Bobby Bradford: Phoenix Rising

By Gary Fukushima I Sep. 9, 2025

“[That’s] the thing of the beboppers,” Bradford said. “These guys were important for not only playing that wonderful music, but they knew a sort of social stance, you see?”
(Photo: Courtesy Bobby Bradford GoFundMe page)

It was a calm, balmy, near-perfect evening in Westwood, California, not far from UCLA, in the expansive courtyard at the Hammer Museum. Every seat and walkway edge was packed with an energized, expectant audience, to hear cornetist Bobby Bradford and his seven-piece ensemble in a performance of his suite Stealin’ Home: A Tribute To Jackie Robinson, a piece first debuted by Bradford in 2021, through a commission by the education-focused, non-profit organization The Baseball Reliquary. In introducing Bradford, Claudia Bestor, the museum’s director of public programs and education, announced, “Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, Bobby is back, spitting fire and ready to play some music!”

It was a triumphant yet poignant moment for Bradford, as the 91-year-old and his wife, seven months earlier, on a much less-than-perfect evening, had to flee from the ashes of their Altadena home of over 50 years. The Eaton fire in early January in Southern California claimed many jazz musicians as its victims among the thousands who lost their homes, property and their lives. It was almost the last chapter in Bradford’s storied life: born in Mississippi, growing up in Dallas as a poor kid working at his family’s store after school — to performing with Ornette Coleman and John Carter as a fellow pioneer of the free-jazz movement and becoming a beloved icon and jazz educator, first at Pasadena City College and then at Pomona College before retiring from teaching in 2021.

Bradford was awakened that fateful day at 4 a.m. by saxophonist Chuck Manning, who, in addition to being in Bradford’s band for many years, was also his neighbor in Altadena. The fierce winds had shifted dramatically and everyone in the area needed to leave right then. Bradford opened the front door to see his cactus plant on fire in the front yard, as a hail of embers flew past him onto the rug and began to smolder.

“We barely got out there with [only] the clothes on our back and our blue bag of medicine,” recalled Bradford. “We lost everything,” including all his horns, especially his prized cornet, which he desperately wanted to save. “I was gonna run [back] and get my horn,” he recalled. “My wife said, hold on, no, we got to get out of here.” They drove away, slowly, because the smoke was an obscuring veil that made it difficult to see even the road in front of them. He hadn’t fully realized even then that he would never again see his home. “I said, OK, I’ll be back tomorrow, like in the past whenever [there] was a threat like that. William Roper said the same thing to me … over the years, probably 10 times that’s happened. There’d be a fire, but it never got to our front door.”

Roper, the tubist in Bradford’s band, also lost his house that night. Manning’s home somehow was spared but was uninhabitable for many weeks, Manning was able to get his twin brother, Rob (who is the chief engineer for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory based in Altadena), to put Bradford and his wife up for a week, before they embarked on a gypsy-like journey, moving from place to place. “You know the Ramada Inn on Colorado [Avenue]?” Bradford said. “They ought to be arrested, it was so bad. Then we were at an Airbnb for a period. [That] wasn’t bad, but we were right next to the freeway.” They found another Airbnb that was so small that “if you were in the kitchen, you bent over, and your butt was in the living room.”

Bradford, in his usual folksy humor, was recounting his ordeal while sitting in a small but comfortable rehearsal space next to the back house they are renting in nearby Pasadena. It’s the fifth place they have moved to — the fifth being the charm, so to speak. They happened upon right as it was being listed by the owner. “So, we came right over here,” he said. “That was just a big a blessing as the fire was a non-blessing.”

Bradford has also been blessed by an outpouring of generosity to replace what he lost. “I told my wife I’m probably better dressed now than I ever was. People give me clothes that fit, you know?” He also was given a cornet, the exact same model that was destroyed in the fire, thanks to some fellow trumpeters on the East Coast who were able to locate one for him. “These guys called me … and I woke up the next day, there’s a FedEx on the front porch with this horn. The first thing I thought is, would I do that for somebody?” Bradford continued. “You have to ask yourself, why are they doing this? It is just because of the music, or is it just one human being to another? I gave that a serious thought.”

Fittingly, for his comeback performance, Bradford decided to revisit the piece he wrote in honor of another who once resided not far from where Bradford lived, someone who also faced and triumphed over tremendous adversity. Jackie Robinson grew up in Pasadena, very close to both neighboring Altadena and the Rose Bowl, where he played football for UCLA. Before that, he attended Pasadena City College, where Bradford would teach some years later. Bradford also identifies with Robinson’s military service, as he himself was also in the military, playing in Air Force bands for four years, in between stints playing in Ornette Coleman’s band. At the Hammer, Bradford began his set with “Lieutenant Jackie,” a blues march to commemorate Robinson’s service as an officer.

After the piece, Bradford spoke to the audience about how Robinson was not only a great athlete but “a great American.” The next day at his home, Bradford clarified why it was important to say that. “You grow up saying, I want in. I’m born and raised here ... I want to be an American, I’m an American too, right? In Mississippi growing up, it’s like you were an unwelcome guest here, in a way. ‘Can’t we put these guys on a boat and send them back to where [they] came from?’ And I wouldn’t be surprised if you’d ask Trump secretly, ‘What if we just ship these black people back to Africa?’ [He’d ask] how much would it cost? There’s that thing that’s still here. Here we are all these years later.”

Robinson’s historic debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers as the first Black man to play major league baseball occurred in 1947, not long after Bradford had already become enamored with Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Dexter Gordon and Fats Navarro. To Bradford, they, like Robinson, represented a kind of “rule breaking” that could perhaps change the status quo of the world Blacks lived in. “[That’s] the thing of the beboppers,” he said. “Their music, and then themselves. The way they looked at the world, these guys were important for not only playing that wonderful music, but they knew a sort of social stance, you see?”

The same social stance that Robinson also represented as one of the new great Black American role models. “Jazz and baseball — what could be more American than that other than a hot dog?” asked Bradford. Those things have endured through the tumult of history, as has the 91-year-old cornetist from Altadena who escaped the ashes to rise again, spitting fire and ready to play some more music. DB