Early life
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.
Academic Life
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]
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]
Historical contributions
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 now-defunct non-profit organization New Revolution Arts in 2014, which organized 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]
Persi Warren Diaconis is an American mathematician of Greek descent and former professional magician. He is the Mary V. Sunseri Professor of Statistics and Mathematics at Stanford University.
In the arts and in literature, the term avant-garde identifies an experimental genre, or work of art, and the artist who created it; which usually is aesthetically innovative, whilst initially being ideologically unacceptable to the artistic establishment of the time. The military metaphor of an advance guard identifies the artists and writers whose innovations in style, form, and subject-matter challenge the artistic and aesthetic validity of the established forms of art and the literary traditions of their time; thus, the artists who created the anti-novel and Surrealism were ahead of their times.
Ronald Lewis Graham was an American mathematician credited by the American Mathematical Society as "one of the principal architects of the rapid development worldwide of discrete mathematics in recent years". He was president of both the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Association of America, and his honors included the Leroy P. Steele Prize for lifetime achievement and election to the National Academy of Sciences.
Avant-garde jazz is a style of music and improvisation that combines avant-garde art music and composition with jazz. It originated in the early 1950s and developed through to the late 1960s. Originally synonymous with free jazz, much avant-garde jazz was distinct from that style.
Archie Shepp is an American jazz saxophonist, educator and playwright who since the 1960s has played a central part in the development of avant-garde jazz.
Williamsburg is a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Brooklyn, bordered by Greenpoint to the north; Bedford–Stuyvesant to the south; Bushwick and East Williamsburg to the east; and the East River to the west. It was an independent city until 1855, when it was annexed by Brooklyn; at that time, the spelling was changed from Williamsburgh to Williamsburg.
Neil Immerman is an American theoretical computer scientist, a professor of computer science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is one of the key developers of descriptive complexity, an approach he is currently applying to research in model checking, database theory, and computational complexity theory.
AUM Fidelity is an independent record label in New York City primarily devoted to avant-garde jazz artists such as William Parker, Matthew Shipp, and David S. Ware. It has also released recordings by improvisational rock band Shrimp Boat and exclusively distributes the CaseQuarter and Riti labels. It was founded in 1997 by former Homestead Records label manager Steven Joerg.
Ebon Fisher taught at MIT's Media Lab at its inception in 1985, and later became a leading figure in the Brooklyn Immersionists arts movement in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. An innovator of ecological "web jams" and "media organisms," Fisher has worked extensively on strategies for using media technology in the service of living systems. Much of his work and writing redefines both art and technology as forms of nurturing and cultivation. Fisher's Quaker upbringing and his youthful experiences at a Quaker farm school in New Hampshire, The Meeting School, were significant influences on his democratic and ecological approach to culture.
Joseph O'Rourke is the Spencer T. and Ann W. Olin Professor of Computer Science at Smith College and the founding chair of the Smith computer science department. His main research interest is computational geometry.
Grant Parker is a South African-born associate professor of classics at Stanford University in the United States. Parker's principal research interests are Imperial Latin Literature, the portrayal of Egypt and India in the Roman Empire and Classical Reception in South Africa.
Albert's Lullaby is the first solo album by American avant-garde bassist, jazz composer, bandleader, producer; Michael Staron which in essence documented his trio collaboration with American avant-garde jazz composer, bandleader, and multi-instrumentalist Hal Russell recorded in 1991 and 1992 and released posthumously on the part of Mr. Russell on the Southport label in 2000.
Leslie Kanes Weisman is an American architecture educator, activist and community planning department official. Weisman was one of the founding faculty members of the New Jersey Institute of Technology School of Architecture in Newark, New Jersey. She was also one of the founders of the Women's School of Planning and Architecture.
Fred Lionel Orton is an English art historian. His initial training was at Coventry College of Art in painting as a Dip.A,D student. He extended his experience in the History and Development of Art initially at the Courtauld Institute in London and then professionally as a scholar of art history and art theory at the University of Leeds.
Social practice or socially engaged practice in the arts focuses on community engagement through a range of art media, human interaction and social discourse. While the term social practice has been used in the social sciences to refer to a fundamental property of human interaction, it has also been used to describe community-based arts practices such as relational aesthetics, new genre public art, socially engaged art, dialogical art, participatory art, and ecosocial immersionism.
Live at Okuden is a live double album by avant-garde jazz trio Jungle, featuring alto saxophonist Mat Walerian, pianist Matthew Shipp and drummer Hamid Drake. It was recorded in 2012 at the Okuden Music Concert Series, and was released in 2016 on the Brooklyn-based avant-garde record label ESP-Disk'.
Penny Marie Von Eschen is an American historian and Professor of History and William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of American Studies at the University of Virginia. She is known for her works on American and African-American history, American diplomacy, the history of music, and their connections with decolonization.
Amy Nicole Langville is an American mathematician and operations researcher, and is also a former star basketball player at the high school and college levels. One of the main topics in her research is ranking systems such as the PageRank system used by Google for ranking web pages. She has also applied her ranking expertise to basketball bracketology. She is a professor of mathematics at the College of Charleston.
Rollo Gabriel Silver was an American literary historian.
Merri Sue Carter is an American astronomer who works at the United States Naval Observatory as director of the World Data Center for the Rotation of the Earth, Washington. She is also the author of books on the history of astronomy with her father, geodesist William E. Carter.
