Faà di Bruno, Giovanni Matteo [Horatio, Orazio] 83

Freeman, Bud [Lawrence]

(b Chicago, 13 April 1906; d Chicago, 15 March 1991). American jazz tenor saxophonist and leader. He took up the C-melody saxophone to participate in activities of the Austin High School Gang and began playing professionally in the summer of 1924. In December 1927 he participated in the definitive Chicago-jazz sessions recorded by McKenzie and Condon’s Chicagoans, including China Boy (OKeh). He toured with Ben Pollack (1928) and worked freelance with Red Nichols and others in Chicago and New York. By 1930 he had formed an original, unmannered style, free of ‘novelty’ effects and with a distinctive jazz timbre. From the mid-1930s Freeman performed and recorded frequently with well-known popular and jazz orchestras, including those of Tommy Dorsey (1936–8) and Benny Goodman (1938). Thereafter he toured and recorded with small groups combining dixieland and swing styles, initially with his own Summa cum Laude Orchestra (1939–40) and then travelling the world, working freelance for several decades. He made the first of many trips to England in 1962, and toured Australia, New Zealand and Japan with Eddie Condon in 1964. After playing in the World’s Greatest Jazz Band (1968–74), he resumed his itinerant career until shortly before his death. Inspired by Coleman Hawkins, to whose conception of timbre he was deeply indebted, Freeman flourished in dixieland ensembles, his instrument serving to replace or supplement the trombone in coordination with the trumpet and clarinet in the front line. For much of his career his melodic conception was coarse, and indeed some of his early Chicago-jazz solos could be imagined as fitting into a rhythm and blues setting years later. In his last decades Freeman altered this approach, striving for a smooth tunefulness with less rhythmic bite, as is heard in an album with the guitarist Bucky Pizzarelli, Buck and Bud (c1975). He was the author of two booklets of amusing anecdotes, and an engaging autobiography with R. Wolf: Crazeology: the Autobiography of a Chicago Jazzman (Urbana, IL, 1989).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H. Panassié: ‘Bud Freeman one of Finest Hot Musicians’, Down Beat, iii/8 (1936), 2 only

G. Hoefer: ‘Freeman Big Influence on Saxists’, Down Beat, xix/7 [recte 6] (1952), 2, 6, 19 only

J. Bainbridge: ‘Our Far-flung Correspondents: the Diamond-Studded Saxophone’, New Yorker (2 April 1979)

M. Richards: ‘Bud Freeman’, JJI, xxxvii (1984), no.9, pp.8–10; no.10, p.14

C. Deffaa: ‘Bud Freeman: Hear that Music’, Voices of the Jazz Age: Portraits of Eight Vintage Jazzmen (Urbana, IL, 1990), 115–49

W.H. Kenney: Chicago Jazz: a Cultural History, 1904–1930 (New York, 1993)

Oral history material in US-NEij and Joseph Regenstein Library, University of Chicago

JAMES DAPOGNY/R

Freeman, David

(b Sydney, 1 May 1952). Australian director. After study at Sydney University (1971–4) he founded Opera Factory in Sydney (1973), Zürich (1976) and London (1981–98). Developing rigorous methods of preparation and rehearsal, Opera Factory emphasized the elements of manufacture and creativity in productions assembled under specific conditions. Freeman’s highly physical productions for Opera Factory required great virtuosity of acting. Those of the classics generally involved a search for the points at which the dynamics of the work could directly engage a contemporary audience. Many plumbed new depths of emotion while creating humour that bordered on the farcical. An impressive roster of innovatory stagings in London included Cavalli’s Calisto, a conflation of Gluck’s two Iphigénie operas and the Mozart-Da Ponte trilogy, of which Così fan tutte received a striking contemporary interpretation. In association with the London Sinfonietta (1984–91), a number of 20th-century works were given, notably Nigel Osborne’s Hell’s Angels, Birtwistle’s Yan Tan Tethera and Punch and Judy, Tippett’s The Knot Garden, Ligeti’s Aventures and Nouvelles aventures and Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad King.

Freeman’s productions for the ENO include Monteverdi’s Orfeo (1981) and Il ritorno d’Ulisse (1989), Glass’s Akhnaten (1985), Birtwistle’s The Mask of Orpheus (1986) and B.A. Zimmermann’s Die Soldaten (1996). A co-production of Prokofiev’s The Fiery Angel (1992) was taken from the Mariinsky to Covent Garden and San Francisco. His spectacular, large-scale productions in-the-round at the Royal Albert Hall of Madama Butterfly (1998) and Tosca (1999) – for the former the arena was flooded – were highly acclaimed.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H. Canning: ‘Freeman of the Factory’, Classical Music (1 Aug 1987), 11–13

A. Clements: ‘David Freeman’, Opera, xl (1989), 1297–302

BARRY MILLINGTON

Freeman, John

(b 1666; d London, 10 Dec 1736). English tenor, tenor-countertenor and composer. He was a leading theatre singer from 1692 to 1700, when he entered the Chapel Royal. He also sang at St Paul’s Cathedral and at Westminster Abbey, where there is a memorial tablet to him and his wife in the west cloister. From manuscripts and printed songs we know that he sang in Purcell’s music for The Fairy Queen, The Prophetess (Dioclesian), Don Quixote, The Indian Queen and Bonduca and was a soloist in his 1692 St Cecilia ode and in his 1695 birthday ode for the Duke of Gloucester, Who can from joy refrain? These parts demand a range of e to a', with an occasional b', and several have a trumpet obbligato. A Handel autograph names him as a soloist at George II’s coronation.

A few songs composed by him were published in song-books in the 1690s; the tune of his popular success ‘Pretty parrot, say’ was used in The Beggar’s Opera.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BDECM

Day-MurrieESB

O. Baldwin and T. Wilson: ‘Alfred Deller, John Freeman and Mr. Pate’, ML, l (1969), 103–10

O. Baldwin and T. Wilson: ‘Who can from Joy Refraine’, MT, cxxii (1981), 596–9

O. Baldwin and T. Wilson: ‘Purcell’s Stage Singers’, Performing the Music of Henry Purcell, ed. M. Burden (Oxford, 1996), 105–29

OLIVE BALDWIN, THELMA WILSON