Bud Freeman

Bud Freeman participated only in three recording sessions with Bix, and all took place in 1930, in the twilight of Bix’s short life. Nevertheless, each session brought us magnificent performances by Bix. The May 21, 1930 session with Hoagy Carmichael and His Orchestra brought us the explosive solo in “Barnacle Bill, the Sailor”. September 8, 1930, gave us the gift of one of Bix’s most poignant performances in “I’ll Be A Friend With Pleasure”. From Bix’s last recording session of September 15, 1930, with Hoagy Carmichael and His Orchestra, we have ten measures of highly inspired Bix in “Georgia On My Mind.” The next year, on May 1, Freeman is part of the pick-up group (that included Bix), under the leadership of Benny Goodman, that played for a house party at Princeton University Cottage Club. Although the direct association between Bud Freeman and Bix had come towards the end of Bix’s life, Bix’s influence on Freeman goes back much earlier. But before Bix, Bud Freeman was inspired by the New Orleans Rhythm Kings and by King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band.

Lawrence “Bud” Freeman was born in Austin, a suburb of Chicago at the time, on April 13, 1906. Music was all around Freeman: he grew up in a musical family and his high school buddies, the famous or infamous Austin High School Gang  – which included Jimmy and Dick McPartland, Frank Teschmacher, and Jim Lannigan – were nuts about jazz.

The members of the Austin High Gang were steady customers of the Spoon and Straw, a local soda parlor. There was a victrola and many records in the establishment and the youngsters used to play them. One afternoon in 1922, they came upon a record by the Friar’s Society Orchestra, later to be known as the New Orleans Rhythm Kings. “We were so excited by that first record that we decided that afternoon to become jazz musicians and form our band, which Dick later named the Blue Friars.'” writes Bud Freeman in his book “Crazeology: The Autobiography of a Chicago Jazzman”, as told to Robert Wolf, University of Illinois Press, 1989. Bud Freeman and his musical friends went to the Friar’ Inn to hear the New Orleans Rhythm Kings. In 1923, Bud Freeman and his high school buddies started frequenting the Lincoln Gardens. Freeman writes:

After that we never went back to the New Orleans Rhythm Kings because when we heard the King Oliver band, we knew we were hearing the real thing for the first time.

At this point, Bud Freeman took up the C-melody sax. His progress was much slower than that of his fellow Austinains: Tesch, the McPartlands and Lanigan had learned the violin. By the summer of 1924, Bud became good enough on the C-melody sax that, with the help of drummer Dave Tough, he got a job playing at a roadhouse in Sheboygan, Wisconsin.

In 1925, Bud met Bix:

“I was nineteen when Harry [Gale] took me to hear Bix, who had just left the Wolverines and was sitting in with Charlie Straight’s band at the Rendezvous on the near North Side. It was a band that played for dancing and a floor show; all the big stars used to go there. As Harry and I entered the club I saw Bix with his cornet about fifty feet away. Our eyes seemed to meet. Here I was facing this great genius I so idolized. Harry knew him, so we went backstage after the last set and waited for the band to walk off. That night I had one of the great thrills of my live. I told Bix how excited I was to meet him, that I had heard every record he had made. He sat down at the piano and started to play compositions by Debussy and Eastwood Lane, his favorite. Then he played some of his own. I rattled on, telling him how great I thought his compositions were, almost embarrassing him with my compliments.” “If Bix had lived longer he would have become one of American greatest composers. He had a love of the great composers of the day, such as Ravel, Holst, Schoenberg, and Debussy. They were a big influence on Bix, and you can hear their influence in his playing of “In A Mist” “Flashes” and “In The Dark.” It was Bix who got David Tough and me into listening to them. They gave us a much better feeling for jazz.”

 

Louis Armstrong was also an importance influence on Bud Freeman. Bud and his buddies regularly went to the Sunset to hear Louis and Earl Hines with the Dickerson band. Bud Freeman writes:

“I was so involved in listening to jazz that I can’t tell you what life was like in those days. We did not live as other people did. Music was twenty-four hours a day. When we weren’t performing, we were listening. Whenever a new Bix or Louis record came out we would have a party. Some guy would serve wine and food at his parents’ home and we would discuss the record, but not as critics would. We talked about phrases. We would sing a phrase and play it over and over. We were learning, but we were learning through feeling. No one was invited who did not feel it.”

 

In the summer of 1925, Bud Freeman was playing tenor sax, the instrument that would bring him fame. In 1926,  the Austin High Gang called themselves Husk O’Hare’s Wolverines. Jimmy McPartland was the leader and the musicians were Dave Tough (drums), Tesch (clarinet), Floyd O’Brien (trombone), Jim Lanigan (tuba, bass), Dave North (piano), Dick McPartland (banjo), and Bud Freeman (alto sax). They got a job at the White City Amusement Park on the South Side. Bud Freeman writes:

“Bix and Pee Wee had come to hear our band at White City because they had heard so much about it. We, of course, were honored to have them there. Dave Tough was playing in our band and they absolutely flipped over us. They invited us to go hear them at Hudson Lake. We left on a Saturday night and got there on Sunday morning. Bix and Pee Wee were rooming together in a lake cabin. When we got there, we banged on their door, and when nobody answered we walked in. There they were, completely passed out; they had been drinking pretty heavily. We shook Pee Wee and he just sort of woke up swinging; he thought somebody was attacking him. A few minutes later we were jamming. We slept that morning and then went with them to their afternoon session at the ballroom. It was amazing how beautifully they played with their terrible hangovers. I suppose they had their little drinks sitting up on the bandstand, but there was one thing about Bix: he might have had a few drinks just to nurse his hangover but I do not recall ever seeing him play drunk. He played so magnificently all the time.”

We move to 1927, the year when Bud Freeman as part of the McKenzie-Condon Chicagoans recorded for posterity “Nobody’s Sweetheart”, “Liza” and “China Boy.” Bud Freeman tells how Red McKenzie and Eddie Condon met:

The Paul Whiteman Orchestra had an engagement during the week of November 7-13, 1927 at the Chicago Theater. Every night, Bix, the Dorsey brothers, and a few Chicago musicians jammed in Sam Beer’s My Cellar at 222 North State Street (the Three Deuces). After a day or two, as the word got out of what was going on, the place was mobbed by musicians and the public alike. Among the musicians who showed up were Red McKenzie and Eddie Condon. Bud Freeman writes, “After he met Condon at 222 North State McKenzie started hanging around with the Austin High Gang… Not long after that, we made our first recording for OKeh Records. It was Red who was responsible for getting us that date. He had a lot of nerve. He went up to OKeh Records and insulted one of the producers and got us a recording session. It was Condon’s date, but McKenzie arranged it. The group was called McKenzie-Condon Chicagoans, with Eddie on banjo, Joe Sullivan on piano, Jim Lannigan on bass, Jimmy McPartland on cornet, me on tenor, Teschmacher on clarinet, and Gene Krupa on drums…on the strength of my solos on  “Nobody’s Sweetheart”, “Liza” and “China Boy” for the OKeh date, I got an offer to go with Ben Polack’s band.

In January 1928, Bud Freeman joined the Ben Pollack Orchestra in New York. The other musicians in the band were:

• Benny Goodman (clarinet)
• Gil Rodin (alto sax)
• Jimmy McPartland (cornet);
• Al Davis (trumpet);
• Glenn Miller (trombone);
• Dick Morgan (guitar);
• Vic Breidis (piano);
• Harry Goodman (bass);
• Ben Pollack (drums).

Of course, Bud played tenor sax and the venue was  the Little Club, described as a “posh night spot.” In July 1928, Bud was invited by George Carhart to join a band to play in the Ile de France on her maiden voyage from New York to Le Havre.  Bud took the job, mostly to get to Paris and see his old buddy Dave Tough who was playing in L’Abbey, an Argentinian restaurant, with a band led by Danny Polo, a clarinet player who had been with the Jean Goldkette orchestra as a temporary replacement for Don Murray. (Danny Polo plays the 32-bar clarinet solo in the legendary recording of “My Pretty Girl”).

Bud did not stay long in Paris. Within a short time, he was back in Chicago where he recorded for OKeh Craze-O-logy. For the next several years, Freeman kept moving back and forth between New York and Chicago, “working in dime-a-dance joints and theater pits, in gangster-owned clubs and speakeasies.” When in New York, Bud occasionally played in Ivy League Schools. To make ends meet, he made recordings when he would be called. Bud participated in the 1930 sessions of Hoagy Carmichael at the recommendation of Bix and at the Bix Beiderbecke session that brought us “I’ll Be A Friend With Pleasure”.

Freeman claims that, on the first recording session:

We did a recording of “Stardust”. “Stardust”, of course, became a classic and Hoagy eventually must have become aa  millionaire through it. But we played it at the wrong tempo. Everybody in the band said, “Get rid of that stupid tune,” and we threw it out. Six months or a year later, Isham Jones, the famous dance band leader, recorded it as a ballad and it became a tremendous hit and there wasn’t a band in that era that didn’t play it.

There is no independent documentation to support this claim. The comprehensive discographies “Jazz Records” and “American Dance Bands” by Brian Rust provide no support for that claim. Unissued recordings are invariably listed, but there is no listing of an unissued recording of Stardust in any of the three recording sessions of Hoagy Carmichael in 1930. Freeman also claims that at this point, Bix, the Dorsey brothers, Joe Sullivan, Gene Krupa, Dick McDonough, and Adrian Rollini started rehearsing with the intention of going to Europe