Von Freeman - Young and Foolish '2007

Tracks list

Tracklist

01. I'll Close My Eyes
02. Young and Foolish
03. After Dark
04. Bye Bye Blackbird

Still one of the best kept secrets in jazz—when he's referred to at all
in the standard histories, it's usually only in passing, as the father of reed
player Chico Freeman—Chicago tenor saxophonist Von Freeman deserves,
instead, to be celebrated as a national treasure.

Freeman was, in his prime, a swing-to-hard bop stylist of extraordinary
shamanistic power; a visceralist who preferred to play American songbook
ballads, but cooked at fierce temperatures, drenched with the blues, and
sprinkled with both the free-improv innovations of Chicago's AACM and the
frantic, bar-walking aesthetic of the honking and screaming tenor school. There
are resonances with saxophonists Gene Ammons, Big Jay McNeely, Roland Kirk and
Ornette Coleman, but Freeman is a one-off.

The low profile Freeman endured during much of his career was partly of his own
making. He rarely left Chicago and was content to make a living as a local
gigging musician. He also spent long periods away from jazz. In the late 1940s
and early 1950s, he played with such future Chicago luminaries as pianists Sun
Ra, Ahmad Jamal, Muhal Richard Abrams and Andrew Hill, bassist Malachi Favors
and tenor Fred Anderson. In the late 1950s, as employment opportunities for jazz
musicians in the city declined, he played for strippers and in R&B bands. In the
1960s, he was entirely lost to the music, playing instead behind bluesmen Jimmy
Reed and Otis Rush.

All these playing experiences came together to create Freeman's mature style
when, circa 1970, he formed a jazz quartet (then, as on Young And Foolish seven
years later, featuring pianist John Young). He was "discovered," aged fifty, in
1972 by Roland Kirk, who produced his first own-name album for Atlantic. But
national recognition eluded him, and Freeman's subsequent recordings were for
smaller labels.

Young And Foolish—seventy minutes of sonic sheet lightning, recorded in
concert in Holland in 1977 and excellently remastered for this
release—kicks off with a marathon, 26-minute reading of "I'll Close My
Eyes," during which Freeman solos for close on fifteen minutes, at times lush
and lyrical, at others broiling, multiphonic and intense. The title track is
almost as long at eighteen minutes, with the brisk "Bye Bye Blackbird" the
shortest track at just under ten minutes. "After Dark," the only explicit blues,
is just over seventeen minutes. Each track is packed with incident and utterly
compelling from start to finish.

A tour de force of rare and astonishing power, Young And Foolish is the stone
favorite for this writer's Best Reissue Of 2007 And Then Some Award. They truly
don't make them like this anymore.



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