Chicago lost a jazz giant and a gentle man of great wisdom and charm this week.
I was lucky enough to meet Fred through my sister Marguerite back in the late 1970's, around the time soon thereafter that he opened his first incarnation of The Velvet Lounge on Indiana south of the loop around 20th. I used to stop by and say hi to him when I could, before I moved out to Los Angeles in the summer of 1986. It is hard to imagine that almost 25 years have passed, but I can see and hear Fred like it was yesterday. He was a solid man who stood on stage like he had deep roots planted in the soil, and crouched over with his tenor saxophone held low, swaying gently whether he was playing a simple blues or some of the original avant garde music he pioneered as one of the founding members of the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Here is a nice memorial from the Chicago Tribune for those of you not familiar with his life or music.
Tenor saxophonist Fred Anderson nurtured generations of Chicago jazz
Howard Reich
Arts critic
It may be impossible to fully measure saxophonist Fred Anderson's impact on music in Chicago--and around the world.
As tenor saxophonist, he invented a rugged, craggy musical language that influenced generations of "free jazz" improvisers.
As clubowner, he helped launch the careers of hundreds of players, among them the brilliant flutist Nicole Mitchell, the explosive percussionist Hamid Drake, the ascending trumpeters Corey Wilkes and Maurice Brown, the leonine saxophonist Edward Wilkerson, Jr. and the magisterial bassist Tatsu Aoki.
And as jazz advocate, Anderson co-founded an organization the revolutioned jazz in the 1960s, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). As such, Anderson long ago emerged as a fire-breathing symbol of everything new, progressive and daring in Chicago jazz. He had suffered a heart attack on June 14.
Anderson, a virtuoso tenorist who owned and operated the Velvet Lounge at 67 E. Cermak Rd., died Thursday, June 24, at age 81, said his sons Eugene and Michael Anderson. They declined to specify where he died.
"He was the essence of music in Chicago," said veteran Chicago alto saxophonist Jimmy Ellis, a South Side compatriot of Anderson's for decades. "He was all music, all the time. "
Added Von Freeman, another legendary Chicago saxophonist, "He had his own style...people seemed to love him. He kept that club open for years, and that's not easy."
Said veteran jazz guitarist George Freeman, Von's brother, "Fred has always been different. He was doing his own thing – he did it his way."
Indeed, it would be difficult to name another lionized Chicago jazz musician whose career unfolded quite like Anderson's. He didn't feel ready to perform in public regularly until he was in his 30s, and he never pursued stardom, yet it eventually accrued to him, anyway. Last year, when thousands crowded Millennium Park to celebrate his 80th birthday during a marathon concert of his works, Anderson was dumbfounded by the attention.
"It was overwhelming," he later told the Tribune. "I was surprised by the turnout, because I didn't know that many people were checking out my music--and people from all over."
The feat was all the more impressive considering the nature of Anderson's music, which was not exactly conceived for mass appeal. His was a rigorous, demanding brand of jazz improvisation that bridged the bebop idiom of Charlie Parker (an Anderson hero) with the "free jazz" experiments of the 1960s and thereafter. The fast-flying phrases and blues-driven energy of bebop converged with the non-chordal, anything-goes song structures of "free jazz" in Anderson's best work.
Whenever Anderson held the stage, he famously leaned forward a bit, unleashing torrents of notes, one phrase cascading atop another, solos often unfolding over a Herculean 20 minutes or more. Even at his 81st birthday show, last March at his beloved Velvet Lounge, the man packed an avalanche of ideas into every soliloquy.
At first hearing, the casual listener might have considered Anderson's solos merely random sonic outbursts, but to those who paid close attention Anderson was carefully developing themes and counterthemes. The deep amber of his tone, the jagged quality of his phrases and the blues-tinged nature of his harmonies distinguished him from everyone else playing the tenor horn.
"He was like Charlie Parker, because he was a creator of this music that people call 'free jazz,' " said Aoki, who collaborated prolifically with Anderson on disc and in concert.
"A lot of people were inspired by his approach to this music. It's 'free' music, but it's swinging. It's a very different way of playing jazz."
Anderson came to this iconoclastic sound circuitously. Born March 22, 1929 in Monroe, La., he arrived in Chicago with his mother when he was 8, after his father had abandoned the family. By chance, Anderson noticed a tenor saxophone that belonged to a cousin, picked it up and found his life's calling.
He received only a couple months of saxophone lessons and basic instruction in music theory, which may help explain how he forged a sound and a style unlike anyone else's. His primary teachers, he often said, were the recordings of jazz masters nicknamed Bird (Parker) and Prez (tenor saxophonist Lester Young), though "he didn't really sound like either one of them," observed Von Freeman. "Maybe he sounded like them in his heart."
To Anderson, "Hearing those recordings of Bird blew my mind," he told the Tribune in 1997, remembering the first time he encountered Parker's music, in 1947.
"I knew I never could play that swift and precise way that he did, but I thought maybe at least I could learn to understand what he was doing. That's when I got serious."
Anderson supported himself and his family working odd jobs--tending bar, waiting tables, cleaning carpeting--and practiced privately in his spare time. When he heard Parker's last performance in Chicago, at the long-gone Beehive on East 55th Street, Anderson rededicated himself to music, he said.
But it wasn't until the early 1960s that he felt ready to bring his achievements fully into public view. It was difficult moment for jazz, because clubs on the South Side (and elsewhere) were folding in droves, thanks to changing musical tastes and urban renewal. So Anderson, pianist-bandleader Muhal Richard Abrams and others invented an organization that soon would reconceive the way jazz was created and presented: the AACM.
"Muhal Richard Abrams and I sort of dreamed up the idea one night at some West Side bar," Anderson told the Tribune in 1990, citing Jodie Christian, Steve McCall, Phil Cohran and others as co-founders.
"We figured there was no place for us to be showcased, no place to be heard. Most of the clubs weren't too keen on booking the latest new music, and there weren't even that many clubs to begin with. So we decided to showcase ourselves, build an organization that would feature us, instead of waiting around for someone else to do it."
Yet while pivotal AACM figures such as multi-instrumentalist Anthony Braxton and the Art Ensemble of Chicago ventured to Europe in the late 1960s and became quite celebrated for it, Anderson stayed in Chicago. Recordings from this period, such as Joseph Jarman's "Song For" (Delmark, 1966), capture the extraordinary creative freedom and tonal heft of Anderson's early work. He didn't get to Europe until the late 1970s, and by then he had developed a distinctive music that embraced fierce dissonance and soaring phrases, bebop syntax and something newer, as well. That music is apparent from Anderson recordings such as "The Missing Link" (Nessa, 1979) and "Fred Anderson and Steve McCall: Vintage Duets" (OkkaDisk, 1980).
After managing the Birdhouse, a North Lincoln Avene bar, in the late 1970s, Anderson got a job bartending a club on South Indiana Avenue and in 1982 bought it. When a customer commented that Anderson's tenor sounded "smooth as velvet," the saxophonist re-christened his room the Velvet Lounge.
Anderson soon began holding informal jam sessions there every other Sunday, and the Velvet became a magnet for musicians who wanted to perform, listen and learn.
"His own music was very strange and beautiful, like nothing else, really--that's why so many musicians hung around Fred," AACM saxophonist Joseph Jarman told the Tribune in 1997. "They wanted to figure out what it was he was doing and how they could learn from it."
By 1993, Anderson began presenting paid-admission shows at the old Velvet, a charmingly dilapidated room that seated 72 people uncomfortably and was sandwiched between a barbecued-chicken joint and a currency exchange at 2128-1/2 S. Indiana Ave. Yet because of Anderson's inexorably rising stature as artist and mentor, some of the world's most celebrated jazz experimenters went to greath lengths to play the Velvet, including Dutch pianist Misha Mengelberg, New York baritone saxophonist Hamiet Bluiett and New Orleans saxophonist Kidd Jordan.
So, too, did a broad range of Chicago experimenters, such as MacArthur "genius" Fellowship winner Ken Vandermark, the musicians valuing a room that allowed them to play what they wanted, no holds barred. By giving Chicago players such freedom, Anderson in effect nurtured new generations of experimenters, including such noteworhty young players as saxophonists Kevin Nabors and Greg Ward, cellist Tomeka Reid, bassist Junius Paul and pianist Justin Dillard.
"Think of all the young musicians who got started at the Velvet," Anderson said to the Tribune last year. "The Velvet gave them a place to play, and for those who wrote music, a place to hear their own compositions."
When news spread several years ago that the age-old building housing the Velvet would be razed to make room for a condo development, AACM musicians played uncounted jazz benefits to raise the $100,000-plus Anderson needed to revive the club around the corner, at 67 E. Cermak Rd. The old Velvet closed in April of 2006 and the new one opened in July (at more than twice the 700 square feet of the earlier space), and it has remained ground zero for avant-garde jazz in Chicago.
"Frankly, I didn't think I was going to resurface this soon," Anderson told the Tribune in 2006. "But people started taking interest in saving the Velvet all over Chicago and all over the world," he added, referring to funds that poured in from his far-flung admirers.
Throughout the last two decades of his life, Anderson performed and recorded prolifically. Late works such as the DVD "Timeless: Live at the Velvet Lounge" (Delmark, 2005) and the CD/DVD set "21st Century Chase" (Delmark, 2009) document the increasing profundity of his compositions and improvisations.
To the end, he never stopped trying to heighten his art, in hopes of living up to the musicians who first inspired him.
"I'm working on improvisation like mad," he said in a Tribune interview in March, on the eve of his 81st birthday show.
"I'm trying to figure out how these great musicians, like Charlie Parker, could play for a week and never play the same thing twice.
"Improvisation is really vast," added Anderson, who is survived by sons Gene and Michael, five grandchildren and six great grandchildren.
It's just like life--you learn in life, but you just have stay on top of it."
Fred, you will be missed by all those whose lives you touched with your music and your grace.
william
