It was a small bar and restaurant in the West Village of Manhattan … and, while you read this, do me a favor and pump up this performance of The Nearness of You by the infinitely soulful and dangerously loving voice of Nicole Henry and her equally flawless pianist, Mike Orta.
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This performance was actually enthralling the audience at the Nango Jazz Festival in Japan … however, this was the level of artistry at Bradley’s … almost every night!
The applause you hear so spontaneously after her first chorus … well … damn, if that wasn’t Bradley’s.
I’ve emboldened the name so you never forget it … because tragically and on a profoundly cultural, political and, yes, soulful level, its absence, the ending of its all too brief existence in Manhattan is one of the small but profound tragedies arising from the … uh … yes the now, profoundly well-known Progressive Movement.
Progressive jazz … little did I know what that word really meant … and it had nothing to do with the souls, artistry, generosity, dedication and, at times, the genius of all the musicians I heard late … late, late, late at night in Bradley’s.
As you listen, a drink helps … but, I weep more regretfully now at the memory than I even did when I was drunk in New York … and that was a fifteen year eternity ago.
If anything defines one of the best things of New York City, it is this version of a night life I tasted till the bar closed … sometimes at 4 a.m.
Mike Orta’s accompaniment to Ms. Henry’s utterly fabulous reading of words that gain a deeper and profoundly more intimate meaning … when her voice is wrapped around them … and Mr. Orta’s small but occasionally and wonderfully fierce additions … well … yes … heaven!
Bliss!
Ecstasy!!
For my own little … and painfully lonely soul at the time.
I was raised on musical genius like this, both live and recorded … and the jazz musicians out of Chicago such as Dick Marx and Johnny Pate visiting us in my home town of Detroit … they’d play on our little upright piano … and make our whole house sound like Bradley’s.
No, you needn’t read this all at once.
Perhaps just sit and listen to what was my main source of comfort night after night following my momentarily but extremely painful goodbye to Dick Wolf’s Law and Order.
I recall one night, after Bradley himself had died, bringing a German film director with me to experience Bradley’s for the first time.
By then the place had been filled with the … uh … politically correct Progressives … world wide!
When I applauded one of the soloists following his two or three choruses … the table next to me, absolutely filled with heavily accented Europeans, shushed me!
“No favorites!!” they whispered harshly.
“What”, I asked.
“No favorites!!”
My German colleague, originally from Bavaria, but who then lived in Switzerland … or at least I was subsequently brought to Switzerland to promote his film … he was very embarrassed by their behavior.
I now have concluded that these masters of what proved to be my first encounter with an Obama “learning moment” were German, most likely from Berlin … and … well … they were ultra “Progressive” … and obviously considered themselves the police of all forms of “Progressive” art.
My God, the politicizing of jazz had grown to a militant exclusivity that infuriated me!
Had I not been with my director and had downed a few more drinks, I might have tipped over a few tables.
Now the atmosphere of this Nicole Henry album was inspired in one of the most jazz-addicted nations in the world, Japan.
They obviously retain a freedom within their increasingly sensitized souls more American than that most American giant of world cities, New York!!
Perhaps it was the moment the sportscaster, Dick Schapp asked me, “Michael, is there anyone in New York you haven’t offended?!”
“Yes,” I should have said, “You, Dick!”
Tighten the phones to your ears, if you’re using them to listen to the intimacy Ms. Henry maintains with herself – and that, mind you, is the first necessity of any recording … or film artist for that matter – and then let the “still, small voice” in.
Let the deep and quietly, blissfully disturbing surrender happen.
Bradley’s is no more and hasn’t lived for many years because once Bradley himself had died, his poor wife could not keep the Progressive Militants out.
That crowd of elitists, enlightened despots and intellectual supremacists had driven the regular customers like myself … had forced them out.
Eventually even they didn’t come.
Why?
They had no one to give a “teachable moment” to.
What happened to Bradley’s has now happened to all of America.
How long we will be in for this horrifyingly arrogant, “teachable endlessness” … and how long this soul-less and tragically American fascism can continue … will perhaps depend upon the depth of agony we all must feel repeatedly when the quintessentially American forms of music are fed to us as a privilege only afforded us by the Progressive dictators who claim to own it.
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