Life-changing albums: Von Freeman's 'Doin' It Right Now'

Interview by Brian Glasser

For me, it’s not really about records so much as live gigs. There was a guy called Von Freeman – not everyone’s heard of him! – in Chicago where I grew up. He didn’t formally give me lessons, but he was kind of like a mentor. Watching him year after year definitely changed my life. I would make private recordings and listen to them. I started off with stereo reel-to-reel, later on cassettes. I’d be in the audience, these were nightclubs so it wasn’t so much of a stage. I’d just be there recording, because I was trying to learn the music. I was 18, 19 – that’s when I started learning what the music was about.

When I played them back later, there was so much to get: the rhythm, the way it flowed, melody, harmony, saxophone stuff like fingering and breathing – there’s so much that you’re getting all at once when you see somebody live. The earliest album I heard of his was Doin’ It Right Now, but it’s different on record. I listened to records of course, but for me the much more important thing was seeing people live.

With the tapes, I had to work it all out myself – I didn’t understand anything at the beginning. These guys were older professionals in my father’s generation and they wouldn’t tell you anything – it wasn’t like a school situation where they’re telling you what the chords are and so on. They learned the same way – so I figured if they could do it, so could I. For me, it’s way better than going to jazz school – it’s not even close. Actually, it’s not even a matter of ‘better’ – it’s not the same thing. It’s a whole different kind of learning.

I’ve never taken one improvisation lesson in my life. I won’t say that I didn’t try to study with Von – but he said, ‘No – I don’t teach’. I asked another guy in Chicago for lessons – Bunky Green. And he told me ‘No’ too! They were my two favourite saxophone players in Chicago at the time; so, I thought, if these guys aren’t going to teach me, then forget it – I’ll just get it like they got it.

Primarily, what I did was this: there were people like Charlie Parker who I’d found out about; and I wanted to know how they learned how to play; and I wanted to copy it. Not mimicking what they were playing but how they learned how to play – their process. I knew that that process produced great musicians, so I wanted to know what it was. That’s what they’d done in their time – they didn’t go to schools like Berklee. I thought: ‘These guys didn’t learn to play in school – so I’m not going to learn how to play in school’. To me, that was kind of obvious.

Initially, I went to a particular concert to see Sonny Stitt, because he sounded like Bird to me, so I had that sound in my head. Von Freeman, who I didn’t know at the time, was the other saxophonist on the concert. But Sonny Stitt didn’t live in Chicago; whereas Von did. When I talked to Von afterwards he said, ‘I have these sessions that happen every week on the South Side’; and gave me the address. It wasn’t far from where I lived, so I started going. That’s how I hooked up with him. It wasn’t because I thought he was amazing – I couldn’t hear that in the beginning. I only heard that later, after I started hanging around. Even that took a while, because my ears weren’t developed.

I was always aware of death – I knew everyone wasn’t going to be around for ever; so I tried to get as much as I could from people while they were still around. Whether it was Thad Jones, Woody Shaw, Joe Henderson – I tried to see them as much as I could. If you want to be a master shoemaker, you hang around master shoemakers! It’s osmosis.

Having said that, when I listened back to the tapes of Von when I was young, I did try and emulate him – I tried to play the notes and transcribe them. You have to do that to know what they’re doing – you have to get into the detail. I listened to Von from 1975 – when I was 18 – till when he died. I only played professionally on a gig with him two or three times, and I made a couple of recordings with him. Usually he was playing with his group and I was playing with mine.

The learning part never stops – I’m still trying to figure out what people are doing! For me, ‘doing my own thing’ and ‘learning’ is the same thing, it’s not separate – learning is my own thing …