It’s a black-and-white photograph, slightly weathered from years of being handled, carried from place to place, packed away, and rediscovered: A small child, maybe five years old, sits on the stoop of a house in Monroe, Louisiana, in the mid-1930s, the dirt yard spilling out in front of him. He’s wearing a striped summer shirt and shorts and a big, beaming, gentle smile. He looks like a sweet kid.
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But Fred had a lot more left to do. He continued running the Velvet, ramping it up rather than down, turning it from the most open-minded jam session in the city to an international venue presenting top-shelf players like soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy, who, unasked, inscribed a promotional poster on the wall of the club: “This place is a temple!” Early one morning Fred called, animatedly describing how the small bar would soon be transformed into a 300-seat theater complete with a restaurant. That ambition never came to pass, but all the same, by the time the Velvet moved to expanded digs at 67 E. Cermak in 2006, it had a small army of supporters—devotees who understood the power of Fred’s music and helped him get the message out.
My fondest memories of Fred include his big, projecting sound—a tone he honed practicing outdoors as a young player, bouncing notes off buildings—as well as his epic solos, which could stretch as endlessly as the midwestern horizon. Perhaps that’s how he earned the nickname the “Lone Prophet of the Prairie.” In the 1970s, left behind by most of his AACM cohorts, he was nearly alone here, holding down the free-music fort, but as his profile rose, so did that of Chicago’s creative-music scene, in no small part due to his attention and care. It certainly wouldn’t have the depth of character that it does now without Fred.
In the studio, I often saw Fred during playbacks slumped in what I first assumed was slumber. But it wasn’t—it was a very unusual kind of listening, the intensity of which was almost trancelike. A cut would end, the engineer would stop the machine, and after a long pause, Anderson would comment, emerging from someplace very remote. He attended other musicians’ concerts that way too, listening carefully, thoughtfully, always listening. He lived for the music, for the community that was formed around the making of that music.
