Cisco Bradley

Bradley was born in Billings, Montana. His father, Charles Crane Bradley Jr., was a teacher and social worker. His mother, Susanna Louise Remple, was also a teacher.[3] Bradley's parents met at Colorado College in the mid-1960s, while involved in anti-war activism.[4] His father was a historian who wrote the first history of the Crow Indian Tribe.[4] Bradley's older brother, Daniel Charles Bradley, is a physicist.[4] His paternal grandfather, Charles Crane Bradley Sr., was a professor of geology and dean of students at Montana State University. His step-grandmother was Nina Leopold Bradley, the daughter of Aldo Leopold, widely regarded as the founding figure in American environmentalist thought.

In childhood, Bradley was exposed to environmentalist and left-wing working class activism. Bradley's maternal grandparent, Sterner Ash Remple, worked his whole life for a railroad company and was a union member. His grandmother, Lois Anne Weber, was a conservative Catholic convert in the 1950s and remained an ardent member of the church until it refused to take a staunch oppositional stance against the Vietnam War, which she considered to be immoral. She then became an atheist and Marxist, joining the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP). She ran for lieutenant governor of Colorado on the SWP ticket in 1984.

Bradley first considered becoming a historian in his pre-teen years and spent four years after college traveling and working abroad. He taught English in Prague, Czech Republic.[4]

In 1999, after the murder of Amadou Dialo, Bradley committed to anti-racism work. He entered graduate school to study Islamic history, first intending to focus on the Middle East, but soon shifted to Southeast Asia. The work of Michael Chamberlain, Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault compelled him to closely examine social history, social disparities, and hierarchies of power. He eventually focused on cultural expressions of dissent and resistance to hegemonic power.

His doctoral dissertation examined how Islamic textualism became the most dynamic social force in the Malay-Thai borderland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.[5] On a Fulbright Fellowship, he spent time in southern Thailand and in Malaysia during the years that the Malay minority led an insurgency against the Thai government.[6] He concluded his graduate studies with the Charlotte W. Newcombe doctoral dissertation fellowship in religion and ethics from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation (which later was renamed the Institute for Citizens and Scholars).[7]

After graduating with his Ph.D. in 2010, Bradley taught at Hamilton College for one year before taking a job at the Pratt Institute. At Pratt, his area of focus shifted to American cultural networks, especially involving music, cultural production, and migration.[8] In 2014, he co-founded Talk Race Forum with vocalist, composer, and educator Fay Victor. They co-hosted over 30 events in formal and informal settings involving artists, musicians, and academics. The project concluded in 2018.[9]

In 2013, Bradley founded Jazz Right Now, as a review of the Brooklyn experimental music scene. The website quickly became an active archive of the music scene through interviews, reviews and artist features. It is now an extensive record of artist profiles, videos, sessionographies, photos, and various related information.[10]

In 2016, with the success of Jazz Right Now, Bradley began to work closely with bassist and composer William Parker, publishing the latter's biography, Universal Tonality, in 2021.[11] The book rooted his life in the Great Migration, tracing his ancestry back to Africa. Cultural theorist Fred Moten called it "an intellectual history of the jazz artist."[12] The book chronicled Parker's evolution from the jazz lofts of the 1970s, his work with pianist Cecil Taylor in the 1980s, and his rise as a bandleader from the 1990s onwards. He is one of the central figures of the New York free jazz scene.[13] Moten also wrote of the book, “Writing elegantly about the music as well as William Parker’s work as an activist and organizer, Cisco Bradley gives a full sense of Parker’s centrality to the development and maintenance of the free jazz scene in New York as well as his efforts in presenting the music across the globe.”[1][14] The interviews he did with Parker came to form the beginnings of the Free Jazz Oral History Project, which aimed to document, preserve, and make publicly available interviews with all of the living free jazz artists who were active in the 1960s and 1970s.[15] The archive currently contains nearly 500 interviews.

Bradley next turned his attention to writing an account of Brooklyn's experimental music scene, specifically at its epicenter in the neighborhood of Williamsburg in the era 1988–2014, which shifted the focus to several younger generations of musicians working in New York with the book The Williamsburg Avant-Garde.[16][17] The book centered on Brooklyn as a microcosm of American gentrification, pushing artists, musicians, and other cultural creators out of vital urban centers. Gentrification as a hindrance to culture is one of Bradley's primary explanations for American creative stagnation.[4][18]

Bradley founded the non-profit organization New Revolution Arts in 2014, which organizes experimental music, art, and poetry events in New York City.[19] His programmed events involved performers such as William Parker, Cooper-Moore, Daniel Carter, Craig Taborn, Mat Maneri, Mary Halvorson, Nate Wooley, Ches Smith, Fay Victor, James Brandon Lewis, Luke Stewart, Jessica Pavone, Sarah Bernstein, Paul r. Harding, and No Land.[20] He also organized and produced the New York Tenor Saxophone Festival in 2015 and the Loud Week Festival in 2018. In 2016–2017, he was the manager of the poetry-jazz big band Heroes Are Gang Leaders, led by James Brandon Lewis and Thomas Sayers Ellis.[21]