Bud Freeman was an American jazz musician, bandleader and composer. He is this week’s Phantom Dancer feature artist. Bud Freeman was one of the first tenor saxophonists in jazz along with Coleman Hawkins.

The Phantom Dancer is your weekly non-stop mix of swing and jazz from live 1920s-60s radio and TV every week.

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SCHOOL

Freeman was one of the young musicians inspired by New Orleans ensembles and the innovations of Louis Armstrong to synthesize the Chicago style in the late 1920s.

He was one of the ‘Austin High Gang’.

One hundred years ago, in 1922, five kids from Austin High School in Chicago, Illinois formed a little band: Jim Lanigan on piano, Jimmy McPartland on cornet, his older brother Dick McPartland on banjo and guitar, Frank Teschemacher on alto saxophone, and Bud Freeman on C-melody tenor saxophone.

Bud was the greenhorn of the group and the only one who did not also play the violin. At the time, their ages ranged from Jimmy McPartland, who was fourteen, to Jim Lanigan and Dick McPartland, seventeen. Teschemacher was sixteen and Freeman was slightly younger.

The boys, like many other students from their high school, frequented an ice cream parlor across the street known as “The Spoon and the Straw.” One of them would feed a nickel to the automatic phonograph and one day they discovered a record by the New Orleans Rhythm Kings. They were so enthralled by the sound of such authentic jazz that they played the record over and over. Then and there, they named their band “The Blue Friars,” after The Friar’s Inn on the Chicago Loop where the Rhythm Kings played.

They went and heard King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band live, rounding off their identity with New Orleans jazz.

Sometimes the Austin High Gang played at Lewis Institute, which Dave Tough attended, and he added his drums to the little band. Later, Jim Lanigan picked up the bass through Chink Martin’s playing and soon became the band’s bassist; Teschemacher also began practicing the clarinet, his style showing traces of the glissandi from violin playing. Dave found Floyd O’Brien playing trombone at a University of Chicago jam session. Then, recruiting him and pianist Dave North, they named themselves Husk O’Hare’s Wolverines and were ready to play professionally. They got a job at White City, a large dance hall of Chicago’s south side amusement park, where they played until their disbandment at the end of the White City engagement.

In 1927, Eddie Condon recorded the Austin High Gang as the “Mackenzie-Condon Chicagoans”. These recordings catapulted the young musicians into the spotlight and they all subsequently developed acclaimed careers in New York, playing and recording with established musicians like Jack Teagarden, Pee Wee Russell, Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey. Of the original Austin High Gang, Jimmy McPartland and Bud Freeman sustained the longest careers in jazz

EEL

By the 1930s, Bud Freeman was working in New York City, typically in the company of ex-Chicagoans, especially Eddie Condon, in whose band Freeman recorded a noted solo, “The Eel” (1933).

By then he had developed a fluent, romantic style featuring sinuous legato melodies. His tenor saxophone sound was especially distinctive—full and smooth, with a rough edge and a large vibrato—and he played with a robust, at times almost violent swing.

Along with a Chicago friend, drummer Dave Tough, Freeman played in the big bands of Tommy Dorsey (1936–38) and Benny Goodman (1938) before embarking on a freelance career as bandleader and soloist.

He formed the Summa Cum Laude Orchestra (1939–1940) which you’ll hear live from Chicago on this week’s Phantom Dancer.

Freeman led a U.S. Army dance band based in the Aleutian Islands during World War II, then lived in New York and Chile.

He often reunited with Condon and other former Chicagoans in concert. Among his notable albums are The Bud Freeman All-Stars and the 1957 Cootie Williams–Rex Stewart album, The Big Challenge, which brought together Freeman and his great tenor saxophone rival, Coleman Hawkins.

After touring with the World’s Greatest Jazz Band (1969–71), Freeman lived in England (1974–80) and performed there and in Europe; thereafter he was based in Chicago.

He wrote two short volumes of reminiscences, You Don’t Look Like a Musician (1974) and If You Know of a Better Life, Please Tell Me (1976), and an autobiography, Crazeology (with Robert Wolf, 1989).

The Eel…

11 APRIL PLAY LIST