Herbie Miller, Contributor

Across artistic disciplines and through all periods, one observes a frightening number of Jamaican artistes ending up by the wayside or fall short of achieving their full capabilities due to overindulgence, psychoses, or utter disillusionment. In the exuberance of their early achievements, some whose promise loomed, simply stopped short of becoming expansively inventive, settling on a style that perhaps intensifies but hardly expands its language.

There are a few, whose infatuation with silly amusement causes them to appear like jesters for the life of their careers.

If none of these pertain, premature deaths caused by careless lifestyles, or resulting from misfortune, account for the remainder. Cecil Valentine 'Sonny' Bradshaw eluded that category. In addition to the challenges artistes face, he got the better of mankind's most desired gift, the definitive yardstick and that unavoidable adversary: time.

Still, the man with the horn never looked at the world through rose-coloured glasses but, significantly, through horn-rimmed ones.

Sonny Bradshaw's file photographs indicate that in the 1940s he wore horn-rimmed glasses, a beret (and sported a goatee) in the style of Dizzy Gillespie. Like everyone vaguely interested in the trumpet, or any other instrument for that matter, Bradshaw also championed the heroics of Louis Armstrong. He was a complete musician who played trumpet, adding its warmer-sounding relative, the flugel horn, in his mature years. He was also a competent pianist and was more than useful playing the bass, drums, organ and trombone. Nevertheless, his playing was without the bravado of either Armstrong or Gillespie. He encapsulated the lyricism of Miles Davis and the warm melodicism of Harry James, whose popular song, The Man With the Horn, Bradshaw also made his band's theme.

He was also an imaginative arranger, a composer and an energetic bandleader with an eye for discovering talent. Bradshaw's style, how he wore his clothes, that is, also reflected the fashion statements of Davis. Bradshaw, therefore, embraced the range of jazz as popular culture exemplified through the personality and creative genius of these masters.

Because of Armstrong, Bradshaw understood the challenges of being an artiste. Harry James gave him an idea of how to swing a big band and remain immensely popular. From Gillespie he learned to organise diverse musical elements into his arrangements and turn up the rhythmic temperature, regardless of idiomatic source, and Davis provided the definition of 'cool'. All these elements contributed to the shaping of Bradshaw's popularity during a time when Jamaican musicians performed at levels attained only by masters.

That is not to say 'Sonny B' was not an original thinker because he exhibited the influences of these masters. Like any great artiste, one's style is first influenced by one's heroes before individual expression is found. It is in that mould that Bradshaw was shaped as he developed an expressive musical grammar and personality as original as any within the context of the Jamaican national ethos.

Entertainment business

An emerging star during the war years, Bradshaw was popular with dance audiences, overcame the challenges and impediments of the entertainment business, outlasting successive trends that soared into and then fell from vogue, and organised bands, big and small, in every decade until his recent death at 83. Yet, he was still perceived, by even some who consider themselves knowledgeable about the arts world, as little more than a charismatic but uncompromising bandleader and a trickster, whose ability to survive made him appear too contented with life to be given serious consideration. The heart of the matter was that Bradshaw, a thoroughly committed artiste, would always prevail masterly in spite of the frivolities of the entertainment business, Government's partiality with cultural funding for the kind of ideas he put forward, and the professed logic that determines corporate sponsorship. Consistently aware of trends, Bradshaw maintained such personal touch with the creative industry, consumer tastes and the necessity for the use of arts in the building of a nation, that his 60-plus years of cultural advocacy and organisation represent one of the single most independently dedicated servants to the elevation of creative aesthetics and the musician as artistic genius.

Diverse entertainment

Bradshaw encouraged music that he thought was good, believing, like Duke Ellington, there were only two types, good and bad, and that genre specification was only necessary for the insular listener. Much of his breadth and scope had to do with something as basic as the individual coming of age at a time when diverse entertainment, including vernacular expression, was the order. It was out of this background that Bradshaw developed the skill to manipulate idiomatic forms as artistic and personal expression. He contended that those who considered local vernacular inferior and crude were in need of a colonic. He understood music as an extension of art into language - not as a commercial hustle or ephemeral vogue. He understood the colour and texture of native language, musically or otherwise, as impulsive reaction for anyone who ever found himself or herself suddenly in a pickle. That as exclamation, it was not only musical but, culturally, its understanding stretches from a 'peeny-waaly' village to a garrison community, from the carefree and tense tenement yard to the anxious uncertainty of a socially established and financially secure uptown family in a mansion on the hill with a heavenly view of Kingston. In Bradshaw's mind, music in the vernacular, coarse or genteel, harbours no prejudices.

But then, Bradshaw's involvement for more than 60 years in music allowed boundaries and borders to be traversable. As a product of the 1940s second generation big-band musicians, 'Sonny B' outdistanced his contemporaries on the local scene by keeping tuned to indigenous forms, learning to swing, understanding the modern movement of bop, and realising that great art does not have to end with lofty ideals but that it is also about humour, tragedy, remorse and celebration; that music could be simplified in a way that made it complex.

As bandleader, he was determined to continue with live instrumental music as a public option, swinging it in basic 4/4 time at all tempos while also reflecting homegrown styles as state-of-the-art achievement. His solid knowledge of arrangement was balanced by the scope of his imagination, which reflected colours, textures and forms that were particularly stimulated by the idiomatic nature of Jamaica's cultural range and the swing music of the war-time era updated to capture the advancement of succeeding decades. To that end, Bradshaw was a hard taskmaster, whipping into shape old and young musicians alike to accomplish the desired results. In spite of his jazz credentials, Kingston's downtown communities of the '30s and '40s shaped his belief in indigenous expression. Therefore, the scope of vernacular expression he often infused into a performance made him one of the finest of the Jamaican musicians associated with the jazz tradition and, in general terms, popular music on the local scene over the last 50 years.

Rich textural freshness

Bradshaw's capability to integrate his respect for tradition with his interest in contemporary music allowed for arrangements that provided rich textural freshness and rhythmic timbres, which encouraged the musicians under his direction to further the melodic and harmonic expansion he demanded of them. No matter how trite and mundane some of the audience-pleasing material, Bradshaw's infusion of Caribbean flavours could elevate them to reflect a zesty quality or contemplative experience. Meanwhile, stock arrangements by Count Basie, Ellington and others, including material by local composers, inspired the band to present elegant and meditative etudes as well as hot, sprightly and exhilarating perfor-mances, with Dean Fraser's graceful majesty on Marley's Redemption Song and Marjorie Whylie's stylistic range on piano the high points.

To the dismay of some conservatives and the pleasure of nationalists, Bradshaw also took the National Anthem out of its colonial yoke and arranged a big band version with a lilting Jamaican accent and rhythmic nuances to highlight its relationship to local sensibilities. Arrangements of traditional numbers like Rucumbine, or what was not then a classic, The Wailers' Road Block, and, consequently Marley's Redemption Song, have benefited from the deep wisdom and diverse knowledge Bradshaw possessed. Years later, the man, considered by many young bulls to be closed-minded, would recommit the syntax of Tiger's Wanga Belly to a jazz structure, sending his audience - many of whom otherwise thumb their noses at dancehall - rocking to the musicality that is always possible if this style of music is given consummate arrangements. Of course, amid the band's performance there were vocal standards, delivered by Bradshaw's wife, Myrna Hague, with such taste that the whole affair hinted at a chic occasion in the midst of a revivalist meeting and are most likely the wellspring that provided the staying power that enabled Bradshaw to persist for such a length of time with his crusade for home-grown distinctiveness with an international essence. Bradshaw understood that music was a metaphor for life, and that the good-to-great musician could take a theme, in spite of its triviality, and made variations that moved beyond conception of an idea and substituted the trifling with the noteworthy.

Perhaps the reason Bradshaw wasn't broadly treasured is that the reach of his stylistic authority was virtually in step with the number of problems that could arise. When the reason wasn't amateurish and substandard personnel, his troubles could be attributed to a stylistic approach to preparedness that demanded levels of excellence, which could discourage as well as inspire. His was also a Jekyll-and-Hyde personality, as disposed to abrupt severe fury as it was to discipline, wit, generosity and a buoyant friendly quality bordering on naïveté in its translucency. All this and then some from the creative fertile mind of a musician some considered passé while others, who prided themselves on being current, failed to fathom the modernity he embodied, hence their missing the point and importance of Bradshaw's mission.

For those of us over 50 it seems 'Sonny B' has been around forever, having listened to our parents and their friends talk about being entertained by him and his orchestra from before we were born. What we discovered in Bradshaw, as our taste of music developed, was a rounded musician, not one of the ace star soloists of our or our parents' generation recognised for deploying shrill high notes, executing dazzling speed or showing off complex harmony.

Neither was he an aloft idiosyncratic artiste as some of our era of musicians were. Bradshaw was brilliant, nonetheless and, furthermore, as soloist, he was no slouch. His brilliance was that of a balanced technician with a passionate artistic sense and a desire to provide his audience with aesthetic fulfilment that ignored the mundane. This he was able to accomplish because, unlike some musicians better recognised for their indulgence in repetition and clichés, Bradshaw could do more by doing a little of everything better than most were able to achieve, by pulling off one crowd-pleasing manoeuvre, and it was that feature that lead to his musical longevity and authority.

Octogenarian master

At one of his final performances I observed a 'Johnny-come lately' put down Bradshaw's playing as weak and without velocity. This would-be hip listener missed the point and failed to understand that this octogenarian master, instead of making his trumpet a relic, responded to Father Time by cutting back on the stamina and locomotion he could summon during his earlier years. His playing was now redefined and refined. It was distilled to the essentials of what he desired to express. It displayed not only the breadth and depth of his experience and the wisdom gained from those experiences, but also contained in the quality of his sound was a kind of patina - a certain texture that longevity alone places on anything or anyone that survived as long as Bradshaw had.

In the latter years, his solos shortened but they embodied a sense of logic and a degree of poetic intensity that the amount and quality of ideas conveyed from those brief intervals repeatedly left the impression that those moments were longer than they actually were.

international acclamation

Perhaps Bradshaw's greatest skill was that of organiser, not only of bands boasting the best available musicians, but organiser of events and concerts and the Ocho Rios Jazz Festival, now approaching its 20th year. Over his 60-odd years of putting together bands and performing music, Bradshaw recognised and advanced the talents of his peers, some of whom went on to achieve international acclamation as important jazz innovators and improvisers. Joe Harriott, Wilton Gaynair, Harold McNair, Sonny Gray, Tommy McCook and Don Drummond are a few. He also used his Sonny B Seven to nurture and polish young musicians who would become seminal contributors to reggae as well as to continue the tradition of large and small band music, regardless of genre.

Like the great Art Blakey, whose Jazz Messengers band was considered a university for future masters, Bradshaw, through his big band and small group, was a relentless believer in discipline and was a hard taskmaster when it came to knowing one's instrument and execution of the music. His aggregations were learning institutions no less then Blakey's, from which the best of local musicians who experienced them benefited. Saxophonist Tony Greene recalls being the new member in the band and being surprised after vocalist Lloyd Wilkes sang Elton John's Daniel and Bradshaw looked his way saying "You have it, play the melody. You young musicians must learn melodies." Noteworthy, also, are the amount and quality of leaders who came through Bradshaw's groups - Willie Lindo, Dean Fraser, Boris Gardener, Esmond Jarrett and Desi Jones are examples.

In latter years, Bradshaw was forced to work with inferior talent more adept at self-promotion and gyrating than musical expression. So inept were many that the concept of solo revolved around repetition and clichéd phrases rather than on improvisation extrapolated from the harmonic, rhythmic and melodic suggestions of the music. At a rehearsal in his small home studio, I once saw Bradshaw command a musician who thought he was doing just fine to "sit down until you have learned your chords".

At the same session he rebuked the band for not expressing the blues and stopped the session to introduce Count Basie and Joe Williams performing Going to Chicago, rhetorically shouting, "You call yourselves musicians. What are you listening to? 'Bra' Gaynair and 'Little G' would have eaten that up."

The upshot is that in spite of his strong-willed approach, Bradshaw's personality also took on an allure broadened by his vast knowledge of and deeply rooted connection to a history the musicians and those of us who stayed around could only truly understand because of the passionate and sometimes volatile style in which he communicated. He knew time was getting harder and harder to outlast and wanted to share with us as much as he could. On a few occasions Bradshaw called and demanded that I drop everything and report to his house/office.

On one occasion, he instructed me to witness and sign a one-page personal document after issuing the instructions that neither the next person he also summoned nor I should suggest any changes, offer any advice or discuss the contents, just sign and go. Another time it was to a meeting, along with five or six others regarding the Ocho Rios Jazz Festival. We all listened attentively to Bradshaw outline his plans. When he was finished he boldly said: "You can all have some tea and biscuits and then leave." When we protested and tried to have a say, he added: "I didn't call you here to have a discussion. I called you here to tell you what I am going to be doing."

Cultural history

It was, however, those calls on which he demanded, "come now, I have some information for you that I just remembered," or the time he found an old photograph of the Eric Deans band at the Bournemouth Club or the remains of a picture of alto saxophonist Joe Harriott, that it was reinforced just how valuable a link he was to our cultural history and how important it was that he shared that information. At moments like those, and with picture in hand and legs crossed, Bradshaw's memory would become illuminated, which leads to a lesson about Jamaica at an earlier time, cultural and social space and place, the creative imagination of our early musicians and the social interaction of the classes. Knowing the interest some of us have in Jamaica's music history, Sonny challenged us not to become mere cheerleaders for those whose art we admired but to also concentrate on the critical analysis of that art. It was quite obvious that he was not only the last of the committed big band leaders available to us, but also, that as survivor he embodied a wealth of history and the capability to articulate its importance to all who were interested. In that respect Sonny Bradshaw was the only one truly qualified and capable of holding together a diverse group of musicians, academics, researchers and serious followers of popular culture interested in musical substance and its relationship to our nation's social and cultural identity.

What we had in Sonny Bradshaw was a combination of the consummate artiste morphed with educator, cultural custodian, critic and a mentor to dozens. Yet, with all his radiance he seemed intent to simultaneously befuddle and beguile all who were part of his circle. To that end some in the loop were, at once, at ease and on edge. The outcome, though, was a thorough schooling in Jamaican arts and American jazz for those who endured, coming from the man with a burning passion that could illuminate or scorch.

This schooling was because we wanted to know and to understand as much as we could about an era that paved the way for a musical identity that is undeniably Jamaican. For Bradshaw, it was his resolve to safeguard the performance style and skills of that generation, as well as to extend those qualities.

He believed in an artistic growth based on talent, hard work and dedication gained over time. He believed this was lacking due to the success, instantaneous recognition and income one lucky break enabled. He encouraged the setting of challenging creative goals that transcends mediocrity and was of the opinion that the audience would follow since they too would be stimulated to expect higher standards. He also challenged those he mentored, as well as our so-called musicologists, critics and historians, to engage a more critical and analytical approach to reviews and discussions since they and the public would be better enlightened. He wanted the artistes to grow from amateurish to virtuosic, and critics to move from wilful cheerleading to intelligently rigorous critique.

Great entertainment

He also lamented the one dimensional and abrasive attitude of the current creative output and wished contemporary artistes would apprise themselves to the tradition of the days when great entertainment included musical theatre and show bands had entourages that featured singers, dancers and comedy routines. He wanted artistes to continue the struggle begun by enslaved musicians and kept alive by succeeding ones who performed music not as aesthetic alone or primarily as a business for making money, but also as resistance to social and political folly and as a challenge to the limits to which the creative capabilities could be pushed. Bradshaw was interested in music that was innovative, that aimed for the highest standards, and that which approached exceptional quality. He believed that these features would extend the aesthetic as well as the content and value of the arts without loosing its audience, indeed, that it would increase the art world's fan base.

While Bradshaw was a hard taskmaster, he was also always quick to smile, give an anecdote or tell a joke. His sense of humour freed those on the receiving end of his vicious honesty from any uneasiness they might suffer if the lesson he wanted to convey were piled on too heavily, as was the case at times. His distinct wit and ready inverted ridicule also placed him among the most self-critical in the artistic craft and, yet, verified that his generosity was above any you could find among established musicians. Not the least intimidated by the changing times and trends, and with malice toward none, Bradshaw was never withholding when lauding those who deserved to be or critical whenever he thought necessary.

Neither the sentimentalist, nor one to indulge romanticism, with Cecil 'Sonny' Bradshaw, as Thelonious Monk's composition indicates, it was Straight, No Chaser. That's the man with the horn who looked at the world through horn-rimmed glasses that I knew. Let us hope that all he has bequeathed will be taught to generations of younger musicians now that he goes off to join Gabriel, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Johnny Moore and other trumpet masters, for there is still much radiance to be gathered from the aura of Bradshaw's halo.

Herbie Miller is a cultural historian and the director/curator of the Jamaica Music Museum. His specialised interest is in slave culture, Caribbean identity and ethnomusicology. He can be contacted at herbimill@aol.com