Bobby Bradford and His CuZns: Freddie Ain’t Ready

After playing a CuZns gig with Bobby Bradford and William Roper, Garth Powell suggested they cut an album. The trio added Brian Walsh on saxophones and clarinets for this studio session, recorded live to two-track analog tape, produced by Joe Harley, with mastering and lacquer cutting by Kevin Gray. Bradford is known primarily for his cornet playing, Roper for his tuba mastery, and Powell for his drumming, but naming all the instruments played on these six tracks would take up this entire column, what with all the bowls, bells, triangles, gongs, cymbals, wood blocks, and wind instruments. With Roper and Bradford offering spoken recitations amid the rattling, shimmering, squeaking, and squawking instrumentation, Freddie Ain’t Ready asks questions about American identity, drawing from the pan-African culture of the Antebellum South and referencing preachers, camp meetings, water deities, voodoo healers, and burial grounds. Bradford, now 90, earned icon status in the Southern California avant-garde playing with Ornette Coleman, John Carter, Vinny Golia, and David Murray. He and Roper act here as modern-day griots in the lineage of what the Art Ensemble of Chicago called Great Black Music—Ancient to the Future, keeping us in touch with who we have been and who we can be.