Allies Bradfield, McCullough Launch Calligram Records

News, From the Magazine, Geof Bradfield, Chad McCullough

By Michael Jackson I Jan. 2, 2024

Calligram founders Geof Bradfield (left) and Chad McCullough are dedicated to putting out physical product.
(Photo: Michael Jackson)

Texas tenorist Geof Bradfield’s playing possesses a steely grandeur and deep sophistication. He’s grown a formidable rep in Chicago, the town where he performs consistently and calls home, and beyond. DownBeat met with Bradfield at the Green Mill, where he regularly leads multiple projects including the Leadbelly tribute Our Roots and the loose-but-tight nonet Yes, and … Music for Nine Improvisers. At press time he was preoccupied with perhaps his most ambitious aggregation to date, the 12-piece Colossal Abundance.

At the Mill in September he was seasoning the sardonic songs of pianist Ben Sidran with skewering blues solos, but a couple weeks prior he’d showcased a quintet he calls Quaver with cohorts Clark Sommers, Dana Hall and Scott Hesse plus Russ Johnson, a Milwaukee trumpeter who enjoys superb rapport with Bradfield.

It’s another top-rank trumpeter, however — Chad McCullough — with whom Bradfield chose to partner in a new venture, Calligram Records. The 40-something McCullough was the 50-something Bradfield’s student at University of Idaho at the century’s turn. “He was tough,” recalled McCullough. “He’d say, ‘I’d fire you if you played like that in my band.’” But McCullough was no slouch and is now widely regarded for his stunning, chilled lyricism and compositional acuity, as heard on The Charm Of Impossibilities, featuring Jon Deitemyer, Jon Irabagon and Larry Kohut, which joins the eponymous Quaver as one of four initial releases on Calligram.

“A calligram represents the thing, but is not the thing,” Bradfield philosophizes, “without getting into semiotic theory, which is the purview of my wife [art historian Amy Mooney].” Bradfield aspires to document projects at peak performance, and there are discrepancies between live energy and studio precision. An opportunity to perform with the Quaver quintet in Portugal at the Guimarães Festival in 2019 for two weeks sharpened the band’s repertoire, and Bradfield was confident the band was captured at a high level; sadly, the live digital files were corrupted. Undaunted, the group recorded at the Mill in October 2021. “It was a special time, folk were excited to come out again before Omicron hit, there was serious energy in the room, yet you could hear a pin drop when Dana was hand drumming [on the ballad] ‘Naõ Faz Mal.’”

Consistent with the Calligram conceit that a recording is but a simulacrum of the real experience, “quite different, socially and sonically,” as Bradfield puts it, he underscores, “There was a hysterical bathroom scene at the Mill during the recording.”

The restroom is right next to the stage at the legendary venue and manager Jason Cole had to interrupt proceedings to quell a disturbance with, “Hey, we’re trying to make a record here!”

Though Bradfield gauged that the material from the Mill was good for a couple of releases, he elected to complete the album with three concise tracks from a session at Ken Christianson’s Pro Musica Studio, including “Solid Jackson,” a nod to Charlie Haden, his mentor at CalArts back in the ’90s. “Charlie would say these curious post-Civil War things when he saw you in the hall, ‘Solid Jackson’ being one,” he said.

The unlikely decision to start a new imprint, producing short initial runs of 500 CDs per artist, in an era when physical copies sell slowly, suited the temperament of both Bradfield and McCullough, who had good experiences with John Bishop’s Seattle-based Origin label.

“John was very helpful,” McCullough recalled. “I worked at Origin for 10 years on web graphics, digitizing the catalogue, doing A&R, shipping promo.”

With no formal training beyond encouragement from Bishop, McCullough worked on design projects on the side and has produced more that 150 CD packages, including layout, branding and imagery for Calligram.

Even though a primary concern is “putting the thing you love in the hands of somebody you trust,” as Bradfield sees self-production, Calligram’s 50/50 partners are concerned with paying back.

They already do this as educators, Bradfield at Northern Illinois University and McCullough at DePaul and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. But, galvanized by the uplifting vibe of the Chicago scene, they wanted to shed light on distinguished peers and up-and-comers. In the latter category comes saxophonist Arman Sangalang, a student of Bradfield. “He’s a great player and a beautiful writer and, rather than some famous guy, we thought he should be part of the family,” insisted McCullough. Sangalang joins Chicago vets Matt Ulery and Dave Miller for his debut. In the former category is Reveal, a rare leader release by Johnson, in spell-binding cahoots with violin marvel Mark Feldman, Ethan Philion and Tim Daisy.

Calligram will chase up the initial releases with the Scott Hesse Trio’s Intention, a Feldman-meets-pianist-Steve Million date dubbed Perfectly Spaced and a live date at Wisconsin’s storied Uptowner bar with drummer Dave Bayless, Johnson and bassist Clay Schaub.

“I’ll also be releasing Atlantic Road Trip with Glaswegian saxophonist Paul Towndrow and Slovakian vibraphonist Miro Herak,” mentioned McCullough.

“We wanted to see how the sausage was made,” says Bradfield, referencing all the elements that go into publicity, manufacturing and design, “inspired by such DIY pioneers from Chicago as the AACM, Dave Rempis, Mike Reed and Josh Berman, Nick Mazarella and Chris Anderson from the JRAC. It’s not a charity, it’s business, but it’s giving back to your musical community.”

With Bradfield handling marketing, mailing and bookkeeping duties, and McCullough in charge of design aspects and streaming platforms, the two are allied in putting out physical product. “One day ChatGPT and all these technological devices will begin to eat each other from the inside out,” Bradfield said. “Instead of being trained to be distracted, we’ll all be free and go back to sitting down and paying attention to music and having conversations about it. At least, that’s our Luddite fantasy.” DB