If you only know free jazz through New York's loft scene or Chicago's AACM, Bobby Bradford is the reminder that Los Angeles had its own version going, quieter but just as serious. Bradford came up in Texas, crossed paths early with Ornette Coleman in Fort Worth, and eventually settled on the West Coast where he spent decades building a body of work that rarely got the attention it deserved outside a small circle of devoted listeners.

The centerpiece of his career is the partnership with clarinetist John Carter. The two of them played together off and on for almost thirty years, and what they made together doesn't sound like anybody else's free jazz. It's lyrical where a lot of avant-garde playing from that era is combative. Bradford's cornet has a warm, vocal quality, almost conversational, and he uses it to bend around Carter's clarinet lines rather than compete with them. Albums like Flight for Four (1969) show two musicians who trust each other enough to leave space, to let a phrase hang in the air instead of filling every bar.

What's easy to miss about Bradford is that he's not an extremist. He came out of the Ornette Coleman orbit, sure, and he's comfortable playing without a fixed harmonic center, but his music keeps one foot in the blues and in straightforward melody. That's probably why it took longer for critics to know how to file him. He wasn't chasing noise for its own sake, and he wasn't playing it safe either. He just had his own idea of where the line between inside and outside should sit.

Bradford also taught for years, mentoring younger Los Angeles improvisers and keeping the city's experimental scene alive when it would have been easy for it to fold into obscurity. He never became a household name, and he probably didn't need to be one. Listen to his records with Carter, or his later work leading his own groups, and you hear a musician who found his sound early and just kept refining it, decade after decade, without much concern for who was paying attention.