Chicago Tribune Howard Reich Arts critic 3:19 p.m. CDT, August 13, 2012
Revered around the world but never a major star, worshiped by critics and connoisseurs but perpetually strapped for cash, the towering Chicago tenor saxophonist Von Freeman practically went out of his way to avoid commercial success.
When trumpeter Miles Davis phoned Freeman, in the 1950s, looking for a replacement for John Coltrane, Freeman never returned the call.
When various bandleaders – from Davis to Billy Eckstine to King Kolax – tried to take him on the road, where his talents could be heard coast to coast, Freeman regularly turned them down.
His refusal to leave Chicago during most of his career, except for the briefest out-of-town engagements, cost him incalculable fame and fortune but also enabled him to create some of the most distinctive, innovative work ever played or recorded on a tenor saxophone.
And his devotion to the city where he was born, 88 years ago, made him a Chicago jazz icon honored with major tributes in Symphony Center and Grant Park, as well as standing-room-only crowds for his weekly gig at a remote bar on East 75th Street, the New Apartment Lounge. Earlier this year, he became one of the few Chicago-based musicians ever to receive a Jazz Masters Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Freeman died Saturday at Kindred Chicago Lakeshore care center of heart failure, said his son, Mark Freeman.
Von Freeman always considered his relative obscurity – which lasted nearly until the final years of his career, when the world started to recognize his genius – a blessing. It enabled him to forge an extremely unusual but instantly recognizable sound, to pursue off-center musical ideas that were not likely to be welcomed in the commercial marketplace.
"They said I played out of tune, played a lot of wrong notes, a lot of weird ideas," Freeman told the Tribune, in 1992.
"But it didn't matter, because I didn't have to worry about the money – I wasn't making [hardly] any. I didn't have to worry about fame – I didn't have any.
"I was free."
Freeman used that freedom from commercial pressures to pursue a music that was as unorthodox as it was intellectually demanding, as idiosyncratic as it was deeply autobiographical. In this sense, he represented the quintessential jazz musician, forging a musical voice that was unique to him, an art that was influential but ultimately inimitable.
"You hear one note, you know that's his sound," Fred Anderson, another iconic Chicago tenor saxophonist, once said of his colleague.
"It's a personal sound. You can tell he listened to all the guys – he listened to Lester Young and Charlie Parker, he took a lot from a whole lot of people and created Von Freeman."
That sound seduced some listeners and puzzled others, but no one could mistake it for anything but that of the great Vonski, as he was affectionately called by friends and admirers. Sharply acidic in the top register of the instrument but full and throaty down below, whinnying and squealing in some passages, whispering tenderly in others, Freeman's tenor work utterly defied categorization. Every sweet-sour note, every intricately etched phrase, it seemed, was crafted to sound as unexpected and as intensely expressive as possible.
If Freeman's widely idolized contemporaries – tenor gods such as the mighty Sonny Rollins, the charismatic James Moody and the stylistically restless Coltrane – epitomized the classic image of the modern saxophonist, Freeman stood as the perennial outsider, working on the fringes of the jazz mainstream. He consistently staked out an exotic but alluring artistic territory, merging elements of down-home blues, R&B honking, brazenly avant-garde techniques and an utter mastery of the predominant jazz language of the 20th Century, bebop.
He came to this startling breadth of musical resources through remarkable good fortune, for his father was a Chicago cop detailed at the Grand Terrace Ballroom, a fabled jazz club near 35th and Calumet. An amateur jazz trombonist, Freeman's father admired the masters and invited them over to the house, where young Earl Lavon Freeman – who was born Oct. 3, 1923 – routinely brushed up against them.
“I got all this music by osmosis,” said Freeman in the Tribune interview.
“Louis Armstrong used to come by from the time I was about three years old, and he'd always say to me, 'Hi Pops,'“ recalled Freeman, pointing to the era when Satchmo was enjoying his first blush of success as a Chicago bandleader and emerging recording artist.
“Earl Hines came over,” continued Freeman, “and Fats Waller played this [Starck] piano of mine.”
In effect, Freeman was a living, breathing link to the first generation of jazz stars that emerged in Roaring '20s Chicago. With his father constantly playing jazz records at home and his mother entertaining him and his two brothers by playing guitar and singing Freeman early on realized music was his calling.
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