining Dudamel at an L.A. Phil gala in Walt Disney Concert Hall, Cho brought refined freshness to Tchaikovsky First Piano Concerto. In Ravel at the Bowl, amplification strongly accentuated his polished technique, gleaming tone and meticulous rhythms, leaving it up to Dudamel and a joyous, eager orchestra to exult in the Ravel that Ellington helped make swing.