Thanks to Gene Dobbs Bradford, the St. Louis jazz scene is hitting the high notes again
By Lynnda Greene
Photograph by Dilip Vishwanat
A 1989 graduate of the prestigious Eastman School of Music, double bassist Gene Dobbs Bradford has been a musical force onstage and off. After serving as director of operations for the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra and executive director of Jazz at the Bistro, Bradford launched Jazz St. Louis in early 2006. This nonprofit organization, which expands and now supports the work of the Bistro, promotes jazz through education, outreach and research, rather than just concerts. Under his leadership, Jazz St. Louis has initiated several community partnerships that, taking jazz as a model for a sort of grass-roots cultural democracy, have already achieved impressive results. Attendance at jazz concerts around the city is up, programming at the Bistro and other venues has expanded, and last year, nearly 20,000 area schoolchildren were able to hear live jazz performed by great artists visiting the city. Best of all, St. Louis has reassumed its rightful reputation as a go-to city for jazz artists and aficionados alike. In February, USA Today named Jazz at the Bistro one of the top 10 jazz clubs in the country. Here, Bradford riffs on two of his favorite themes—jazz’s role in the city’s future and the city’s role in the music’s future.
You’ve said your family back in Maryland wasn’t particularly musical, though your father did sing doo-wop. How did you come to serious music? My first exposure to serious music was Bugs Bunny cartoons; that’s where I first heard opera themes, which I thought were pretty cool. Then came A Charlie Brown Christmas. I liked the part of “Für Elise” they used so much I bought a cassette of Beethoven’s piano works so I could listen to the whole thing. But there were all these sonatas on it, too, and I liked the way all the musical lines moved. I started on violin but switched to double bass when my hands got too big in high school. It was in our jazz ensemble, where we got to do old Count Basie arrangements, that I learned how much fun playing could be. But it all started with Bugs.
You trained in the classical tradition, toward a job in a symphony bass section, yet you’ve spent your entire career managing other people’s playing. Why the switch? When I wasn’t playing in the jazz ensembles at Eastman, I was finding excuses to play; I was always arranging gigs for us around town or even back home on vacations. At some point I realized that if I had to sit in a symphony bass section, playing music someone else chose, the way they wanted me to play it, I’d go crazy. But creating events, bringing together musicians who could play much better than you ever could—that really appealed to me. I wanted to find ways I could exceed my own talent.
Record sales are down, and attendance at performances lags. Is jazz at risk? It’s true, interest in this music has been fading since the ’60s when rock ’n’ roll came along, and then, too, jazz began to get experimental, and that turned people off. We saw a great resurgence in the late ’80s when people like Wynton Marsalis and other young lions of jazz just out of school began to champion this music. Ken Burns’ superb Jazz documentary in 2000 initiated another wave of interest.
Locally, things have progressed slowly, too. It’s taken 10 years, but Jazz at the Bistro has certainly changed St. Louisans’ perception of this music from just background music in some club to a cultural institution in the same category as the symphony or the art museum. Ask anyone outside of St. Louis and they’ll say, ‘Oh yeah, they’ve got a great thing going on there!’ But jazz is still not as secure as it used to be—not here, not anywhere. Most St. Louisans know that great artists like Miles Davis, Oliver Nelson and Clark Terry started their careers here, as have more recent local bright lights like Jeremy Davenport, Peter Martin and Marcus Baylor. But only aficionados can likewise name other native-born jazz greats like Lester Bowie, Ray Kennedy, Ronnie Barrage, Oliver Lake and Hamiet Bluiett. So yes, American cities, especially St. Louis, need to embrace their cultural heritage. If we’re not vigilant, we could lose it.
For the uninitiated, what would you say is distinct about a jazz performance? Our music is made fresh daily. It’s always unique; it happens in the moment and can’t be replicated ever again. Each performance is something only you and the people in that room get, because the next time the musicians play the piece you just heard, it will be significantly different. Jazz is very personal because the musicians are, in a sense, the composer. Like Baroque music, jazz is improvisatory—you start off with the form, the chord changes, and then you make up everything else. In jazz, the musicians create their lines on the spot, in the moment, in response to all the influences going on in and around them—including you. So in a way, your personality is a component of the creative experience. You’re in on it.
Why, given the rich jazz tradition here, do so few St. Louisans know about the history of this music in their city? Well, we’re gonna let ’em know! I was very surprised when I came to work with the symphony to find so few jazz venues here; after all, I’d grown up in Maryland thinking of St. Louis as a pillar of this music. It’s really lack of education, which is one reason we launched Jazz St. Louis—to broaden our outreach.
Typically, though most St. Louis kids hear about classical through the symphony’s great outreach programs, few learn much about jazz, so we really have to get out there. On average, we reach between 15,000 and 20,000 school kids a year. The Whitaker Jazz Education Collaborative not only helps us get our visiting musicians into local schools, where they perform, explain and get them all jamming, but also nurtures new young talent in smaller groups like the spectacular THF Realty All-Star Student Ensemble.
It’s not a hard sell, only a matter of exposure. Every generation eventually gets curious about other kinds of music; they’ll seek out music that’s a little more sophisticated, that stands the test of time. Some of the rap and hip-hop they like now will pass that test, but most won’t—and if we can get to them now, they’ll know it. Our approach is not “This is good for you, and the stuff you’re listening to is not.” Kids here are pretty hip; we get our musicians in front of them in their schools, and in two minutes, they’re dancin’. They get it. Jazz is there. It’s entered the culture.
New moniker, new mission, new strategy. So what does Jazz St. Louis aim to do that Jazz at the Bistro hasn’t, and how? Since we’re small, our whole strategy depends on collaboration to develop both new audiences and more performance venues. For example, through UMSL's E. Desmond Lee Fine Arts Education Collaborative, we’re forging alliances with other big cultural institutions like Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, the symphony, the art museum and others to get our music in front of people as far west—and east—as we can get it. It’s a great partnership because everybody wins: We all broaden our offerings and our audiences.
St. Louis is the quintessential small town—you really do feel here like you can know everybody. We laugh about it, but the fact that this city operates largely by word of mouth explains why our jazz community continues to thrive and grow. It’s how jazz has always grown, historically—one conversation at a time. I truly feel that if I can just sit down and talk to everyone in St. Louis about jazz, we won’t have to worry about where the audiences are going to come from.
Historically, this city has always seemed to produce an inordinate number of musicians whose biographies note that they’re “formerly of St. Louis.” How can we keep gifted musicians here? The only way to keep them here is to offer them more venues to play in, and the only way to do that is to make people aware of how jazz fits not only into American culture, but into St. Louis culture. Another function of Jazz St. Louis is to help people who are presenting jazz, too many of whom have had a hard time of it. We see Jazz at the Bistro as not just the flagship venue, but also a sort of “mother house” to smaller tribes around town, like Cookie’s in Webster, Balaban’s in the Central West End, Finale in Clayton, Mad Art in Soulard, Boogaloo in Maplewood, the Delmar Lounge in U. City and the jazz programs at Webster University, SIUE and UMSL. The idea is to generate enough of an audience that we can support two or three thriving venues at any given time, so that when people come into town, they’ll tell friends that of course they’re going to go hear some great jazz, because that’s “what St. Louis is famous for.” Wherever there’s a stage in this town, we want to see jazz there.
Your thoughts on the future of jazz—and the future of our city? Historically, musicians came here because as a crossroads city on the river due north of New Orleans, St. Louis attracted lots of different people and sounds. They still come—because it still does. Where else can you go and find such a wealth of high-caliber, big-city artistic institutions and that deep sense of community you usually find only in small towns? Corporate and civic support for the arts, which has always been fantastic even through tough economic times, is really beginning to pay off now.
It’s a great time to be here because people are finally beginning to think regionally and realize that art has to permeate the very fabric of our lives, at every level, wherever we live. And with jazz in St. Louis, it’s one degree of separation. Once you’re in, you’re never out.
