Celebrating Journalism With a Jazz Sensibility
Wynton Marsalis, left, artistic director of jazz at Lincoln Center, blows a passionate rendition of Duke Ellington’s “Black and Tan Fantasy” with clarinetist Victor Goines at the memorial service for Ed Bradley at Riverside Church in New York. (Credit: CBS News)
Celebrating Journalism With a Jazz Sensibility
Let’s start with why there was never a permanent, weeknight “CBS Evening News With Ed Bradley,” which would surely have been a milestone.
As his “60 Minutes” colleague Steve Kroft told the story Tuesday at the memorial service for Bradley at New York’s Riverside Church—one of the rare times such a service for a black journalist has been nationally televised—Bradley was “for years, the heir apparent to Dan Rather at CBS News.”
Kroft said Bradley liked to recall sitting in for Rather for an entire week, and, at the end of the first night, in these days before cell phones, the producer handing him a beeper. Bradley hated beepers, and had intended to spend quality time with friends coming to town.
But what if something happens? the producer asked Bradley, who did the anchor chores for Rather in 1990, 1991, 1998, 2001 and 2002. What if the president were shot, or a major national crisis erupted? “We need to be able to find you, and I promise not to bother you unless it’s really important.”
Reluctantly, Bradley accepted the beeper.
The device went off in the wee hours, “shaking Ed to the core,” Kroft recalled. He bolted upright in bed and blurted out, “My God, somebody shot the president.”
The beeper signal turned out to be a wayward one, intended for a pizza delivery man.
But the incident confirmed for Bradley that “CBS News was his job, not his life,” Kroft said. A permanent anchor job was not in Bradley’s sights.
And “it was a great life,” Kroft told the more than 2,000 who assembled to celebrate one of the pioneer African American television journalists, and one of the great broadcasters of any race. In the process, he illustrated one man’s way of balancing professional and private passions.
Speaker after speaker in the packed Gothic-styled sanctuary filled in a portrait of a man who enjoyed everything—the finest cars, wines, cigars and flowers, the love of a soulmate he discovered late in life, a successful career, the comfort of his own skin, and the passion for the craft he loved.
Celebrants learned this from the “suits” he worked for, the godson he mentored, a former president, the colleagues he labored with, the musicians he befriended. We heard it from family members and in anecdotes from his days at historically black Cheyney State College, where he was known as “Moon.”
“I wish I would have had a chance to meet him,” Gerard Williams, the grand marshal of the Rebirth Jazz Band, said after the service. “He is a big inspiration even in death.” To conclude the 2 1/2-hour event, Williams led his New Orleans band mates down the aisles as they played “When the Saints Go Marchin’ In,” while members of the crowd waved white handkerchiefs in the New Orleans tradition.
During the service, Bradley’s singer friend Jimmy Buffett sang “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?” accompanied on piano by famed New Orleans producer Allen Toussaint; trumpeter Wynton Marsalis played Duke Ellington’s “Black and Tan Fantasy”; rhythm ‘n’ blues singer Irma Thomas, also from the Big Easy, performed “Holy, Holy, Holy” to an organ accompaniment, and Aaron and Art Neville, two of the famed Neville Brothers, contributed “Amazing Grace.” One of three photos on the altar showed Bradley singing “60 Minute Man” with the Nevilles.
Some called Bradley a jazz journalist.
Former president Bill Clinton, a surprise speaker, said, “He always played in the key of reason.” But he knew that “to make the most of music, you have to improvise. His solos were the disarming smile,”—he paused—”the disconcerting stare . . . the highly uncomfortable silence . . . the deceptively dangerous question . . . and the questions that would be revealing no matter what answer you gave.”
But that was a question of style, not of purpose.
Dick Buterra, Bradley’s hiking buddy in Colorado, said he had once asked his friend of 30 years, as they hiked in the Rocky Mountains, “Do you really want to die with your boots on?” noting that he had almost everything anyone could possibly want.
“I’m a journalist,” Bradley replied. “I’ve climbed to the top of the mountain from the bottom. In Vietnam I almost died. . . . Yes, Dick, I want to die with my boots on.”
This came from a reporter who loved the game so much he found a way to live for 13 days with the Viet Cong, behind enemy lines, Buterra said.
Colleagues said that just 12 days before his death, Bradley insisted on retaping the narration for an Oct. 29 piece that showed that BP executives knew there were serious safety concerns at a refinery where 15 people were killed and scores more injured in an explosion last year. His wife wheeled him from the hospital to record the voiceover. “Some heard frailty and weakness” in Bradley’s voice, said producer David Gelber. “I heard a man with passion and courage til the day he died.”
From family members, listeners learned that Bradley cared deeply about maintaining a full and rich life away from the cameras. He was “Butch.” He was “Moon.” He was “Teddy Badley.” The Rev. James A. Forbes of Riverside Church said Bradley once considered becoming a minister, but realized it would be too confining. Instead, Forbes said, his work was “the ministry of Ed Bradley.”
On the mountainside where Bradley told Buterra he would indeed die with his boots on, he also explained that he had another reason for wanting to continue despite the illness he told few about. “I owe Patricia more life,” speaking of his wife. “She’s done so much for me and is my reason for living.” Longtime friend Charlayne Hunter-Gault was forced to pause in her eulogy when she described the hospital moment when finally he said, “Let me go.” Bradley was 65 when leukemia claimed him on Nov. 9.
Like many black journalists, Bradley was subjected to the question, “are you black first or a journalist first?” Producer Harry Radliffe, who is black, volunteered from the altar, “Some have described him as an African American journalist. That’s not how I saw him or how he would describe it. He was a reporter, a journalist and an American journalist. He was informed by his heritage but, having said that, he was not defined or colored by it.”
Still, 12 members of the New York Association of Black Journalists helped arrange the service, and were listed in the program; and a slimmed-down Bryan Monroe, president of the National Association of Black Journalists, which last year gave Bradley its Lifetime Achievement Award, was an honorary usher. Bill Cosby noted from the altar that Bradley created the Ed Bradley Foundation at Cheyney, the alma mater that was founded as a “school for colored boys.”
“Ed was among a handful of us who represented the first wave of black journalists entering mainstream media, and he carried that not as a burden but as a badge, which he wore unapologetically, without standing on a soapbox, but by insisting that, even as he entered, he had a responsibility to bring along the people who looked like him, in ways that were recognizable to themselves,” Hunter-Gault said in her eulogy.
“The path Ed lit must not go dark on the generation that idolized him and hopes to follow in his footsteps,” she continued. “To them, I say, if you want to follow in Ed’s footsteps, you can’t sit behind a desk and look good, you’ve got to put on your traveling shoes and walk the walk, not just talk the talk.”
Some of that generation talked with those who came before them, at a rooftop reception afterward near Columbia University. Many were of the media glitterati.
“By the time Mr. Marsalis reached the pulpit,” the New York Times wrote, “he had passed Howard Stern and Paul Simon, each of whom had once been interviewed by Mr. Bradley; Brian Williams and Meredith Vieira, now co-workers at NBC but once colleagues of Mr. Bradley’s at CBS; Dan Rather and Diane Sawyer, also formerly of CBS, who sat together one row in front of Walter Cronkite and a row behind Mike Wallace and Andy Rooney, who survive Mr. Bradley on ’60 Minutes.’ Nearby were Katie Couric, who now anchors the ‘CBS Evening News’; Connie Chung, who once co-anchored it; and Lara Logan, the young foreign correspondent, who may yet some day.
“Sprinkled among those heavyweights of broadcast journalism were the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the Rev. Al Sharpton, David N. Dinkins, Spike Lee, Chris Rock, Aaron Neville (who sang ‘Amazing Grace’ and referred to Mr. Bradley as ‘the fifth Neville brother’) and Bill Cosby (who also spoke).”
Others included Juan Williams of National Public Radio and Fox News; retired CNN anchor Bernard Shaw; columnists Les Payne and Stanley Crouch, NBC correspondents Ron Allen and Lester Holt; CBS correspondents Byron Pitts, Russ Mitchell and Leslie Stahl; CBS “Early Show” co-host Harry Smith; black film historian Donald Bogle; New York politician H. Carl McCall, Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y.; reporters Jacqueline Trescott of the Washington Post and Herb Boyd of the New York Amsterdam News; freelancer Greg Tate; photographer Fred Sweets; retired New York Times reporter C. Gerald Fraser; author and photographer Roy Decarava; National Basketball Association Commissioner David Stern; New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg; New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly and book publishing executive Charles Harris, now of Alpha Zenith Media, Inc.
[On TheBlackWorldToday.com, Herb Boyd also mentioned broadcast anchor Ed Gordon, Time Warner CEO Richard Parsons, photographer Chester Higgins, filmmaker St. Clair Bourne, and Renee Minus White, fashion and beauty editor of the Amsterdam News and a member of the classic singing group the Chantels.]
The well-ordered services met with the approval even of the contrarian Crouch. “It really reflected the guy. There wasn’t anything corny, nothing was overstated,” he told Journal-isms. “The greatest thing that can happen in these situations is that people can express something for the deceased, rather than use it to talk about themselves.” Crouch noted the lack of “narcissistic anecdotes.”
Jim Vance, longtime anchor at Washington’s WRC-TV, the NBC-owned station in the capital, first met Bradley in December 1959, when both were at Cheyney. Too upset to comment in the first days after Bradley died, by Tuesday Vance was able to marvel at the journey his buddy had taken. “I am utterly thrilled at the impression, the footprint, that this friend of mine left,” he said. “I couldn’t . . . think in 1960 that Butch would end up with the former president of the United States speaking well of him. I don’t know anyone of whom I am more proud or whom I feel more privileged to have been connected with for all these years.”
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