A Venerable Sax Man Channels a Couple of Patriarchs

[Lois Gilbert]

A Venerable Sax Man Channels a Couple of Patriarchs
By BEN RATLIFF
NY Times


After playing a few songs at the TriBeCa Performing Arts Center on Friday
night, the tenor saxophonist Von Freeman sidled up to the microphone in his pale
suit and sunglasses. "I'm very lucky," he said, with the half smile of someone
who has pulled something off without your knowing it. "I actually played with
Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young. So you know how old I am: 81, baby."
That was it for contextualizing. The rest of the concert was just lovely,
smeared, smoky sound, salted with a few passages of hard, fast bebop language.

The show was part of this year's Lost Jazz Shrines series, which honors a
famous defunct jazz spot for a few concerts each season. This year's theme is
Cafe Society (which opened in Greenwich Village in the late 1930's and lasted
more than a decade), and Friday's particular focus was on two tenor saxophonists
who played there, Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins.

Mr. Freeman, who has a hard-core local following in his hometown, Chicago,
rarely comes to New York. But every time he does, he insists on casual
performances. It's as if at any moment he might just give up the pretense of being a
star, hand the horn to someone else, and slope off to charm someone at the bar.
Talk about lost jazz shrines: his beatific attitude and entire mode of being
is a lost jazz shrine. On Friday he was backed by the pianist Barry Harris and
his trio. Mr. Harris, who's 73, is another jazz elder holding a great deal of
important musical secrets. It's hard to believe, but they had never played
together before.

They worked well together. Mr. Harris is a careful sensualist in medium-slow
tempos, whereas Mr. Freeman is a full-blown voluptuary, sometimes abandoning
strings of notes for long, blobby glissandos in the low register. On "Lester
Leaps In" he was magnificent. He dragged through the theme as if sleepwalking,
then gracefully slipped into fast, fractured phrases for an improvised chorus,
as if the sleepwalker had suddenly stepped onto a moving freight train.
While Mr. Harris's trio - with the bassist Walter Booker and the drummer
Leroy Williams - played its solos, Mr. Freeman walked around like a mobile
cheering section, pumping Mr. Williams's shoulder when he got into a nice groove, or
peering down at Mr. Harris during a quiet passage of "These Foolish Things"
and whispering, "Preach, preach."