Polly Bradfield

An American festival organizer and musician writes in a letter: "The Polly Bradfield record changed my life...one of my favorite records of improvising ever...I will buy any and all extra copies you have. . . My plan is to give them out to the best and the brightest string improvisors." A British critic pleads "someone please reissue her solo album!", after pointing out that the Bradfield recording is considered to have set some kind of standard for the most silence on an album of improvised music. The pressing plant was apparently confused at the time, ringing Bradfield at her Lower East Side apartment and asking if something was missing. Boxes of the record were later rescued off the curb outside this very building, close to becoming victims of the artist's rushed departure from New York City back to her native California. It is a haunting image, and it seems like none more appropriate would ever come along to illustrate the lack of personal significance an artist involved in the avant-garde might wind up feeling, even after years on a so-called happening big city art scene. Yet there are those who feel the creations of such artists, unheralded and unfufilled as they might have felt, represent important time capsules, just waiting to be discovered by whoever might be interested decades later. The inspirational result is much like what the French describe as "ca n'a pas pris une ride"--or, there is not a visible wrinkle on the person's face. The Solo Violin Improvisations recording Bradfield put out herself in the early '80s is regarded as a controlled masterwork of severely intense playing, the pinnacle of a musical mountain climbing expedition. And from the reaction of new listeners to the album, the view from up there is as stimulating as ever. Bradfield began...