Right: Ron Carter & Foursight, clockwise from top left: Jimmy Green, Payton Crossley, Ron Carter, and Donald Vega Credit: Michael Jackson / Frank Nourry
When I looked over the lineup for this year’s Chicago Jazz Festival, the first thing that leaped out at me was the pair of sets at Pritzker Pavilion on Thursday—saxophonist Chico Freeman celebrating the centennial of his famous father, Von Freeman, followed by bassist Ron Carter leading his group Foursight.
Freeman came up in the late 70s with the neo-traditionalist Young Lions (Wynton Marsalis, Roy Hargrove, Terence Blanchard) but by the late 80s had launched an electric band called Brainstorm; Carter might be best known for the five years he spent in Miles Davis’s second great quintet in the 60s. But it’s only a slight exaggeration to say that between the two of them, they’ve played with every single musician of note from the past half century of jazz, pop, Latin music, reggae, country, folk, soul, and beyond.
At 86, Carter has 12 years on Freeman, so if they were to compete on raw number of sessions, he’d surely win—Guinness World Records even recognized him in 2016 as the most-recorded bassist in jazz history, having played on 2,221 albums (“and counting,” Carter adds). If you were to set them head-to-head on variety of gigs, though, it’d be a wash: Freeman has played with the likes of Don Cherry, Bobby McFerrin, Celia Cruz, Hall & Oates, and Michael Jackson, while Carter’s credits include not just Miles Davis but also Aretha Franklin, Billy Joel, Alice Coltrane, Astrud Gilberto, and A Tribe Called Quest.
Carter began on cello before picking up the bass, and Freeman played trumpet before adopting the saxophone as his principal horn. Both men take a spiritual approach to their instruments, and as distinctive as their styles are, they can fit into all sorts of musical visions.
These giants hardly need me to introduce them—especially Carter, who’s the subject of the 2022 feature-length documentary Ron Carter: Finding the Right Notes—but I can’t resist trying. Born in Ferndale, Michigan, and now based in New York City, Carter joined Chico Hamilton’s band in 1959, gigging with the drummer while pursuing a master’s degree. He made one of his first recordings on the 1960 Eric Dolphy album Out There, and he says his wife at the time helped teach Dolphy how to cook.
Carter’s tenure with Miles Davis, from 1963 till ’68, was in the quintet with Herbie Hancock, Tony Williams, and eventually Wayne Shorter. He says Davis never told him to play or change a note, and that when they talked, the trumpeter never wanted to discuss the groundbreaking music they were making—they’d talk about boxing, Carter recalls, or the politics of Harlem.
“[Carter’s] playing was clean and clear and definitive,” Hancock told the New York Times last year. “He was always right in the pocket at just the right place. He knew which way to go, to make it not just an exciting listening and playing experience but one that opened doors to new possibilities.”
Carter would later appear on Blue Note LPs by Hancock, Shorter, and Williams, as well as on albums by a slew of other jazz titans, including Sam Rivers, Freddie Hubbard, Lee Morgan, and McCoy Tyner. He played soul with Roberta Flack, fusion with Hungarian guitarist Gábor Szabó, and practically every other kind of music known to humans. Carter insists that every session he did was equally satisfying—he won’t pick favorites, and he says they were all learning experiences.
Carter’s discography as a bandleader begins in 1961, but he didn’t launch the group he’s bringing to the Jazz Festival—the quartet Foursight, for this show with drummer Payton Crossley, tenor saxophonist Jimmy Green, and pianist Donald Vega—until decades later. The group mixes hard postbop with standards such as “My Funny Valentine,” though Carter prefers not to concern himself with such distinctions. “I’m not sure how you decide what’s traditional over hard bop—I don’t put those titles on my music,” he says. “I like that song [‘My Funny Valentine’], so if you find a better standard, send me the lead sheets, and I’ll compare it against ones I like to play.”
Ron Carter & Foursight
Part of the Chicago Jazz Festival. Thu 8/31, 8 PM, Jay Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park, 201 E. Randolph, free, all ages
Carter doesn’t want to make predictions about Foursight’s set—he says he’d like to be surprised by it himself. Whatever he plays, he makes it his own (“That’s what I do, man”), and his quest to find the right notes will never end while he can still play. He’s excited to get back to jamming and practicing with other musicians every night, for as long as the pandemic continues to permit that. Carter describes his own playing as “a sound that commands the undivided attention of listener and player,” and this performance ought to reward the audience’s full concentration.
Chico Freeman is similarly prolific and wide-ranging, and his musical family includes not just his father, Von, but also two famous uncles, guitarist George Freeman and drummer Eldridge “Bruz” Freeman. In the 1950s, those three brothers made up the house band at the Pershing Hotel ballroom in Woodlawn, where they famously backed the likes of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker.
Gillespie’s philosophy particularly inspired Chico. “We once did an interview together, and they asked, ‘What is jazz?’” he says. “Dizzy said it was the search for truth. I realized that’s what we’re all looking for—it’s about what you feel and what you want to express at that moment. Because yesterday is not a real thing, and neither is tomorrow—only now. That’s the only truth that’s real. That’s been my mantra.”
Freeman started at Northwestern University in 1967, where he added the saxophone to his arsenal in his junior year. And throughout his formal education, he learned from his father. “I just felt like every music is really the same,” he says. “My experience taught me that, because I was playing jam sessions with my father and learning that way. But I listened to a lot of Miles and Trane, Motown, and R&B. I even sang in groups when I was younger.”
In the 1970s, Freeman further expanded his musical palette working with pianist and composer Muhal Richard Abrams, founding president of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. “Straight out of college, I went right into the AACM,” he says. “Muhal was my mentor. He taught me composition, and I learned my whole big-band approach because I was in his. I took in everything, including how to improvise.”
Von Freeman had always encouraged Chico to have his own immediately recognizable sound, rather than copy anyone else. For this Jazz Festival set, Chico pays homage to the powerful and distinctive musical voice of his father, who would’ve turned 100 in October.
For what he’s calling the Von Freeman Centennial, Chico says he’s doing a loosely structured three-tiered program mapped onto three eras in his dad’s career. “I’m trying to capture as much as I can, within 50 minutes to an hour, of the journey that he and I took together,” he explains. The band includes George Freeman (now 96 years old), bassist Avery Sharpe, drummer Yoron Israel, guitarist Mike Allemana, vocalist Margaret Murphy, and vibraphonist and pianist Thaddeus Tukes.
Chico Freeman: Von Freeman Centennial
Part of the Chicago Jazz Festival. Featuring George Freeman, Avery Sharpe, Yoron Israel, Mike Allemana, Thaddeus Tukes, and Margaret Murphy. Thu 8/31, 6:30 PM, Jay Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park, 201 E. Randolph, free, all ages
The first part of Von and Chico’s journey began in the early 80s. Von was already well-loved in Chicago, but he didn’t travel much—so a fast-rising Chico, then living in New York, helped boost his dad’s international career by arranging his first gigs in the Big Apple since the 60s as well as his first trip to Europe. Father and son took several tours abroad together and collaborated on many albums, often working with Sharpe (a longtime McCoy Tyner sideman) and Israel (who’s now department chair of percussion at the Berklee College of Music).
The second part also began in the 80s, with Von’s long-running Tuesday residency at the New Apartment Lounge on the south side, which continued till the bar closed for renovations in 2010 (Von died in 2012 at age 88). Allemana and Murphy both played many of those famous jam sessions, which accounts for their presence here. The third part, Chico explains, is about the younger musicians his dad encouraged and tutored—Chico was among them, of course, and he’s likewise helped upstart players. Tukes, who grew up in Pullman on the south side and graduated from Northwestern in 2016, represents those generations.
Chico promises a combination of Von’s compositions and jazz standards, with a few surprises. He’s thrilled to be back in Chicago (he now lives in Switzerland), and he’ll return in mid-September to play the Hyde Park Jazz Festival, the Jazz Showcase, and the Green Mill. This Jazz Festival gig isn’t the only one honoring his father, either—he’ll play Von Freeman Centennial shows at the Green Mill too. “His voice was his own,” Chico says. “No one else sounded like him. So that’s my definition of timeless.”
