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"The Jazz Life"
Click on the names below:
Forrest Dylan Bryant - JazzTimes Magazine
Scott Yanow - Los Angeles Jazz Scene
Sheldon Nunn - JazzReview.com
George Kanzler - All about Jazz, New York
Paul J. Youngman - Jazz Review.com
Andrea Canter - JazzPolice.com
Edward F. Nesta - Luxury Experience Magazine
John Henry - Audiophile Audition Magazine
Ron Pelletier - Gallery 41
Brad Walseth - JazzChicago.net
Stephen Fratallone - Jazz Connection Magazine
Michael Steinman - Cadence Magazine
Jean Szlamowicz - Jazz Hot Magazine (Paris, France)
Larry A. Detwiler - Jazz Improv Magazine
Jackie Anderson - WJAB 90.9FM Huntsville, AL
Mike Jacobs - KIOS FM Omaha, NE
Mary Palmer - High Plains Public Radio (Kansas)
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Also read other Interviews below
Creating the Next Generation of Jazz Musicians
by Kevin L. Carter
Bradford Hayes
Bradford
Hayes is known for playing the alto sax, but he is also known, at least to a
large and growing group of people in Newark, as a teacher. For the past 26
years, he has been a schoolteacher, and for the past 16 years he has been a
music teacher and bandmaster at Luis Munoz Marin Middle School in Newark.
He has actually encouraged those studying music in college to major in music
education rather than music performance. The children in our schools need
responsible adults to teach them about life, and musicians can teach music
to children in the same manner, Hayes says. “You may not always get the gig,
but you can always teach the youngsters who need you,” he said. About 85
percent of Hayes’ students have gone on to Arts High School in Newark, which
has produced jazz greats such as Wayne Shorter, Woody Shaw, and Sarah
Vaughan.
Hayes will be performing in two venues this week. On Thursday, August 7, he
appears at Millyard Park on South Clinton Avenue in Trenton as part of the
Mercer County Cultural and Heritage Commission’s summer Concerts in the Park
series. On Monday, August 11, he will appear at the Princeton Public
Library.
At his performances this week, Hayes will be playing music from his latest
record, “The Jazz Life.” He will be sharing the stage with Michael Cochrane
on piano, Takashi Otsuka on bass, and Greg Searvance on drums.
Hayes, 49, has performed all over the United States, including shows in
Carnegie Hall, the Beacon Theater, Birdland, Tavern on the Green and S.O.B’s
in New York. He has also played gigs in Paris, Tokyo, Veracruz, Mexico,
Ghana, and Canada. Hayes has appeared, either live or on record, as a
sideman with the late, iconic Nigerian drummer Babatunde Olatunji, with whom
he was associated for 15 years, as well as artists such as Yusef Lateef, Ted
Curson, Joe Lee Wilson, Jimmy Heath, Al Grey, Cecil Payne, Rufus Reid, Ray
Bryant, Winard Harper, Ben Riley, Dr. Lonnie Smith, Cecil Brooks III, Jerry
Butler, and the Dells.
He has been a traveler for some time. A native of Petersburg, VA, Hayes was
raised primarily by his aunt and uncle, Katherine and Odell Reese, after his
parents, Morris and Ethel Hayes, broke up when he was a young child. “My
mother and father without any doubt loved me very much and I always knew
this, but when they couldn’t get along I became a pawn in that chess game of
divorce,” he says. He first moved to his maternal grandparents’ home and
then to that of another aunt and uncle before moving in with the Reeses.
Odell and Katherine Reese, Hayes says, were “gifts from God. They raised me
as if I were their own.” The family lived on a farm in Dinwiddie County,
where “we had chickens, hogs, and all of the fresh vegetables one could ever
dream of.” Hayes’ aunt and uncle were strict disciplinarians. “Believe me, I
needed it,” he says. “Without them having been in my life, I would be
nothing. I owe them everything; I owe God for putting them on Earth for me.”
Hayes now lives in Hillside, Union County, with his wife, Carolyn, his
daughter Bianca, 12, and twin sons Bradford Jr. and Morris Odell, 7. Morris
Odell, of course, is named for his father and his uncle.
Before ending up in Dinwiddie County, VA, Hayes spent his early elementary
school years in Anchorage, Alaska, where his uncle, Tommy Jackson, was an
Army drill sergeant stationed at Fort Richardson. After returning to
Virginia as a third-grader, Hayes began becoming interested in music. At the
age of 11, he began playing the saxophone. It soon became a passion. Hayes
credits his music teachers in junior high, high school, and college for
continuing to foster this passion.
“I am the first musician in my immediate family,” he says. “I was hooked on
the saxophone at the age of 11, and I did learn the basics of the instrument
very quickly.” His elementary school music teacher at Rohoic Elementary, Mr.
Crummett, was Hayes’ first influence. “He was very patient and made sure
that we knew the basics and learned how to read music.”
Then, at Dinwiddie County Junior High and High School, his teacher was
Robert Harvey. “Mr. Harvey is the main reason I am so passionate about
teaching today,” says Hayes. “He was really big on learning how to read
music.” Growing up in rural Virginia, however, Hayes never got a real chance
to listen to or play jazz. He listened primarily to what he could hear on
the radio in the 1970s: Earth Wind & Fire, and R&B and pop bands such as
Newark’s own Kool and the Gang, as well as Cameo, the Commodores, the Doobie
Brothers, and Chicago. It was after he heard the Crusaders, with Wilton
Felder and Grover Washington Jr., the man who created smooth jazz, that
Hayes began really wanting to play the music as part of his life. “It just
drew me in more and more,” he says.
Football was also a passion. After graduating from high school, Hayes went
to North Carolina A&T State University, a historically black school in
Greensboro, where he was a member of the football squad. The male athletes
there were encouraged by teachers and others to major in physical education.
Hayes, as a youth, had wanted to become an NFL player, but after high
school, he decided that music was a better option and refused to major in
phys ed, he says. “Being the difficult one, I just said no.”
At A&T, as in junior high and high school, Hayes was fortunate to encounter
some high-quality mentors. “I didn’t know who Charlie Parker, John Coltrane,
Duke Ellington or any of these cats were until I went to North Carolina A&T
State University,” he says. He credits two professors, Ted McDaniels and
William C. Smiley, with teaching him what real jazz was.
“Even then I was embedded in the R&B world, and I had to mature into what a
saxophonist should be really focusing on. I would say I started getting
serious about this at around 20 years old, and then I still had to be
de-programmed and then re-programmed,” Hayes says.
In 1981, Hayes graduated from North Carolina A&T with a bachelor’s degree in
music education. He believes he has had a fulfilling life as a teacher and a
performer. “Teaching is something that I never thought that I would be doing
25 years later, but as I said I am the first musician in the family, and I
was raised to be responsible for myself. Education was my way of repaying
all the blessings given to me. Every year my objective has been to give my
students the best possible opportunity go to a good high school, giving them
a chance to go on to college and have the best possible life that they can,”
he says.
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