George Freeman – Birth Sign – DELMARK RECORDS

Creativity, Originality, Style, and goin “outside!”

GEORGE FREEMAN, Birth Sign DELMARK (DD 424)

[RECORDED 1969, FEATURING VON FREEMAN]

This is unsung Chicago guitar hero George Freeman’s first recording as a leader, a severely underrated funky soul jazz outing from ’69! George plays in a unique guitar style I absolutely love; always deep in the blues/jazz groove, yet with wild, unpredictable phrasing and licks, and a distinctive gritty tone. George (b. ’27) is the younger brother of Chicago jazz legend, Von Freeman (b.’22) whose tenor sax is featured on most of the tracks from this Koester produced, Michael Cuscuna (Mosaic Records) supervised, and Malcolm Chisholm (Chess engineer) recorded session. Session organist supreme, Sonny Burke and drummer Billy Mitchell round out this cookin’ quartet. This was also Burke’s first recorded session work, going on to work with countless legends, including Curtis Mayfield, Watts 103rd St Rhythm Band, Bobby Womack, Marvin Gaye, Smokey, Aretha, Dizzy, and Johnny Taylor!

George is absolutely on fire in the guitar/ organ/drums trio format, with particularly inspired playing on his outstanding originals, “Mama, Papa, Brother” and the title track, “Birth Sign.” They slow it down and vary the tempo with 2 introspective ballads, “My Scenery,” and Weill’s “My Ship” which features both Freeman brothers in action, with beautiful blowing from Von. One cut, “Must Be, Must Be” has a different lineup, featuring Robert Pierce on organ instead of Burke, along with the diverse AACM heavies, Kalaparusha McIntyre on tenor sax and Lester Lashley on trombone.

Yeah, George has been on the Chicago scene since the ‘40’s, playing with everyone from Bird, Pres, and Ammons to Groove Holmes and McGriff, and even the Art Ensemble of Chicago! And you know what, he’s still out there killin’ it with his one-of-a-kind style.

I’m excited to announce that we can all look forward to a new Delmark studio release in early ’09 from the legendary ageless saxophonist Red Holloway featuring George Freeman, along with B3 master Chris Foreman and drummer Greg Rockingham from the Deep Blue Organ Trio!

You can also catch George Freeman live every Thursday at Mr. Sid’s Tropical Den on Chicago’s South side, 7209 S. Exchange.

Great Music in Review BY KEVIN JOHNSON

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Chicago Jazz Magazine

Jazz Legend George Freeman Dies at 97 | Remembering a Trailblazing Guitarist

Yes!!! 96-year young George Freeman, Guitarist featured on the Today show. His Delmark album from ’72 (rec in ’69) BIRTH SIGN is probably my fave Delmark jazz album of its vast catalog of 70 yrs. And if you’ve never heard his mind-boggling distinctive guitar workouts, check out his live stuff w Charlie Parker from 1950!!! So ahead of his time and a true inspiration. Go George Go!!!

George Freeman, a trailblazing jazz guitarist who enjoyed a late-career renaissance, dies at 97

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George Freeman performs at the Green Mill, April 12, 2019, in Chicago. (John J. Kim/Chicago Tribune)

By Hannah Edgar | Chicago Tribune

You could recognize George Freeman’s playing anywhere.

When tenor saxophonist Gene Ammons and his sextet appeared as guests on WTTW in 1970, most members of the band generally hewed to the backing progressions. Then there was Freeman, daringly traipsing around their harmonic fringes in hard-rocking, blazing solos.

That was typical for the ever-adventurous Freeman, who died in Chicago on April 1. He was 97 years old. His death was confirmed by his nephew, Mark Freeman.

While still in his teens, Freeman was among the first musicians in Chicago, and one of the first jazz guitarists anywhere, to champion the bleeding-edge bebop of his idol, Charlie Parker. He eventually got to play with Parker, in now-lauded performances at the Pershing Ballroom in the early 1950s.

The list of jazz greats with whom Freeman collaborated is long. Besides Parker and Ammons, for whom he wrote the hit “The Black Cat,” he side-manned for Count Basie, Dexter Gordon, Lester Young, Sonny Stitt, Jimmy McGriff, Coleman Hawkins and Harrison Bankhead.

Freeman’s virtuosic presence on the bandstand long attracted critical and connoisseurial plaudits. “Among the many talented musicians I first got to see and hear during my recently concluded three-and-a-half year stay in Chicago, one of the most memorable was guitarist George Freeman,” DownBeat editor Dan Morgenstern gushed in a 1971 profile for the magazine, the same year Freeman released his first album as a bandleader. “Freeman’s way of going outside is exciting but also musical, and doesn’t sound at all like what other contemporary guitarists attempt in this vein.”

Despite his résumé and insider acclaim, Freeman’s career never took off the way he and his supporters expected. He was often overshadowed by his older brother Von Freeman, a monumental tenor player with whom he shared the Freeman family home in Greater Grand Crossing for decades. The younger Freeman sometimes suspected his perch at jazz’s vanguard came at his own professional peril.

“The (radio) DJs didn’t quite understand me, because I was going a different direction,” Freeman told the Tribune in 2023. “My playing has always been so advanced. … It wasn’t my time, because I came home. I was always coming home.”

“Home” for Freeman was Chicago, save some mid-career stints in New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area. Born on the South Side on April 10, 1927, Freeman was the youngest of three boys, all musical: Von and oldest brother Eldridge “Bruz” Freeman, a drummer, both joined Freeman for the first of Parker’s Pershing Ballroom performances. Music was nurtured at home by their father, George Freeman, Sr., a police officer whose beat included clubs on the 35th Street strip, and their mother, Earle, herself a guitarist. The brothers would stay up late listening to jazz radio with their father, even if it meant showing up to school the next day bleary-eyed.

Freeman was inspired to pick up guitar after he heard blues star T-Bone Walker play the long-defunct Rhumboogie Café in Hyde Park as a teen; too young to enter the club legally, he snuck in through a stage door to hear him. “He was singing, had that guitar up behind his neck — he was dynamic,” Freeman later recounted to JazzTimes.

Freeman was already sitting in for Eugene Wright’s Dukes of Swing band when he passed through Walter Dyett’s prestigious band program at DuSable High School. Freeman wasn’t immune to the exacting pedagogue’s fits of anger — he was booted from class on a couple occasions — but Dyett later invited him to join his swing orchestra at Rhumboogie Café, the same place Freeman fell in love with the guitar.

In 1947, tenor saxophonist Johnny Griffin, a DuSable classmate, recruited Freeman to join the Joe Morris Orchestra. It was his first touring break, and his first move to New York. Freeman racked up early recording credits but unjustly missed out on a compositional credit for the band’s first hit, “Lowe Groovin’.” He quit in protest, landing back in Chicago just in time to link up with Parker for the Pershing residency.

A few years later, Freeman was cheated out of another potentially career-making opportunity. He crossed paths with one of Sarah Vaughan’s bandmates, who narrowly kept him from joining the epochal singer on the road. The musician, who held a grudge against Freeman, told him the wrong date for the start of the tour and he missed the whole thing.

In the 1960s, Freeman linked up with soul and R&B singer Jackie Wilson and saxophonist Sil Austin, a partnership that opened the door to other genre-blending collaborations with Wild Bill Davis and Richard “Groove” Holmes. After an unhappy few years in California, Freeman returned to Chicago, where he played in Gene Ammons’ band from 1969 until Ammons’ death in 1974.

Freeman recorded his first albums under his own name after returning to Chicago, releasing “Introducing George Freeman Live, with Charlie Earland Sitting In,” (1971), “Birth Sign,” (1972), “New Improved Funk” and “Man and Woman” (both 1974) in quick succession. Another run of albums followed nearly 30 years later, mostly on singer and collaborator Joanie Pallatto’s Southport label: “Rebellion” (1995), “George Burns!” (1999), and “At Long Last, George” (2001, featuring singers Kurt Elling and René Marie).

Freeman became a coveted guitarist-on-call for touring acts and worked the Chicago circuit for the rest of his life, often alongside Von. However, worsening vision problems from a childhood accident made it difficult for Freeman to travel to gigs without assistance.

When Von Freeman died in 2012, Chicago’s jazz community swooped in to ensure that George, then 85, was looked after. Drummer Mike Reed set Freeman up with fellow guitarist Mike Allemana, a former bandmate of Von’s, for a month-long residency at his then-new venue Constellation. Freeman’s bookings, which had slowed to a trickle before Von’s death, soon spiked. He became such a fixture that the Tribune named him its 2014 Chicagoan of the Year in Jazz.

In 2015, Freeman linked up with Von’s son, Chico — himself a volcanic tenorist — to release “All in the Family” in 2015. At that point, nephew and uncle hadn’t collaborated since they shared an out-there local bill in the 1970s, one Chico felt nervous even offering the older musician.

His doubts were dispelled as soon as George began to play.

“He blew my mind. He came and he played just amazingly. He was just a total musician. That changed my mind about everything,” Chico told JazzTimes years afterward.

Freeman released an album roughly once every two years after “All in the Family.” His most recent, “The Good Life” (2023), featured bassist Christian McBride and organist/trumpeter Joey DeFrancesco, heavyweights in the jazz world.

This time, Freeman wasn’t a sideman. They were the ones supporting him — a fact that tickled him endlessly.

“I wanted to play with (DeFrancesco) in the first place, and McBride had heard about me. They all knew me! That’s what made it so great,” he said.

Besides a show-stopping appearance at the 2023 Chicago Jazz Festival, Freeman mostly kept his recent gigs contained to an annual birthday party he hosted at the Green Mill, the city’s historic jazz venue. The next one, celebrating his 98th, was scheduled for April 11 and 12, with Allemana, organist Pete Benson and drummer Charles Heath; it’s been fashioned into a memorial concert in his absence.

In his last conversation with the Tribune, Freeman echoed the sentiments he shared with DownBeat magazine in 1971, his first major print profile.

“With all this talk about musicians being brothers, there is too much competitiveness among them and they aren’t cooperating enough. The way I see it, everybody can’t be a leader, so you’ve got to get behind somebody,” Freeman told DownBeat.

“Why not help another musician to do his thing? You’ll get your turn when the time comes.”

Freeman is survived by nephews Chico and Mark Freeman and by his great-nieces and -nephews. He was preceded in death by brothers Eldridge “Bruz” Freeman and Von Freeman. A service will be announced at a later date.

Hannah Edgar is a freelance writer.

Originally Published: April 1, 2025 at 3:55 PM CDT

George Freeman, a trailblazing Chicago jazz guitarist, dies at 97

Hoss

George Freeman with Gene Ammons on TV (1971) – Jungle Strut

Fantastic, in depth article in DownBeat Magazine from Howard Mandel on the legendary inspirational nonagenarian jazz guitarist George Freeman, Guitarist !!! He’s still gigging, recording at 96 years young!!!!

Be sure to check out his KILLER soul jazz funk recording debut as a leader BIRTH SIGN, released on Delmark in early 70s.

George Freeman: Guitar Royalty at 96

News, From the Magazine, George FreemanBy Howard Mandel   I  Oct. 10, 2023

Visit Chicago guitarist George Freeman, whose new album The Good Life (High Note) featuring Joey DeFrancesco and Christian McBride, among others, dropped on his 96th birthday — April 10, 2023 — and be charmed.

Comfortably ensconced on a couch in the grand piano-dominated living room of his longtime South Side home, dapper in an open-collared, white shirt and tan suit, Freeman is a model of contentment. He gives a hearty welcome, directs attention to the photos of his family’s historic musical legacy crowding his walls, and leans into telling stories from back in the day as well as the present moment, in which he takes great pleasure.

“My new album? I love it,” Freeman exults, as well he should. The Good Life comprises seven tracks from two trio sessions recorded in 2022, Freeman performing mostly his original tunes either with bassist McBride and drummer Carl Allen, or with organist DeFrancesco — in what proved to be his last studio date — and drummer Lewis Nash. “I listen to it every day!”

Freeman’s self-satisfaction is well-earned, as he’s honed his unique style of jazz guitar for 70 years, essentially since the instrument first plugged in. Its earliest adopters showed Freeman what his future could be.

“Charlie Christian with the Benny Goodman sextet on record, that was it!” he recalls, citing their classic cuts like “Flying Home” and “Seven Come Eleven.” “And when I was a schoolboy, my friends and I used to gather on the sidewalk outside the Rhumboogie club to listen, since we were too young to go in. One night someone playing guitar knocked me out! ‘Who is that?’ I found out — T-Bone Walker!”

Swing and blues, the soundtrack of the ’30s and ’40s as embodied by Christian, Goodman, Walker, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, Tommy Dorsey and others, became keystones of Freeman’s personal vocabulary, but he didn’t stop there. “I always listened to the horn players,” he says, “And Charlie Parker changed everything. Before him it was all swing, music for dancing. But when Bird played, the dancing stopped. The young people wanted to hear what Charlie Parker was playing. They understood what he was saying.”

Freeman understood, too. He’d been immersed in music since birth. His father, one of Chicago’s first Black police, befriended Louis Armstrong, who lived with the Freemans for a time. His mother was an amateur singer; his older brothers (both now deceased) were Eldridge “Bruz” Freeman, a drummer, who eventually pursued jazz in California, and Earle Lavon “Von” Freeman, tenor saxophonist, community mainstay and NEA Jazz Master.

One night in 1950 at Chicago’s Pershing Hotel Lounge, George demonstrated directly to Parker how he’d absorbed bebop’s fleet lyricism, irregular phraseology and improvisational daring. The alto saxist led George, Bruz and Von (long mis-identified), bassist Leroy Jackson and pianist Chris Anderson through jams on “There’s A Small Hotel,” “These Foolish Things” and “Fine And Dandy” issued in 1970 as An Evening At Home With The Bird (Savoy Records).

Parker seldom played with guitarists — few were up to bop’s challenge. “Freddie Green and the other guitarists in big bands were strictly rhythm men,” Freeman says. “There was Tiny Grimes, Oscar Moore, Les Paul, Barney Kessel, Mary Osborne. But the best was Tal Farlow, who played with the red-headed vibist, Red Norvo. He was a monster. And Wes Montgomery. He was a natural.”

When George Freeman joined that rarified jazz guitar cadre, he’d already made a mark in the other new genre of the 1940s: rhythm ’n’ blues.

Let’s back up: The Freemans attended Chicago’s DuSable High School, known for its rigorous jazz program run by self-styled Captain Walter Dyett — who wouldn’t accept George in it. Undeterred, the guitarist teamed up with one of Dyett’s most illustrious students, tenor saxophonist Johnny Griffin, in a band led by trumpeter Joe Morris that was leaning on riff-tunes, laying into the beat and going for the gusto. On “Boogie Woogie Joe,” Morris’s hit of 1947, George Freeman played explosive breaks and a hot chorus that has been called the first electric guitar solo in rock ’n’ roll.

Freeman wrote another song for Morris, “The Hulk” (heard on The Good Life, retitled “Lowe Groovin’”), but was denied composer credit. Unhappy about the slight, George traveled to New York with Morris and Griffin, found Harlem disappointing, and the Apple unpleasant. He says he realized that “in New York you have to really want what they got there. You have to be ambitious, more than I am. I wasn’t raised like that.”

Back in Chicago, Freeman established a low-key local career, often with his brothers, working out of the Pershing. But by the end of the ’50s, he’d become restless and took to the road with saxophonist Sil Austin, soul-man Jackie Wilson, organists Wild Bill Davis and Richard “Groove” Holmes and Jimmy McGriff. He anchored tenorist Gene Ammons’ band for five years, and released his debut as a leader, Birth Sign, helmed by then-fledgling record producer Michael Cuscuna (whose liner notes grace The Good Life).

An underacknowledged soul-jazz classic, Birth Sign introduced five of George’s tunes (including “Mama, Papa, Brother,” “Cough It Up” and “My Scenery,” which is still in his book). Von played tenor, two organists alternated duties, little-known Billy Mitchell drummed perfectly, AACM members Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre on tenor and Lester Lashley on trombone sat in on a Robin Kenyatta blues, and the program was rounded off by a tender reading of Kurt Weill’s “My Ship.” Cuscuna spent three years shopping the tape; finally Chicago’s Delmark Records released it.

Since then, Freeman’s recordings have been intermittent yet embraced by a coterie of connoisseurs. They’ve ranged from Man & Woman and New Improved Funk from Groove Merchant (both issued in 1974), to a run from Chicago’s Southport Records that started with Rebellion in 1995 and has continued with George Burns! (1999), All In The Family with Chico Freeman (George’s nephew, Von’s son, 2015), George The Bomb (with blues harmonica avatar Billy Branch, 2019) and Everybody Say Yeah! (2022) Each album is imbued with George’s slyly understated personal touch, quirky open-ended lines, peerless sense of dynamics and timing, and hints of dry humor — as is The Good Life.

A celebratory project, The Good Life was initiated by George’s circle of devoted fans, who thought he rated a birthday treat. Jazz Museum of Harlem founder Loren Schoenberg was producer, supervising the sessions; bassist McBride brought in Allen and invited DeFrancesco, who brought Nash; Sirius XM jazz director Mark Ruffin connected with High Note (whose sister label Savant issued Freeman’s At Long Last George in 2001).

The players’ buy-in gratifies George. “I love these musicians,” he asserts. “Those guys played like it was their own date, like they were the leaders.”

Well, not quite. The four accompanists do indeed give their all to the tracks, Joey D. being particularly creative and expressive. (An aside: “George wanted to record with an organist, and wanted the best,” says his friend Jeff Shaw. “Joey usually visited Chicago in October, but changed his Chicago booking to early August. He died three weeks later”). However, everyone remains deferential to George throughout, alert to the hushed moods and simmering themes he sets, responsive to his nuances and inflections. They make music as a true group effort, which makes their real leader happy.

At 96 he’s in decent health and lives independently, getting help when needed from family and fans. He’s been honored with a proclamation by former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, appeared on the Chicago Jazz Festival main stage and the Museum of Contemporary Art’s prestigious Tuesday on the Terrace concerts, and been a font of information on Chicago’s South Side jazz for research conducted in pursuit of an advanced University of Chicago degree by guitarist Mike Allemana, who often backs up George on gigs. He composes at his piano, performs on either the red Gibson ES 335 that Groove Holmes bought for him in the late ’60s or an Ibanez Artcore, using a metal cabinet knob for a pick. “A pick is the most important thing about your sound,” he advises.

George Freeman has exemplified the good life. He’s played it his own way and it’s gotten better over time. “Yes,” says the guitarist, massaging his graceful hands one with the other, a daily habit he says keeps his long fingers spry. “I see everything opening up now!” DB