You could recognize George Freeman’s playing anywhere.
When tenor saxophonist Gene Ammons and his sextet appeared as guests on WTTW in 1970, most members of the band generally hewed to the backing progressions. Then there was Freeman, daringly traipsing around their harmonic fringes in hard-rocking, blazing solos.
That was typical for the ever-adventurous Freeman, who died in Chicago on April 1. He was 97 years old. His death was confirmed by his nephew, Mark Freeman.
While still in his teens, Freeman was among the fiMcBriderst musicians in Chicago, and one of the first jazz guitarists anywhere, to champion the bleeding-edge bebop of his idol, Charlie Parker. He eventually got to play with Parker, in now-lauded performances at the Pershing Ballroom in the early 1950s.
The list of jazz greats with whom Freeman collaborated is long. Besides Parker and Ammons, for whom he wrote the hit “The Black Cat,” he side-manned for Count Basie, Dexter Gordon, Lester Young, Sonny Stitt, Jimmy McGriff, Coleman Hawkins and Harrison Bankhead.
Freeman’s virtuosic presence on the bandstand long attracted critical and connoisseurial plaudits. “Among the many talented musicians I first got to see and hear during my recently concluded three-and-a-half year stay in Chicago, one of the most memorable was guitarist George Freeman,” DownBeat editor Dan Morgenstern gushed in a 1971 profile for the magazine, the same year Freeman released his first album as a bandleader. “Freeman’s way of going outside is exciting but also musical, and doesn’t sound at all like what other contemporary guitarists attempt in this vein.”
Despite his résumé and insider acclaim, Freeman’s career never took off the way he and his supporters expected. He was often overshadowed by his older brother Von Freeman, a monumental tenor player with whom he shared the Freeman family home in Greater Grand Crossing for decades. The younger Freeman sometimes suspected his perch at jazz’s vanguard came at his own professional peril.
“The (radio) DJs didn’t quite understand me, because I was going a different direction,” Freeman told the Tribune in 2023. “My playing has always been so advanced. … It wasn’t my time, because I came home. I was always coming home.”
“Home” for Freeman was Chicago, save some mid-career stints in New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area. Born on the South Side on April 10, 1927, Freeman was the youngest of three boys, all musical: Von and oldest brother Eldridge “Bruz” Freeman, a drummer, both joined Freeman for the first of Parker’s Pershing Ballroom performances. Music was nurtured at home by their father, George Freeman, Sr., a police officer whose beat included clubs on the 35th Street strip, and their mother, Earle, herself a guitarist. The brothers would stay up late listening to jazz radio with their father, even if it meant showing up to school the next day bleary-eyed.
Freeman was inspired to pick up guitar after he heard blues star T-Bone Walker play the long-defunct Rhumboogie Café in Hyde Park as a teen; too young to enter the club legally, he snuck in through a stage door to hear him. “He was singing, had that guitar up behind his neck — he was dynamic,” Freeman later recounted to JazzTimes.
Freeman was already sitting in for Eugene Wright’s Dukes of Swing band when he passed through Walter Dyett’s prestigious band program at DuSable High School. Freeman wasn’t immune to the exacting pedagogue’s fits of anger — he was booted from class on a couple occasions — but Dyett later invited him to join his swing orchestra at Rhumboogie Café, the same place Freeman fell in love with the guitar.
In 1947, tenor saxophonist Johnny Griffin, a DuSable classmate, recruited Freeman to join the Joe Morris Orchestra. It was his first touring break, and his first move to New York. Freeman racked up early recording credits but unjustly missed out on a compositional credit for the band’s first hit, “Lowe Groovin’.” He quit in protest, landing back in Chicago just in time to link up with Parker for the Pershing residency.
A few years later, Freeman was cheated out of another potentially career-making opportunity. He crossed paths with one of Sarah Vaughan’s bandmates, who narrowly kept him from joining the epochal singer on the road. The musician, who held a grudge against Freeman, told him the wrong date for the start of the tour and he missed the whole thing.
In the 1960s, Freeman linked up with soul and R&B singer Jackie Wilson and saxophonist Sil Austin, a partnership that opened the door to other genre-blending collaborations with Wild Bill Davis and Richard “Groove” Holmes. After an unhappy few years in California, Freeman returned to Chicago, where he played in Gene Ammons’ band from 1969 until Ammons’ death in 1974.
Freeman recorded his first albums under his own name after returning to Chicago, releasing “Introducing George Freeman Live, with Charlie Earland Sitting In,” (1971), “Birth Sign,” (1972), “New Improved Funk” and “Man and Woman” (both 1974) in quick succession. Another run of albums followed nearly 30 years later, mostly on singer and collaborator Joanie Pallatto’s Southport label: “Rebellion” (1995), “George Burns!” (1999), and “At Long Last, George” (2001, featuring singers Kurt Elling and René Marie).
Freeman became a coveted guitarist-on-call for touring acts and worked the Chicago circuit for the rest of his life, often alongside Von. However, worsening vision problems from a childhood accident made it difficult for Freeman to travel to gigs without assistance.
When Von Freeman died in 2012, Chicago’s jazz community swooped in to ensure that George, then 85, was looked after. Drummer Mike Reed set Freeman up with fellow guitarist Mike Allemana, a former bandmate of Von’s, for a month-long residency at his then-new venue Constellation. Freeman’s bookings, which had slowed to a trickle before Von’s death, soon spiked. He became such a fixture that the Tribune named him its 2014 Chicagoan of the Year in Jazz.
In 2015, Freeman linked up with Von’s son, Chico — himself a volcanic tenorist — to release “All in the Family” in 2015. At that point, nephew and uncle hadn’t collaborated since they shared an out-there local bill in the 1970s, one Chico felt nervous even offering the older musician.
His doubts were dispelled as soon as George began to play.
“He blew my mind. He came and he played just amazingly. He was just a total musician. That changed my mind about everything,” Chico told JazzTimes years afterward.
Freeman released an album roughly once every two years after “All in the Family.” His most recent, “The Good Life” (2023), featured bassist Christian McBride and organist/trumpeter Joey DeFrancesco, heavyweights in the jazz world.
This time, Freeman wasn’t a sideman. They were the ones supporting him — a fact that tickled him endlessly.
“I wanted to play with (DeFrancesco) in the first place, and McBride had heard about me. They all knew me! That’s what made it so great,” he said.
Besides a show-stopping appearance at the 2023 Chicago Jazz Festival, Freeman mostly kept his recent gigs contained to an annual birthday party he hosted at the Green Mill, the city’s historic jazz venue. The next one, celebrating his 98th, was scheduled for April 11 and 12, with Allemana, organist Pete Benson and drummer Charles Heath; it’s been fashioned into a memorial concert in his absence.
In his last conversation with the Tribune, Freeman echoed the sentiments he shared with DownBeat magazine in 1971, his first major print profile.
“With all this talk about musicians being brothers, there is too much competitiveness among them and they aren’t cooperating enough. The way I see it, everybody can’t be a leader, so you’ve got to get behind somebody,” Freeman told DownBeat.
“Why not help another musician to do his thing? You’ll get your turn when the time comes.”
Freeman is survived by nephews Chico and Mark Freeman and by his great-nieces and -nephews. He was preceded in death by brothers Eldridge “Bruz” Freeman and Von Freeman. A service will be announced at a later date.
Hannah Edgar is a freelance writer.
