Chicago loses an icon: tenor saxist Fred Anderson silenced at 81

Tenor saxist and jazz icon Fred Anderson, 1929-2010  (photo by Peter Bell)

The city got a little quieter yesterday – and not in a good way.

The death of Fred Anderson deprives us of more than his massive tenor saxophone tone: burly and limitless, thrilling in its sheer power as it transmitted mournful long tones or rippling waves of dark energy, hundreds of notes dancing within his heroic improvised sagas.  His death deprives the city, and the international jazz community, of a singularly influential and universally admired teacher, mentor, and supporter of new jazz and old traditions.
 

But back to that sound.  It never left him, even after the physical wasting of old age had torn the pounds from his frame.  The bulk was gone – the bulk that allowed him, in the 60s, to support his family through manual labor: for many years he was a carpet installer, lifting the weighty rolls from van to home.  The bulk was gone; the sinew remained.

Anderson died Thursday at 81, having been placed into a medically induced coma on Monday, June 14 (see here for earlier story) after going into cardiac arrest at Saint Francis Hospital in Evanston.  He had been on life support since late last week, but it was removed on Saturday (June 19). In the words of his granddaughter, “His strong heart pumped until he died” – with no artificial heart or lung assistance – six days later.

I make no special claims to objectivity in the matter.  I met Anderson in the 70s; I’ve admired his music ever since, and came to love him as a relative – as did the majority of those he encountered – for his determination, his humility, and his integrity.  I was honored to write the liner notes for his first American release (and only the second recording under his own name), The Missing Link in 1984.  I’ll miss him tremendously, the image of him bent at the waist, plunging into his own music – grappling with Fate, it often seemed – burned into my memory.   
 

    Anderson's first U.s.release (photo by Lauren Deutsch)

“Baba Fred” was pretty much the last of his generation in Chicago.  (That’s an honorific immortalized in song by vocalist Dee Alexander, one of the countless artists who found a performance home at Anderson’s nightclub, the Velvet Lounge.)  He outlived a number of the musical adventurers with whom he partnered on stage or on record, among them the drummers Ajaramu and Steve McCall, the bassists Fred Hopkins and Milton Suggs and Charles Clark. 

He also outlived several charter members of the AACM, the artists’ collective that became an international symbol of jazz experimentation, which Anderson is generally considered to have co-founded. 

That longevity is more than incidental: Anderson was in fact the oldest musician in the AACM, and he occupied a vital link in Chicago jazz history.  In the 50s, working on his own, he struggled with then-new ideas about improvisation – what would come to be called “free jazz” – and his efforts helped bridge the gap between Ornette Coleman’s work in the late 50s and the explosive evolution of the AACM’s music less a few years later.  

As he told me for the liner notes to The Missing Link (Nessa Records): “I was always a loner . . . . The first thing I wanted to try to learn, I wanted to play without copying cats. . . .  I knew I didn’t really want to play like that, because I knew if I started playin’ like that I’d be dependent on other people’s ideas all the time.” 

First he applied new ideas to his reverence for the rhythmic freedom of Lester Young and the big sound of Gene Ammons, encountering cold shoulders from unsympathetic peers for his efforts.  (“I’d get laughed at, throwed off the bandstand, all the time,” he told me in ’84.)  Then he gave this amalgam his own twist, and it helped shape the ideas of the younger but like-minded musical neighbors who formed the AACM. 

But by the time he had performed at the very first AACM concert, in the summer of 1965 – and took part in Joseph Jarman’s album Song For, only the second AACM recording, the following year – Anderson was already 37 years old, close to a decade older than many of the firebrands who would soon carry the AACM torch to Europe and then New York.  Along with his contemporary, Muhal Richard Abrams, he became a tribal elder for this new music in Chicago. 

And after Abrams moved to New York in 1977, Anderson became the conscience of the AACM in Chicago, and father-figure to three generations of Chicago musicians.  Recognizing the need for a performance space for himself and for the younger musicians now in his informal care, he opened his first club, the northside Birdhouse, in the 1977.  By 1982 he had moved to the Velvet Lounge, a funky bar with a rec-room-décor a few blocks east of Chinatown, which slowly turned into his pride and joy – workingman’s bar by day, avant-garde jazz haven by night – and now his legacy.
 

Anderson’s bands brought public attention to such major figures as saxophonists Douglas Ewart and Chico Freeman, bassists Tatsu Aoki and Harrison Bankhead, drummer Hamid Drake, and trombonist George Lewis.  (Lewis took his studies further: now the Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University in New York, he authored the definitive history of the AACM, A Power Stronger Than Itself.)  
 

Henry Grimes with Anderson at Velvet Lounge  (photo: Mark Sheldon)

Even after he’d established a deep pool of favored collaborators in the 90s, Anderson still made himself and his club available to younger musicians, many of them members of the AACM: flutist Nicole Mitchell, drummer Chad Taylor, guitarist Dave Parker, trumpeters Corey Wilkes and Maurice Brown, keyboardist Justin Dillard.  All of them will carry Anderson’s memory in their own music: they won’t be able to help it.

Shortly before his 80th birthday, Anderson shared with me some of what drove him to continue.  “I’ve been around all these years, trying to sort out this jazz tradition,” he allowed.  “The foundation has been set, and I have a responsibility to keep trying to contribute.”  He regarded any fame that had come his way as almost ancillary to his prime purpose, refusing even to make much of the birthday-week festival in his honor.  

“There’s still a lot to be done, and I’m just here for a short while,” he continued.  “I can’t be ‘celebrating’ something that’s still ongoing.  A lot of the young musicians, they’re not spending enough time with the scales and the chords and those things.”  This from a man who was once routinely (and wrongly accused) of making up his own music to mask his own ignorance of music theory.

In 1995, the prolific reedist Ken Vandermark arrived from Boston, and he has never stopped singing Anderson’s praises, as a musician and as a promoter.  Using the Velvet Lounge as a staging point, he spearheaded a new wave of free improvisation in Chicago, in the process focusing international attention on the club, and on Anderson himself.  Since his 65th birthday, more than twenty Anderson discs have been released; before that, there were four.

Around the same time, Asian-American who had created their own collective on the AACM model – Asian Improv aRts, or AIR -- began to perform at the Velvet on at least an annual basis.  They came to Chicago to pay homage to Anderson, and to gain the experience of sharing the stage with him.   (This relationship was facilitated by the presence in Chicago of the polymorphic Japanese-American bassist Tatsu Aoki, who began playing in Anderson’s groups in the 90s.)

Eventually, musicians from around the country flocked to the Velvet, for such occasions as the after-fest sessions during the Chicago Jazz Festival – for which Anderson’s counterpart in New Orleans, the saxophonist and mentor Kidd Jordan, traveled annual to Chicago – and for Anderson’s birthday celebrations, which drew bassists Henry Grimes (from New York) and Richard Davis (from Wisconsin), as well as saxophonist Francis Wong (from the San Francisco area).  

For European improvisers, the Velvet became both a performance venue and a congenial hangout when they came to town to perform elsewhere – part clubhouse, part shrine to the career of its owner.  The club’s reputation became synonymous with Anderson’s own profile, which grew progressively larger during more and more frequent bookings throughout the continent.  (It remains to be seen, however, whether the club can continue without Anderson’s steady hand and personal financial involvement.)

So it wasn’t just Chicago; the world itself got a little quieter yesterday.  And not in a good way.

Related articles: Fred Anderson birthday bash; Fred Anderson kicks off birthday month