His grandmother, Lois Anne Weber, was a conservative Catholic convert in the 1950s and remained an ardent member of the church until it refused to take a staunch oppositional stance against the Vietnam War, which she considered to be immoral.

[4] He entered graduate school to study Islamic history, first intending to focus on the Middle East, but soon shifted to Southeast Asia.

His doctoral dissertation examined how Islamic textualism became the most dynamic social force in the Malay-Thai borderland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

[5] On a Fulbright Fellowship, he spent time in southern Thailand and in Malaysia during the years that the Malay minority led an insurgency against the Thai government.

[6] He concluded his graduate studies with the Charlotte W. Newcombe doctoral dissertation fellowship in religion and ethics from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation (which later was renamed the Institute for Citizens and Scholars).

[10] In 2016, with the success of Jazz Right Now, Bradley began to work closely with bassist and composer William Parker, publishing the latter's biography, Universal Tonality, in 2021.

"[12] The book chronicled Parker's evolution from the jazz lofts of the 1970s, his work with pianist Cecil Taylor in the 1980s, and his rise as a bandleader from the 1990s onwards.

[19] His programmed events involved performers such as William Parker, Cooper-Moore, Daniel Carter, Craig Taborn, Mat Maneri, Mary Halvorson, Nate Wooley, Ches Smith, Fay Victor, James Brandon Lewis, Luke Stewart, Jessica Pavone, Sarah Bernstein, Paul r. Harding, and No Land.

In 2016–2017, he was the manager of the poetry-jazz big band Heroes Are Gang Leaders, led by James Brandon Lewis and Thomas Sayers Ellis.