Clea Bradford

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Clea Annah Ethell Bradford (born 1933 in Clarksdale , Coahoma County , Mississippi , † August 19, 2008 in Silver Springs ) was an American soul , blues and jazz singer .

Life

Bradford first grew up in Charleston (Missouri) . Her father, Rev. Richard Henry Bradford, was a preacher for the Morning Star Missionary Baptist Church ; her mother Elizabeth encouraged her early on to compose songs to texts. She made her first appearance at the age of three. Clea's mother moved to St. Louis after separating from her husband . The jazz saxophonist Jimmy Forrest lived in the neighborhood and held jam sessions in his apartment . a. with Oliver Nelson and Clark Terry . The youthful clea were given the opportunity to attend these meetings and began performing in clubs. She had her breakthrough as a professional musician in 1950, when she was 17 years old and received a 32-week engagement in the Faust Club . After three years in Detroit , she lived in Buffalo , Cleveland , New York City and Chicago .

Her first recordings were made in 1959 for the blues label Hi-Q (on which John Lee Hooker and Eddie Kirkland recorded); however, the soul-influenced number I've Got You was unsuccessful. In 1961 she lived in the New York area and recorded her debut album These Dues with Oliver Nelson's Orchestra , which was released by Prestige Records and contained standards such as Skylark, Willow Weep for Me , They Can't Take That Away from Me . In 1962 she returned to St. Louis and got a longer engagement in the Tres Bien Club . She recorded the popular track Some Day My Prince Will Come for the small Norman label . In 1964 she appeared at the Apollo Theater in Harlem ; tours and club appearances for Hugh Hefner's Playboy Club followed in the middle of the decade . In 1965 she recorded her second album Now for Mainstream Records , again with Clark Terry and with Hank Jones , Barry Galbraith , Osie Johnson , Milt Hinton and George Duvivier , as well as a brass ensemble under the direction of Urbie Green and strings. This was followed by a tour with Earl Fatha Hines and Benny Carter through the Soviet Union , which was supported by the State Department ; In 1966 she appeared in the New York Museum of Modern Art in the concert series Jazz in the Garden .

This was followed by more soul-oriented recordings for the Cadet label with arrangements by Richard Evans ( Her Point of View ) towards the end of the decade . With My Love's a Monster , she had a regional R&B hit in the American Midwest . Around 1970 she lived in Los Angeles, then in the Baltimore and Washington DC area. The last recordings were made in 1983; She toured Switzerland in the late 1980s before gradually withdrawing from the music business in the 1990s. In 1986 she was inducted into the St. Louis Jazz Hall of Fame . In addition to her musician activities, Bradford was a painter, social activist, and composer; she wrote the blues tracks One Sided Love Affair and I've Found My Peace of Mind for Pee Wee Crayton .

Discographic notes

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ obituary in BluesArt
  2. ↑ a b Obituary in the Washington Post
  3. ↑ It first appeared on singles, then in anthologies ( Meet Me in St. Louis: A Musical Souvenir ) and in CD format in 2005 on In the Afterglow: Memories of Gaslight Square on Gaslight Records.
personal data
SURNAME Bradford, Clea
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bradford, Clea Annah Ethell (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American soul, blues and jazz singer
DATE OF BIRTH 1933
PLACE OF BIRTH at Clarksdale , Coahoma County , Mississippi
DATE OF DEATH August 19, 2008
Place of death Silver Springs