The great one remembered

[Pan Times]

When Giants Salute and Titans Bow

Clive Bradley Remembered
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“Bradley is the greatest steelband arranger that ever passed through in our time - he was a boss!”
-Len “Boogsie” Sharpe

“A great musician. A great loss to the pan world for sure. There is only one Clive Bradley. There is no one who does a panorama tune like Clive Bradley. He has his style which was very effective. He looked at a song and lyrics and used that. The guy is genius. He’s a top-of-the-line musician.”
- Jit Samaroo

“Sir Bradley indeed did make his contribution to the steelband movement....a very valuable one indeed..!! A lot of arrangers who started after him (including myself), benefited tremendously from the high standards that he set for us.... May his soul rest in peace....!”
- Leon “Smooth” Edwards

“I and Bradley - together years ago. Bradley introduced us to the whole studio scene in a way... This will be a great, great loss to the whole pan scene... He was a genius.”
- Pelham Goddard

“Clive was one of the greatest musicians ever produced by this country [Trinidad & Tobago]. He was a master of orchestration. He had a fine mind and was very witty. He was a fantastic musician. It is a terrific loss - there can only be one Bradley.”
- Ray Holman

“Clive was - as we say - one of the greatest arrangers in pan. He was a mathematician - he was able to subtract and divide and add to the music, and do with the music whatever he think needed to be done; and he knew sometimes that silence was golden. We need to continue, and do the best we can to make him smile.”
- Robert Greenidge

“In the midst of all the merrymaking that carnival is supposed to be; that handling of the minor key makes you remember those two masks... One mask is smiling and one mask is weeping. His minor always had this terrible, gut-wrenching quality about it. The tragic underside of the human condition. Nobody can do it like that - I don’t know that anyone ever will... And it seemed to embody everything that I think Mr. Bradley was, that he knew life as - brilliant and he knew it as tragic. And his music said that, and in that way it became almost a mirror of Trinidad life...”
- Pat Bishop

click to hear more from those who knew him

[(Oscar) Mark Roberts]

He was a genius a master of the art,you could always expect something different from Clive he was a step above the rest
I consider myself bless to have been around him, he was a true teacher he will be forever missed.
Oscar Mark Roberts

[Jojo]

Mr. Bradley left behind a body of work that speaks for itself. His music reaches far beyond pan. And I think this is what separates him from all others.

[kenneth clarke]

Bradley was one of my mentors. He was a friend, a teacher and mastered his musical concepts. One of his lessons he left us, is how to extract the motif from a simple piece of music and develop it into interesting melodies. His method of orchestration moved the peoples' minds into whatever direction/level he wanted.
What a blessings to have had a maestro of his calibre from the islands of TRINIDAD & TOBAGO.
Gone but not forgotten!
- Kenneth Clarke

[miguel reyes]

pat, robert, ray, pelham,leon, jit and len, even though they were all competing against each other at one point
or another. like Bradley they are all there for the music. to make it the best that they can
for the lisening audience, mr bradley had a style that made you think ,what was going to happen next what angle what chord
what phrase, he used all parts of the song he was arranging to make it so musical and enjoyable and suprising to the ear.
simple yet effective passages that sounded so right..

miguel.

[ed cee]

The sweet texture of Bradley's musical contributions made me yearn to play for him. I hungered for the day, and it came in 1999 with In My House and in 2000 with Picture On My Wall, teasingly haunting melodies with arrangements that, to this day, makes me sit up and wonder where did the old man go.

[odw]

Despers - In My House slow jam

Despers - Picture on my Wall slow jamz

[hollis clifton]

If ever there was a WOW! factor in musical arrangement  ... that's tha man

[yvette johnson]

"Work" to do.  Clive Bradley left quite a legacy.  Now, we must expand and enhance and not allow his supreme efforts to go to waste.   Ancestors.