Hello…

I will be re-publishing highlights of my music journalism here — both new and archival, ranging from the early 1990s to now. The stories will cover jazz, classical and rock, as well as offbeat hybrids and various strains of music from around the world. Sometimes they will be in-depth, sometimes they will be more brief. As an introduction, here’s my bio:

A longtime music journalist, Bradley Bambarger has written for publications ranging from Billboard and Gramophone to DownBeat and the site of Medici.tv. He founded and curates the concert series Sound It Out in New York City, having produced and marketed more than 300 concerts since 2012 by a who’s who on the avant-jazz scene at the historic hall of Manhattan’s Greenwich House Music School. The Sound It Out events — which have earned critical kudos from The New York Times, DownBeat, Time Out New York, New York City Jazz Record and WBGO, among others — have included several successful all-star fundraising concerts for Greenwich House, including such top artists as The Police’s Andy Summers and Wilco’s Nels Cline. Bradley has written promotional materials regularly for iconic arthouse label ECM Records for more than a decade, along with co-producing/co-directing a series of promo videos for such label artists as Vijay Iyer, Bill Frisell and Jack DeJohnette, among many others. One recent notable journalistic publication was a cover story on Andy Summers for the January 2018 issue of Mix magazine. For the 2018–19 season, Bradley was guest editor-in-chief of the monthly In Tune, a school-year publication for teenage music students across the U.S.; along with shepherding its entire editorial flow, he created new features and wrote multiple columns for the magazine. Bradley developed the founding editorial plan for the magazine Listen in 2009 and contributed features/reviews to each issue across its nearly decade-long publication run, including a memorial cover package on David Bowie. In June-July 2015, he was chief editorial producer for Medici.tv’s coverage of the XV International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow and St. Petersburg, producing 50 mini-documentaries and supervising four video teams. Bradley was chosen as guest curator for the June 2016 issue of DePauw University’s 21CM online magazine. He has also created promotional materials for Universal Classics/Verve Music Group, Sony Classical, Anzic Records, Clean Feed, Harmonia Mundi/PIAS, the Metropolitan Opera, New Jersey Performing Arts Center, Greenwich House Music School, 21C Media, Braithwaite & Katz Communications, Fully Altered Media and Destiny Records, among others.

From 1995 to 2000, Bradley served as the New York-based senior writer for Billboard magazine, helping to expand the magazine’s international coverage in the classical, jazz, world and edgier rock genres. He eventually served as executive editor of Billboard, co-leading a redesign of the century-old publication. As a creative director for pioneering classical content firm Andante from 2002 to 2004, he produced award-winning archival CD+book boxed sets and supervised editorial packages for music streaming and an online magazine. From 2004 to 2010, Bradley was a staff music critic and reporter at The Star-Ledger daily newspaper of New Jersey, covering pop and classical music in New York and New Jersey, as well as nationally. He has been a content consultant for the Met Opera Shop, as well as taught music history classes at New York University. He has written liner notes for albums on such labels as ECM, Intakt, Pyroclastic, Anzic, Clean Feed, Sony Legacy, Harmonia Mundi, Deutsche Grammophon, Sony Classical, RCA Victor, JazzHeads and ESP-Disk. His work has also appeared in such publications as Rolling Stone, Steinway Owners Magazine, Relix, Symphony Magazine, Musical America, Chamber Music Magazine, Stereophile, Revolver, Guitar World, Musician, Time Out New York, Playbill, Pulse, Sing Out! and the New England Conservatory’s Notes magazine, among others. Bradley graduated from the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism and has lived in New York’s East Village for more than 25 years.