'Play loud'
Lessons from saxophonist Fred Anderson
Lessons with saxophonist Fred Anderson took place in the basement of his Evanston home.
“Play loud,” he instructed. “Anyone can play soft. Play loud. Fill the horn.”
He wanted to complete the room, to blow through the walls. He wanted his voice to be heard from beyond his Evanston home and throughout the neighborhood and all the way to the South Side.
I took his words to heart. Blowing my long tones from a Northwestern University practice room, sorority girls across the way shouted back “SHUT UP!”
Another time I was practicing in my dad’s apartment in Highland Park. After several hours of my braying, barking and blowing, a woman called up and said, “I am a very old lady, sick at home and dying. Please let me go in peace.”
Through Anderson, I had the chance to meet and play some free jazz with musicians associated with him, the saxophonist Doug Ewart and the drummer, Hank Drake, who became well-known as Hamid Drake.
I moved back to Chicago after leaving NYU after six weeks and found a job working in the furniture department on the second floor of Chandler’s, an Evanston stationery store that lasted a century before closing in 1995. After a few months in the rarely visited furniture area, where I learned to smoke cigars with the old codger, Dave, who held court there, I received a promotion to the mezzanine level, where we did a steady business selling the newly invented “answering machine.” People would come up the stairs and ask for a demonstration of the PhoneMate and Record a Call. Without any additional viable conception, I absurdly considered a career as a professional free jazz musician, carrying the trusty Selmer Mark VI I had purchased a year before at Manny’s on West 48th Street in Manhattan.
The Saxophone Shop on Noyes Street in Evanston provided a launching pad for my musical evolution. Teacher Bob Black’s style was Classical; he was an acolyte of the Fred Hemke school — Hemke the dean of the Northwestern saxophone department, an author and icon.
After an hour of Ferling etudes, I hinted I was interested in jazz lessons — the “New Thing.” Black had a twinkle in his eye as he provided his recommendation.
“There’s Fred Anderson,” he said.
Then he warned, “He’s got a little different style.”
He made it sound off-beat, mysterious, even dangerous.
At that point I didn’t know about Anderson and was probably only vaguely aware of the Art Ensemble of Chicago and the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, groups that dominated and served as a beacon for the jazz avant-garde in the Chicago area and beyond.
Anderson was a prolific and cogent communicator, with a mesmerizing, powerful voice, always listening and tight with the rhythm section or other instrumentalists. His solos extended time into conversations, sometimes a discourse, diatribe or even a dance.
I saw him perform many times at clubs or coffeehouses in Evanston in the mid-1970s, rooms packed with people anticipating — and getting — a transcendent event.
Anderson’s teaching approach was quirky and wonderful, free but focused and often traditional. He directed me to jazz standards, despite my urge to go straight to the abstract. We played “Tenderly” — a song popularized by Rosemary Clooney in 1952 — together. “Star Eyes” was another tune he favored. He advised me to listen to Chu Berry, the third-most famous of the 1930s saxophonists, after Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young. The liner notes to his 2007 release Birdhouse even remark Berry’s influence in Anderson’s sound.
I was disappointed not to be more “out there” from the git-go but Anderson’s adherence to the jazz tradition helped me develop a more realistic approach to what free-blowing was all about.
Anderson’s theory book “Exercises for the Creative Musician,” written with Paul Steinbeck, a Slonimsky-esque chronicle of exercises, natural-minor ascents with melodic minor descents, minor charts with scalar inflection and a variety of II-V chord progressions.
The book also includes chromatic ideas, transcriptions and tunes.
Anderson’s solos are not just 16, 32 or 64 bar statements but rather sentences, paragraphs, short stories and personal essays. His reservoir of ideas was fueled by his concentration and connection to the audience.
Anderson’s torrent of sound that it’s hard to distinguish his lines, but then that would be like decoding a pixel in a photograph. A listen at half-speed to his solos will amaze you with some of those “traditional” lines that he has absorbed in his consciousness. In his performance he provided a synthesis of musical and vocal communication.
Saxophonists trained in the Chicago area tend to present a bulky, brawny style. Anderson was of a lineage following Sonny Stitt and Gene Ammons, with contemporaries Bunky Green, Joe Daley, Ken Vandermark, Freeman and more.
“Anderson dotes on the lower register, hefting an Ur-roots tone in his weighty accumulation of notes for the overall artistic scheme,” Peter Kostakis writes. “A characteristic Anderson solo unhurriedly yet authoritatively builds from deceptively simple materials so connected as to suggest an improviser searching for the One Definitive Solo.”
For an improvising musician, the book raises the question as to the value of patterns — Anthony Braxton who rejected pattern practice as the road to purgatory.
Anderson explained to Steinbeck that you just don't “learn the exercises and play them. That’s like playing scales, that’s all you’re going to do.”
The concept is to master the patterns until they are integral to your playing, they pop out as easily as a D minor 7. “You’re not going to just pick it up, playing it one time,” Anderson told his collaborator. “You have to play them over and over, in different ways, with different rhythms, and study the different connections — one chord going into another chord, one key going into another key. You’ll find out you can do almost anything, once you hear those sounds.”
I’ve personally worked from Oliver Nelson’s “Patterns for Saxophone,” for a lifetime and I still use it. Joseph Viola’s “Technique of the Saxophone,” with Vol. 1 scale studies and Vol. 2 chord studies, are indispensable.
I never got to the point in lessons with Anderson that he unpacked the exercises, but I’ve turned to the book during recent practices.
The idea of any pattern-style book is to learn the first one or two so you see the sequence, then close the book and be able to finish at all registers of the horn. As the patterns get progressively more complex, the challenge becomes more daunting. When the player internalizes them enough they are second nature and can be pulled out without conscious thought.
I see the incorporation of the patterns as a mantra, a “nam myoho renge kyo” chant that gathers strength from its own dervishness.
Using simple, short and intriguing melody lines, Anderson sets the framework to explode in almost any direction, with the goal of collaborative creation, intense listening and rhythmic attention. His jazz, swing and bluesy roots are elevated by his harmonic toolbox, virile sound, and urgency to communicate.
Before the Internet, Anderson’s music was hard to find, rare and precious. He recorded on European labels like Okka, Thrill Jockey and Atavistic. He performed mostly in the Chicago area, declining to join many of the Chicago musicians who ventured to the New York scene.
Anderson’s work is well-represented in recordings and the internet — much more than ever in his life, aided by the proliferation of material online, including live concerts and a lot of recordings. He was so prolific that even that even the many options online are only a fragment of his output.
With the advent of the Velvet Lounge in 1982, Anderson found his musical home. His reputation spread among aficionados.
Chicago drummer Mike Reed wrote in “The City Was Yellow,” a chronicle of the modern Chicago jazz scene. “The ubiquitous presence of (Von) Freeman and Anderson during this time cannot be overstated; both became invigorated by a steady output of new recordings and performances. Both began to receive and enjoy a new level of international interest and acclaim that had previously eluded them.”
I missed those last decades of Anderson’s live music and the Chicago scene, which provided a marked counterpoint to the “Whiplash”-like turbo-jazz world of Boston, New York and L.A. The clipping from Downbeat, a handful of CDs and LPs and the electronic world of YouTube are what remain.
Yes, Anderson was loud. His music reverberated from his basement through his suburban neighborhood and like the butterfly, from Chicago to around the world.
Here is one of my favorite performances, “The Milwaukee Tapes, Vol. 1,” featuring the Fred Anderson Quartet, recorded in 1980.
Now that I’m playing again I’m going to go free, at least as much as I have the courage, to Play Loud.