Earl Freeman
"The music opens up their minds, opens up their hearts - it's subversive, but it's pure!" -Earl Freeman, from "Freedom Fighter" by Valerie Wilmer, Melody Maker, May 13, 1972

[page last updated April 17, 2024]

Earl Freeman outside Studio We, 193 Eldridge Street, NYC, est. mid-late 1970s, photographer unknown
from the Aboriginal Music Society Father of Origin box set (Eremite)

Even within the underground free jazz world, where there is no shortage of distinct individuals, Earl Freeman (March 11, 1931 - July 25, 1994) stands out. An artist of wide-ranging interests, his means of expression included music, poetry, the visual arts (especially drawing), & fashion. While he presented himself in bold, eye-catching military garb (often with an aviator helmet & goggles, sometimes accentuated by a whip, & another time a parachute), his art was often more cryptic & elusive, feeling akin to a peek into a largely private world/view.

Earl Freeman, age one, photo courtesy of Mylo Freeman

Born in Oakland, California, Freeman's earliest years were spent on a farm with his grandparents. He told his daughter Mylo that he never encountered racism until he left the farm to go to school. Freeman showed an early affinity for art & music, particularly jazz, & started to play bass in junior high school. When he was a teenager, he was drafted into the US Army. He served in the Korean War, where he lost a lung as a result of being stabbed with a bayonet. Upon his return to the States he is said to have spent some time in Chicago, though it is unclear quite when (details on this period are especially scant, though there is some speculation below). He moved to Vancouver in the late 1950s, then to the Netherlands & other locations throughout Europe. (see Mylo Freeman's contribution below for more)

Mylo Freeman: "I think Earl went to Europe partly because of my mam and me. Also because there was more work and less racism. When their relationship ended on Ibiza, he had a mental breakdown. He spent a little while in an asylum until he recovered. I think this must have been around 1964/1965.”



In 1968 he went to Paris & forged associations within the community of improvisors, artists, & activists who gathered there. His first commercial recording was on Kenneth Terroade's Love Rejoice, made in June 1969 for BYG/Actuel. Over the next few months he contributed to several more heavy records, led by musicians such as Archie Shepp, Sunny Murray, Clifford Thornton, Claude Delcloo / Arthur Jones, Selwyn Lissack, & Gong. At the turn of the decade, he was heard with Brigitte Fointaine (see this video c.1970), Jacques Thollot & Joachim Kuhn (see this 1972 footage), Noah Howard (hear Patterns), Mike Osborne (hear Shapes), Frank Wright, & Alan Silva's Celestrial Communications Orchestra.

Earl Freeman by Valerie Wilmer, Melody Maker, May 13, 1972

By the early 1970s he was in New York City, playing primarily electric bass (rumors persist that someone in Europe destroyed his upright). There he collaborated with & influenced some of the next generation of improvising musicians who were part of the emerging loft jazz scene, notably with the Music Ensemble, founded by Roger Baird, Billy Bang, Malik Baraka, Daniel Carter, & William Parker, later joined by both Freeman & trumpeter Dewey Johnson. In a 2014 interview, Parker gave these insights about Freeman's approach:

"He was always there, musically, when you needed him. He wasn’t the kind of bass player that pushed the music forward. He was almost like a poet on the bass, like a painter, someone that would make a snapshot of the fire to cool it down in a way & bring out the elements of beauty in the fire. So if you look at a fire & it has colors, green & red & blue, he would take those colors & make a lake out of those colors in his music. But the colors started from the fire. And that was his role in the music that we played. He’d always make a lake out of fire & then it would begin a new story. ... He was a catalyst for almost calming the fire so that it would last longer & change direction."

Roger Baird recalled, "It was always such a pleasure to play with Earl because he was so tuned in to the cosmos. He always had that thread going & there was never any hesitation to his approach. As a drummer, playing with Earl, it was just like riding on a wave of sonic bliss......virtually effortless & so inspirational." (email, December 17, 2016)

Freeman seems to have performed regularly within this community, while also being somewhat outside of it. Noah Howard continued to be a noteworthy collaborator during this period (hear his Live at the Village Vanguard LP & these recordings from 1973; there is also this brief, tantalizing silent footage of them with Arthur Doyle, Art Lewis, & probably Robert Bruno, a performance also shown in the photo below). One of Freeman's colleagues during this period recalled a private recording of Earl with Phill Musra & Michael Cosmic, which would certainly be, at the very least, of heavy historical interest to enthusiasts of this music.

Earl Freeman, Noah Howard, Arthur Doyle, probably Robert Bruno, Studio Rivbea, July 5, 1972, photo courtesy of Roger Baird

Freeman's vision seems to have been given especially full expression in a "Living Performance" he composed & directed, the Universal Jazz Symphonette's Sound Craft '75: Fantasy for Orchestra album: an ambitious concert that featured a large ensemble (again, comprised largely of young musicians), dance, readings, & photography. The only release in his discography where he is the clear leader, the music is a sprawling & tumultuous ocean of sound recorded in Washington Square Methodist Church in NYC. One participant recalled that some people were listening from the street outside due to the loud volume of the performance; trying to capture immersive environment must have been a challenge. It was issued on flugelhornist John Mingione's Anima label, with a drawing by Freeman on the cover. Below is the first page of an illuminating description of the record, seemingly promotional material written by Freeman:

After this period of relatively consistent documentation, Freeman appeared on just two more recordings during his lifetime. In the early '80s he was back in the Bay Area of his youth & played on some of Sonny Simmons' Global Jungle. Not long afterward he returned to New York City where was a member of The Freestyle Band, a collectively improvising trio with Henry P. Warner on clarinet & Philip Spigner, aka Adeyeme, on hand drums, & Freeman on rubbery, coagulating electric bass that transported their music into a cosmic mystery zone. According to Spigner, "Playing with Earl & Henry was like flying in formation...we took turns flying out front...we would rotate positions...we were dreaming in harmony." (email, March 4, 2016) Their self-titled LP was the only release on Spigner's Adeyeme Productions Unlimited label, with another drawing in Freeman's trademark style adorning the cover & his musical contributions clearly in the forefront (at last!).



From Ed Hazell's notes to the expanded CD reissue released by NoBusiness in 2012: "The music sounds unprecedented from its opening moments. Warner’s roots in bop & his affinity for the blues are evident, but he’s expanded that fundamental vocabulary with the vocal inflections & extended techniques of free jazz. Spigner’s rhythmic patterns are clearly inspired by traditional Afro-Cuban and African musics—reclaiming African roots in an American context was an important aspect of the music for many black musicians at the time—but Spigner’s playing is not at all traditional, asserting an Afro Modernism that still sounds fresh & exciting today. And then there’s Freeman’s otherworldly electric bass. Freeman, through careful manipulation of the attack & decay & timbre of individual notes, turns his bass lines into strings of bubbles with colors dancing over their surfaces. His lines balloon & pop, sidling along with the music at oblique angles with an oddball, imperturbable logic all their own. No one before or since has played the instrument quite like him. With no cymbals or piano to intervene between the bass & drums & the clarinet, the trio is all sonic extremes. On each track, unusual sounds & textures hit the ear from above & below. The short, sharp slap of palm against congas penetrates the melismatic blanket of clarinet. The envelope of rounded electric-bass notes enfolds the freshet of hand drums & the vocal cries of the clarinet. The hand drums speak like an ancestral voice in dialogue with the modern, electric burble of the Fender bass."

Unfortunately The Freestyle Band broke up shortly after this album was released. No subsequent recordings of Freeman's music were issued while he was alive.

New Music Distribution Service catalog, 1986



During the 1980s & '90s, Freeman usually lived in either New York City & San Francisco, where he continued collaborate with kindred spirits, including legendary poet Bob Kaufman & younger multi-instrumentalist Kirk Heydt. During this period he seems to have occasionally led a somewhat transient life, often staying with friends for a while before moving on, sometimes leaving behind drawings or poems.

Music, writing, & visual art were constants throughout Freeman's life, but dissemination of his creations seems to have been infrequent. His poems & drawings were occasionally published in self-produced & likely short-run editions or in journals, but the primary distribution of his creations seems to have been by gifting them to friends. With regard to his poetry, his friend Margaret Lee observed, "I think his use of spacing & punctuation when typing up his poems helps in the understanding, creating pauses, adding emphasis. Some serious subjects, but you, & anyone who knew Earl, would appreciate his humor. His imagery encompassed: the gothic, science fiction, racism, lust, militarism, politics, nature, innocence. He made up words to great effect, i.e. 'embro-licules'! It & other 'nonsense' words also showed up in his letters."

In a letter estimated to be from the mid or late '70s, Freeman wrote (in his creatively punctuated & occasionally inscrutable hand), "I've created 45 - of - the most miraculous pen drawings ever conceived. It's unbelievable (or perhaps 'conceivable') I'm going to see these Big Big Art People tomorrow. Whether or not some body will awaken(?) or not remains to be seen. However, things are looking upward - - at last." Whether anything came of this meeting, or if the drawings survive, is unknown.

His drawings often have, again, a somewhat inward, hermetic focus, seemingly akin to private meditations. Occasionally the suggestion of helicopters can be detected in his more abstract works, perhaps a reflection upon his war service. Even if that interpretation is off-base, given Freeman's often otherworldly output & fondness for aviation gear of the past, it may be fitting that he now rests at the Riverside National Cemetery in California, which is adjacent to the March Field Air Museum, whose mission is "dedicated to promoting an understanding of humanity's reach for the skies."

Riverside National Cemetery, Riverside CA, section 41-site 1807. Photo by Braden Hammer, 2014

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Earl Freeman has been of particular interest to me over the years, the initial inspiration coming from William Parker & Daniel Carter, whose memories of Earl were highly evocative & intriguing. Then eventually hearing the Freestyle Band LP really knocked me for a loop. That led me to be in touch with the late, very kind Henry Warner, who sold me his remaining copies of that record so I could offer them here (sorry, sold out). After the accompanying write-up for that album was done, this research was dormant for a long time until I was contacted by Earl's longtime friend Margaret Lee, who generously shared what she knew about his life (see below). Her essay, which answered so many questions about Earl, inspired me to resume this work. For the past several years, I have periodically interviewed Freeman's colleagues & collected any mentions of him, with the goal of posting something online "eventually." Though many mysteries remain, it is hoped this page, launched February 2020, will be a regularly-updated living document of these remembrances & artifacts that will shed light on (& elicit more information about!) this fascinating artist who seemed to prefer the shadows. -Adam Lore

An attempt at a chronological Earl Freeman discography, in order of recording date:

Feb./Mar. 1957: Brooks and Brown: Sleeping in an Ocean of Tears / They Call Her Rosalie (Duke) (Freeman involvement unconfirmed; see below)

Jun. 10, 1969: Kenneth Terroade: Love Rejoice (BYG/Actuel)

Aug. 12, 1969: Archie Shepp: Yasmina, A Black Woman (BYG/Actuel)

Aug. 15, 1969: Sunny Murray: Hommage to Africa (BYG/Actuel)

Aug. 18, 1969: Clifford Thornton: Ketchaoua (BYG/Actuel)

Aug. 22, 1969: Claude Delcloo / Arthur Jones: Africanasia (BYG/Actuel)

Sept. 1969: Friendship Next of Kin Featuring Selwyn Lissack: Facets of the Univers (Goody)

Sept./Oct. 1969: Gong: Magick Brother (BYG/Actuel)

Nov. 9, 1969: Archie Shepp: Black Gipsy (America)

Nov. 9, 1969: Archie Shepp: Pitchin’ Can (America)

Nov./Dec. 1969: Archie Shepp & Philly Joe Jones: s/t (America)

Oct. 1971: Noah Howard: Patterns (Altsax)

Feb. 1972: Mike Osborne: Shapes (FMR)

Aug. 22, 1972: Noah Howard: Live at the Village Vanguard (Freedom)

Feb. 8, 1975: The Universal Jazz Symphonette: Sound Craft '75 Fantasy for Orchestra (Anima)

1982: Sonny Simmons: Global Jungle (Deal With It)

1984: The Freestyle Band: s/t (Adeyeme Productions Unlimited)

1990: Sonny Simmons: Live 1990 DVD (no label/private release)

(note: contrary to what is currently shown on discogs, a different Earl Freeman played on those Bill Summers records)

*** Several of Freeman's poems & drawings were collected in a limited edition folio co-published by Wry Press & 50 Miles of Elbow Room (with special thanks to Mylo Freeman, Kirk Heydt, & Margaret Lee for their foresight in preserving these works & their generosity in sharing them). A second, wire-bound edition was published in 2021. Read about the project at Aquarium Drunkard.

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Margaret Lee:
We begin this retrospective with a touching remembrance from one of Earl's longtime friends, who has provided so much invaluable information, inspiration, & encouragement for this project.

I corresponded with Earl’s mother, Clara Scott, after he died in 1994. She was then living in Los Angeles.

In one of her letters to me she wrote, "Earl was a very talented kid, could draw animals when he was 4 years old … When Earl was little he would not talk but pointed when he was asked his preference … when he did talk he did so in sentences and was exceptionally bright … His father and (I) had problems and separated before he was born. His father did not pay child support and I boarded him out and worked at various jobs. When he was about eleven I hooked up with my daughter’s dad and then took him home but continued to support him in music, clothes etc…

"I gave him music lessons at a young age on the piano, wanted him to play in symphony, which he did not like. I was very disappointed but went to the instrument shop and bought him a bass fiddle when he graduated from Jr. High. … Earl was very talented in music, could read and write it. … I was too busy supporting him. He had everything other kids had… cars, not always new but good … had one of the first foreign cars, English I think … Cute little compact with a sliding roof. Had a charge account at a store which featured clothes from England and was very striking when going to high school …

"Was drafted at 18. Got a medal for sharp shooting."

Earl Freeman c.1961, courtesy of Mylo Freeman

Earl married a Dutch woman, probably in the late ’50s or early ’60s and, as I recall, they lived in Holland. They had a daughter, Mylo.

(I’ve often wondered why he went to Europe in the first place, other than following the path of others who migrated to where they and their music were appreciated. I’ve speculated that he might have been on tour with Sun Ra. I base this only on the fact that he mentioned Sun Ra often and spoke as if he knew him early on.) [ed. note: Concrete details on Freeman's frequently-mentioned Sun Ra connection have proven elusive; was it during his little-known Chicago period? Info eagerly welcomed!]

At this point I feel compelled to say that what I am writing to you might not in every instance relate to his music and is more personal in nature, but it may provide you with insights about him.

Earl and I met in Palma, Majorca (which was then an undeveloped gem), in January 1966 at an out-of-the-way, unimposing, jazz club. 
(A remote memory says "Jazz Indigo.") He played there occasionally, sitting in with various musicians, and lived in a small hotel just up the hill, close enough so that he could carry his instrument back and forth. He spent most of his time in his room, avoiding the sun and streets. Fortunately he had a phonograph and jazz records in his room, which he must have brought with him to Spain, and he acquired classical records as well. He drew and notated music or wrote poems. I became aware that he was supportive of young, Spanish musicians, as he was of anyone who aspired to be creative.

I returned to the States that spring (’66) and Earl wrote from Barcelona, where he was living in the Hostal Benidorm. He became acquainted with jazz musicians who played at a club in the Place Real (can’t remember its name, but I heard great music there a year later), and he wrote with some enthusiasm about a Dutch couple he had met, Mazio and Maraika Jansen. Mazio was an artist (oils). In later years people commented about how Earl dressed, his public persona. It was refined during this period.

Maraika & Mazio Jansen, photos courtesy of Margaret Lee

There is no need for me to expound about the racism Earl encountered in the United States or in other places, including the United States Army and, during the time we lived in Spain, the Church and Franco yet ruled that ultra conservative country. At least a head taller than anyone else, with broad shoulders, and angular, Earl stood out, to say the least. He drew stares and risked confrontation.

With Maraika’s assistance (according to a card he mailed from Barcelona in July of ’66), he purposefully developed a powerful pseudo-military street-look for the city. (She could be stylishly flamboyant herself and often wore a cape and thigh-high boots.) Earl adopted, and adapted, a one-piece jump suit (simple traveling wardrobe, that), sometimes tacking to it something that might be construed as a "decoration," a glint of metal, perhaps a whistle. And he began wearing big, heavy, boots, despite the heat. In October he wrote, "Today I’m coldly urban." Eventually, in cooler climes, aviator helmet and goggles.

He and Maraika carried beautiful, ancient, silver Ibizan flutes (that at a glance could have been mistaken for batons). Together they brought a bit of street theatre to Franco’s hermetic Spain.

The next autumn, by chance, (no kidding!) we bumped into Earl and Maraika on the Street in Barcelona. Maraika suggested that my family and I spend the following winter on the Island of Ibiza (’66/’67). She was, in fact, going to the island the next day so we accompanied her on the ferries (two) and she helped us find a place near where she and Mazio lived just outside of Ibiza town. Earl also moved to the Island that winter, but returned often to Barcelona, or nearby Castelldefels, on the mainland.

Yet on Ibiza in February (’67) I received a card sent from Castelldefels that said, "… Time for a long journey. Next month I leave for San Sabastian in N. of Spain to visit xwife and daughter-Proceed on to Paris, Amsterdam to friends-music-musician artist AND Donald." (Caps his.) Don Cherry (?), who he mentioned fondly? Don Moye? [ed. note: Possibly Donald Garrett…?] [Nov. 2020 note from Pierre Crépon, which removes Garrett from consideration: "I read a Jazz Magazine interview recently confirming that Garrett first came to Paris in 1971 to play with Jean-Luc Ponty and Olivier Johnson."]

Pony Poindexter (saxophone) & Earl Freeman live at the Jamboree in Barcelona, 1967, photo courtesy Mylo Freeman

Enigmatic, Earl didn’t reveal much about his personal life in conversation or in his letters. Friends might have been aware that he pondered the unknown, dark and light manifestations, signs, … death. He immersed himself in music, classical music and jazz, talked about that, composers, art, old movies, and other musicians. He wrote poetry. Anger was directed at injustices and stupidity, yet his sense of humor about the foibles of life came through. He often chuckled. It emerged in his letters, in his drawings, but especially in his poetry. He found a way to live creatively despite everything.

Another card that year was mailed from Utrecht, Netherlands. Earl mentioned that he had been ill and hospitalized. As you know, he had only one lung. He was vulnerable to lung infections and had a residual cough. I knew he had been in Korea and thought he lost his lung there. He didn’t talk about it.

He moved to Paris in 1968. Initially he lived in what was called the meat district, but by the time I visited him he was living on the Left Bank. During my stay, we walked with a friend of his (Kenneth Terroade?) to a small theatre where he played a variety of "sound" instruments (not his bass) with a group of musicians. It was informal, more like a rehearsal. The next day we traveled by car (whose I don’t know) to a country home outside of Paris for a party, a get-together held for the musicians. Unfortunately I no longer remember their names.

I know that Earl was eventually "expelled" from France but I doubt it had as much to do with the riots and unrest there as it did with the Civil Rights Movement and upheavals occurring in the United States. Hoover and the FBI went after the Black Panther Party. The CIA was certainly investigating expatriates living in Europe. (Eldridge and Kathryn Cleaver took refuge in Paris.) The American Center for Students and Artists there was suspect.

from video with Jacques Thollot & Joachim Kuhn, 1972

I don’t have all of my correspondence so I am not sure of his movements in Europe before he returned to the States. I next visited him in New York City around 1972 or ’73 and went with him one night to a loft on the Lower East Side where he played the bass (his?) with a group. We visited people he knew, including Marzette Watts, and dropped by to see Sam Rivers. They talked about what Earl was doing musically.


In 1978 he arrived in Minneapolis by bus and stayed with my teen-aged daughters and me in rural northern Wisconsin for a couple of weeks. Earl had mixed feelings about that relatively wild country. He was definitely out of his element, but did manage to leave the house and venture into the surrounding woodland and fields on a couple of occasions. He commented on the birdsongs and how quiet it was there.

He travelled on by bus to San Francisco where he [stayed] for a month with old friends of mine on Post Street. A card sent not long after he arrived says, "…as soon as I sober up will get on the search for my folks." I assume he saw his mother who, apparently, he had not seen for many years.

His host, John, told me recently that he went to Oakland with Earl during that time and said, "He had me play piano with the group. It was totally ad lib but they were such talented musicians, I sounded great."

I assume Earl went back to NYC, but we lost touch for a time, I moved, and if he wrote during the early ’80s, I no longer have those letters. So let me pick up with some excerpts from a letter I received in September, 1987. (He was living at #2, 1836(?) McAllister St., for whatever that’s worth)

"I’m doing ok for the moment. I’ve detoxified myself from heavy alcohol…almost 3 weeks now feeling much better! I’m back to eating again … can’t seem to stop after seven years of every day drinking. … The withdrawals couldn’t be any more terrible than coming down off of heroin."

Also in this September letter, "Well Margaret, I’m preparing another journey. I’ll be leaving for NYC in early October. I think it’s time for me to climb back into the ring. I can take just so much of this Northern Hemisphere mentality. NYC is where all the music is at. Ya can’t beat that. My address will be c/o Ade.Yeme, 26 Horatio Street, West Village."

He sent along a flyer that was obviously crafted by him; it has his signature ink work along the border. The musicians and club are named. (see Constellations flyer below)

On May 8, 1990, he wrote, "As for me I’m still hanging strong after a disastrous N.Y.C. adventure … plus a brain operation here in S.F. Many wonder how I came thru all of that well so do I."

In his letter of May 11, 1991, Earl wrote a vivid description of what he called "another horrific physical alcoholic back-lash" and saying, "Anyway I came out of the backlash standing rather tall. But I’m drinking absolutely no alcohol, haven’t had a drink in over a month. I believe that was the last warning from the Creator."

Despite those accounts of his struggle, most of his letters were upbeat. He sent poems. He mentioned Faulkner, Thoreau, Whitman, and he was reading about the life of Edgar Allen Poe … (the macabre, of course). He often described whatever music he was listening to:

August, 1990: "Just heard Monk’s Dream by Thelonious Monk, at the piano, and the great Charlie Rouse playing tenor. You must hear also the 5th Symphony by Jean Sibelius. I’m now looking at Elvis Presley under a more positive lighting … I check’d out five of his early films this past Sunday and learn’d a thing or two. …Is time a tool of Enlightenment?"

His sense of the profound tinged everything.

I took the train down from Seattle and visited Earl at 44 McAllister Street, SF, "the Civic Center Residence," which was his home for years. He buzzed me in and came downstairs to meet me. He looked very much as always, in my eyes. He appeared comfortable in his small, studio apartment. A friend of his, a young woman named Lori Baldwin, prepared a meal. I liked her. We had a great visit. That was the last time I saw Earl.

Although there is more, there always is, I am determined to finish this up for now. In the meantime, you may share this with those who remember him fondly.

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Michael White, date & photographer unknown, from WBAI

Michael White:
On March 14, 2014, I had the pleasure of speaking via phone with violinist Michael White (1930-2016) about his friendship with Earl Freeman when they were coming of age in Oakland, California.

You and Earl were friends from childhood?

Yes, from like junior high, high school, we hung out together. We were both musicians and interested in the music, especially jazz. I had been playing since I was seven. I was brought up classically but I was always interested in the music because part of my lineage was Duke Ellington, and Ray Nance of course was my idol at the time. One of my cousins, Ivie Anderson, used to sing with Duke Ellington, so…all of that. (laughs)

[Earl] was the one that always had all the music, all the latest records. He loved Duke Ellington’s bass player, I can’t think of his name at the time, but this was during the ‘40s. It was a daily thing, where everybody came over Earl’s house. Earl was like the hubbub of activities, especially music.

There was one occasion I can cite: I commandeered my father’s car, I was like 13 years old and [Earl was] about the same age, and went to Los Angeles to hear Clifford Brown and Max Roach. Just he and I. It turned out that he stayed with George Morrow, of course that was Max Roach’s bass player at the time. Everybody saw that we were so earnest (laughs) and were so serious about this music. I stayed with Carl Perkins, the piano player. They put us up, believe it or not, put me up in the hotel. Earl stayed with George Morrow, Max’s bass player, out in Pasadena. [killjoy editorial note: Given that White & Freeman were born in 1930 & '31, they would have been in their 20s by the time Brown & Roach got to LA]

Was music his primary interest at that time? Because I know in later years he was also very into drawing and poetry.

Yeah, he was an artist. That was who he was. All his interest was in that direction. He was always drawing and things. He really loved the bass and music. For hours every day (laughs) he would sit and listen to all kinds of jazz and everything. It was a daily thing. So we hung out together for years. During that time, the '40s, maybe from [ages]…11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, those years. I went into the army and I lost track of him after I came from Korea in the early '50s. I saw him spasmodically every now and then, or somebody would tell me what he was doing and where he was and all, but we lost track of each other.

When you say there were things happening at Earl’s house, who was he living with at that time?

He was with his father, but his father was very seldom home. We had more or less carte blanche in our activities. But it was mostly music all day, every chance. Mostly it was like a meeting place for the cool guys.. … People that we hung out with were all about jazz. It was a constant thing for years.

Was Earl also classically trained, on the bass?

I don’t think so, but he was like a genius guy in a lot of ways. ... Later I heard people talk about him in really glowing terms, his musicality and his playing and things, but after the middle '50s, I lost track.

When you say he was a genius in a lot of ways, can you expand on that just a little bit?

There are some folks who are sort of ahead of their time, how they saw things, what they were attached to, and how they did things. ... More or less we hung out at Earl’s house! (laughs) He had all the stuff! (laughs)

Did you guys have to go to LA to hear a lot of the music in person, or did some of it also come up to Oakland?

Oh no, they came to Oakland. All the bands came to Oakland. Oakland at that time was like a little New York. We heard everything. Jay McShann, Honeydrippers... all the great players. I can’t think of it right now, but that’s all I heard all my life, ever since I was six years old. I used to shine shoes at the bowling alley where they used to practice. Dizzy…A lot of bands from the east, and all these great players. I heard that all my life.

We lost track of each other after I left to go to the army and came back and all that kind of stuff. … I heard he had gone to Europe. And then I met some people, later years, in the '90s, that knew him and spoke glowingly of him, you know.

I heard someone suggest that some of his family might have originally been from Louisiana. Do you know anything about that?

I don’t know. I couldn’t say. I only saw his father every now and then.

It sounds like he was mostly off on his own.

Yes, more or less. His father was in and out. His father was a barber or something like that. But he had the place all to himself most of the times we were there. Very seldom I saw his father.

His mother Clara wasn’t around much?

I never saw her at all.

OK. I didn’t really come in with any great agenda (laughs), and I don’t want to take up too much of your time…

No, it’s OK! It brings back fond memories. Very fond memories. I’m glad to put my input, what little I remember, because it has been such a long time.

Oh, I understand. It’s funny, I was talking with somebody who knew Earl in New York in the '70s and '80s, and he said a similar thing. They can’t remember specifics about Earl, but he made a really big impression. Not too many people know about him now, it seems. He only had a couple records where he was more or less the leader and some sideman gigs…

That must’ve came when he was in Europe or here?

A lot of his sideman recordings were in Europe. He did one large ensemble piece here in New York in '75, and then there was a trio with him on electric bass, a clarinet, and a hand drummer. That was in the '80s. I could send you a CD of that last one if you want.

Yeah, I would love it.

Sure, I’d be glad to. He was really going off into something very mysterious. I’ve never heard anyone play electric bass in that fashion before. It’s very cosmic.

He was like that, a cosmic person.

Even as a youngster?

Oh, yes...During that time...it was about the universe and especially as far as jazz was concerned, it was about a universal spirit and universal love and all that kind of thing. Reaching for truth, the utmost, beauty, and inclusiveness.

His music, his writing, the intricate drawings that were on the covers of the records...they all had that search, that same feeling. But I’m sorry, it seems like I cut you off when you were going to say something...?

Oh no. That’s all I can really remember right now.

OK. If you don’t mind giving me your address, I’ll drop one of those CDs in the mail for you next week.

Oh, would you? I would really appreciate it.

Oh, it’s the least I can do for this.

I hope I’ve helped you in some manner.

Absolutely, very much so. And your music has also helped me!

(laughs) We’re still doing that! My wife [Leisei Chen]…we’ve been at it for a long time. We’re still doing it.

Alright, Mr. White, I won’t take up too much of your Saturday, but thank you very much, I’m greatly appreciative of all this.

I'm pleased to talk about my best friend, Earl, and all his exploits. (laughs)

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Some Chicago / Sun Ra speculation:

Finding anything solid about the oft-mentioned Earl Freeman / Chicago / Sun Ra connection has been an ongoing source of frustration. Recently I happened upon the very informative King Kolax discography that includes this bit:

"In February or March 1957, Kolax's quintet at the Crown Propeller included Harold Ousley (tenor sax), Prentice McCarey (piano), Earl Freeman (bass), and Steve Boswell (drums). Malachi Favors had recorded with Andrew Hill for Ping in October of the previous year; now he was a permanent member of Hill's steadily working trio. The Crown Propeller personnel was announced in a Jazz Hot item titled 'Chicago Flash!' (no. 120, April 1957) which ran the information along with a photo of Ousley. However, in an article on King Kolax in the same issue, Kurt Mohr identifies his "current" bassist as James Lee. Ousley remembers leaving Kolax after this engagement. He thinks the band was out of work, as he did not have to teach a successor. Ousley played in Sun Ra's Arkestra for a little while (interestingly, Malachi Favors' few rehearsals and gigs with The Ra also took place in 1957) before leaving Chicago with a rock and roll show; his departure from town appears to have taken place in the fall of 1957."

That site also lists an Earl Freeman as one of two possible bassists on Brooks & Brown's "Sleeping in an Ocean of Tears" / "They Call Her Rosalie" 45/78 on Duke: Robert "Billy" Brooks and Piney Brown (voc) with King Kolax Orchestra: King Kolax (tp, ldr), Harold Ousley (ts); unidentified (bars); prob. Prentice McCarey (p); Lefty Bates (eg); James Lee or Earl Freeman (b); prob. Leon Hooper (d). Hear Sleeping in an Ocean of Tears, a pretty hot tune:

Whether or not Freeman actually played on this record, him being part of that community at that time "feels right" to me. Maybe this is the period when he hooked up with Sun Ra, in whatever capacity that may have occurred, before heading to Vancouver later that decade? Anyone want to weigh in…?

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Fraser MacPherson, Bill Holmes, Earl Freeman, Bill Perkins, Chuck Logan, & Tom Thosburn at The Cellar in Vancouver, est. late 1950s, photographer unknown, from http://www.greggsimpson.com/Cellar_Gallery.html

From Live at the Cellar: Vancouver's Iconic Jazz Club and the Canadian Co-operative Jazz Scene in the 1950s and 1960s by Marian Jago (info here):

In addition to Chuck Logan, two other African Americans became, at least for a time, an integral part of the Cellar scene - tenor saxophonist Bill Holmes and bassist Earl Freeman, who relocated from the United States together specifically to play at the Cellar. As Tony Clitheroe remembered their arrival:

"John Dawe and I and two or three other guys were sitting around the Cellar one night, drinking and chewing the fat or what-have-you, and we heard the door open at the top of the stairs and we heard footsteps coming down, and we sort of looked to see who would come through the door at the bottom, and it was two black guys. One guy was carrying a bass, the other guy is carrying a tenor saxophone. So they looked at us and we looked at them, and they asked, 'Is this the Cellar?' and we said, 'Yeah, come on in, have a drink.' So they came and sat down and we poured them a few drinks and asked, 'Where are you guys from?' 'Miami.' [sic, probably?] They’d heard about the Cellar all the way from Miami, right? So anyway, I thought, I’m off the hook. There was a bass player here and he was probably going to stick around. And they both stayed around for a while, but I think the climate got to them. After about a year and a half or something they disappeared.'

While Tony Clitheroe believed Freeman and Holmes had arrived from Miami, John Dawe recalled that they had come from Los Angeles and had moved north in order to play and practice at a club that had a reputation for offering few artistic limitations, a sense of community, and less pronounced racism than they experienced south of the border.

"And there were a couple of other black guys that played at the Cellar, they were from [the States]. They moved up here, why I don’t know. It was a bass player named Earl Freeman and a tenor player, really good tenor player, named Bill Holmes. They just showed up one night and walked through the door again, out of the pouring rain, and dumped their stuff on the bandstand and kinda said, 'Here we are.' Actually, a lot of word had spread down to California about the Cellar and people just kind of showed up in town here. Um, maybe they were fed up with the [racial] problems in the States and kind of got the idea to try up here, but those two guys, Bill and Earl, they were in town for [a while]."

Earl Freeman in particular was a popular addition because bass players were still in short supply.

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Earl, Mylo, & Tini Freeman, 1961, courtesy of Mylo Freeman

Mylo Freeman:
Mylo Freeman, daughter of Earl & Tini Freeman, shares the sweet story of how her parents met. An artist & author, learn more about her work on her website.

In the late 1950s, my mother Tini, an 18 year-old girl with a head full of romance, went to Canada. Away from the boring Hague and ready for a great and compelling life. My grandfather agreed, provided he could find a safe place for her. Acquaintances had recently emigrated and she could rent a room with them in Vancouver. They even found a job for her in a record store and arranged it so they could keep an eye on her. With her passion for jazz, it was the perfect job. The adventure could begin! And that it did.

Dark brown skin and 1.90 meters tall. Love at first sight. My father, a jazz bassist born in America, was on tour in Canada with his band and came to buy a record. Not just one time, but every day after he met her. They became inseparable. My mother traveled for a while with the band, but after a few months the question arose where they were going to settle. In America, where their relationship was still considered illegal? Rather not. My mother wrote a letter to my grandparents how she had met the love of her life and that he will soon travel alone to the Netherlands. Then once the time came and the bell rang, my grandparents ran to the front door to meet their future son-in-law. Small detail, my mother had not mentioned in its letter that my father was black ... But her concern was unnecessary. My father was received with open arms.

Earl & Mylo Freeman, Skien, Norway, c.1960

Mylo & Earl Freeman at the Louvre, Paris, April 1968, photo by Tini Freeman

Mylo & Earl Freeman, NYC, c.1985

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Kenneth Terroade & Earl Freeman, photo by Jacques Bisceglia

Kenneth & Eileen Terroade:
The legendary saxophonist/flutist Kenneth Terroade, who performed with Sunny Murray, Dave Burrell, Selwyn Lissack, Count Ossie & the Mystic Revelation of Rastafari, & Dr. John, a.o., was one of Earl Freeman's close friends & collaborators in the late 1960s / early 1970s. From Valerie Wilmer's "Freeman Fighter" profile in Melody Maker, May 13, 1972: "[Freeman] cited Kenneth Terroade, the Jamaican saxophonist, as the man who introduced him to the music scene in Paris. 'I was influenced quite a bit by him, because if it wasn't for Kenneth, I was intent on burying myself into an anonymous shell." Ken & his wife Eileen shared some of their memories in Brooklyn on August 15, 2017, & in subsequent correspondence.

The first time I met Earl was when he showed up at the recording for Big Chief [on January 11, 1969]. Sunny knew him and Earl was a regular at many of Sunny's sessions. At the first meeting he told me how he really liked my playing. So we started practicing together. Earl had a beautiful, root sound and was a real inspiration to me. So I naturally would want him on Love Rejoice. He was my first choice for any musician on the album.

ET:     Ken shared an apartment with him for years in Paris.

That's right. That's exactly right. He was very encouraging. So we'd play a little bit, or practice all day sometimes, from morning until the evening. He said, "You need to be on an album." So when I got the date with BYG, the 22nd one on the list [Love Rejoice], Earl was on the album. We practiced and everything that he did, it was just like he knew what needed to be done. So this is a wonderful album that I did with Earl.

I think that was the first recording that he made. [maybe not; see Chicago section above]

Yes! Exactly right, yeah. ... Then I think he did something afterwards with Sunny Murray and myself.

Yes, he was on Hommage to Africa.

Hommage to Africa, that's it. Part of a wide selection of musicians on this date: Archie Shepp, Sunny Murray, Malachi Favors, all these guys. But it was a very beautiful album and Earl was on it, yeah. Sometimes a little flute, a little fife in the background, and that's a great effect on it, you know? Just a wonderful little sound that he'd put in at the right time. That's a beautiful gift.

ET:    He liked little things, like little toys, little sounds. Just what was needed. Like a child, simple and very sweet.

Where did you live with Earl?

We were living in Saint-Michel, nearby a place, Le Chat Qui Pêche, a famous jazz club. That's where I first started playing with Sunny Murray when I was living in Paris.

We were going to Belgium one time to do this festival. This is when Earl was part of it as well. I was the only one who was Jamaican, and I thought I could get into Belgium from Paris without a visa. So, what do I know. The police came and took me right off that bus. They said, "Oh, you didn't have a visa, you can't go in there." So Earl came off and said, "Listen, this is my friend. You can't do this!" And he had a big whip around his shoulder. I said, "Earl..." (laughs) It went from here to about where Eileen sits (several feet away). (laughs) And he pulled this whip out like he wanted to do something to this guy and then the guy reached for his gun. So I said, "Earl, please, I really appreciate it, but go back on the bus. I will be alright."

So, good thing I had a bottle of cognac with me that night. God helped me to bring that cognac; I didn't know what I was going to go through. So that kept me up all night, because I'd take a sip of that and I kept warm, because it was freezing.

ET:    Walking outside, just waiting until the concert is over the next day.

That's it, until they would come back. So, a learning experience. But Earl, boy, he came off of that bus, and everybody said, "When we're coming back, you can come on board." Earl wasn't satisfied with that! He wanted to come out and do something about it. But I said no, they look serious, you know.

I think Selwyn Lissack told me, the first time he met Earl, he had the whip...and that was very memorable.

That's it.

ET:    But he was a gentle guy.

Yeah, that was just his style.

Kenneth & Eileen Terroade in Jamaica, mid-2010s, photographer unknown

ET:    The first time [Earl] came over [in 1975 or '76, in New York City], it was about 12 o'clock at night. It was late. ... My son Koro was up then, and I said, "Who could be at the door so late?" Koro looked through the peephole on the door and said, "A black angel is outside!" That was it for Earl; he just loved Koro. He would play with his little matchbox cars... Earl had a large black cape on. I said, "That's a very different outfit." He said, "I make a lot of my clothes." And he kept trying to encourage me, "You could sew. You could do it." About a week later he came with a sewing machine. He was just a nice guy. I said, "Oh, I'm not brave enough to sew." He said, "Try it!" He said he found it on the street. He said, "It's easy to work." He just left the sewing machine. He was just that nice.

He was a special person.

March 18, 2020 addition:

Also just wanted to share something Kenneth has mentioned so many times....Earl had a favorite song......In a Silent Way...a Miles Davis piece on his album of the same name....What is lovely is that Earl called it "Beautiful Sky Boat."

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from the back cover of Alan Silva's Inner Song LP

Alan Silva:
On February 28, 2016, the great Alan Silva spoke with me by phone about Earl Freeman & the rich Paris scene of the late 1960s/early 1970s.

I became familiar with Earl when I was in Paris. He joined our community, let’s say around early 1970, '71, '72, '73, I guess. I can’t pin down when that period was. So he was quite a character. He had his own costume, actually. That was interesting. (laughs)

Yeah, that’s something everybody remembers.

Well, the thing is, we were all looking for our clothes identities ... You can remember Earl Freeman from wearing some kind of first, second World War cap that the aviators used to wear, people flying in planes. He had a lot of things to do with airplanes, Air Force, I guess, I don’t know. He had more of that quality of his clothes.

He served in the Korean War.

I don’t know of his background. Do you have any?

A little bit. I spoke with violinist Michael White, who was best friends with Earl in high school. And Sonny Simmons, who knew him in the Oakland days as well.

Oakland, OK, beautiful. Oh, all these Oakland guys … That’s a whole area in the history. Earl, I don’t know how he actually got to be in Paris. At this time we all congregated at the American Center for Artists and Students. You can look on the web and see that place. It doesn’t exist at the moment, but there’s some archives of the activities that took place there in the '70s and '80s. He kind of joined that community that was all the musicians, Sunny Murray, myself, Frank Wright, Bobby Few, Muhammad Ali. The whole crew…the Art Ensemble of Chicago. All were congregating there. Anthony Braxton…The American Center was like our meeting ground for that and Earl was part of that community.

Now on bass, as a bass player myself at this particular period, [Earl] was another great guy doing some interesting stuff on the instrument. We’re all, at this particular period, we’re not somewhat competitive as some people might say. In fact, that whole generation of bass players, we had to support so many different groups…That’s the whole problem a lot of people don’t understand. I mean, if you look at bass players and drummers as supporting the background, the backbone of the whole jazz scene…Bass players are not necessarily competitive. We function, “Yeah, you want a bass player? Yeah, OK, here we are.” (laughs) At that particular time, the kind of music that we were creating at the time, there was very few bass players that would take those kind of things that I was doing and develop them, too. So that’s my point of view of him as a bass player. I don’t know how many recordings he made, actually.

It wasn’t as many as one might think. There was a cluster of them in the summer of 1969 that he did on BYG/Actuel, with Clifford Thornton, Kenneth Terroade, Archie Shepp, Sunny Murray…you and Earl were both on his Hommage to Africa record. Claude Delcloo and Arthur Jones, he’s on that album. So there was a cluster…

That’s what happened with that label. He was there at that particular moment, you understand. When you think of the Actuel label, we were all Americans who had been actually contracted to work for this label. I mean, it was one of the coup d’états of the jazz industry when you look at it from one point of view. It was the first time that a European label had actually booked that many Americans. They started the label with quite a number of people. Like Blue Note built up their catalog after many years of making a lot of records, but this guy came along and produced 20 records in one session. So that’s historically one of the greatest recording sessions in history, to a certain degree. But since that took place in Europe, the American historians tend to block all this history out. Everything’s happening in New York, St. Louis…But nobody was really documenting what we were doing in Paris, on the same scale.

---

So Earl, you say, well, what is he doing? Well, he had a very productive career. When he went back to the States, he just went underground.

Yeah, it seems like he bounced around when he got back here.

He was an artistic guy, I liked him for that. Poet ... But I don’t know what happened to him when he left. A lot of people, like Frank Wright, I told him, “Don’t go back to the United States, man. Wait a minute…” Because it was like, even the Art Ensemble of Chicago and a lot of people who had been in our community started going back to the States.

So how did he get hooked up with your Celestrial Communications Orchestra? I heard he played harp in that. Is that right?

(laughs) Yeah, right. That was one of the projects I did, and he was available. I think he played harp and bass, two at the same time. Because it was a radio concert, they had a lot of instruments that I had access to. So I said, “Freeman, why don’t you play that harp over there?” I mean, it had tympani drums and a whole lot of acoustical instruments and so forth. And I said, “You should play the harp.” He played the bass, too. In the Celestrial Communications Orchestra, during this period…most of it was the expatriate groups of people that were operating in Paris at that time.

I think of Earl Freeman more as an individual more than anything else. When I look at an artist, I look at them as individuals.

How much photographs have you got?

Not a whole lot yet. Certain people who Earl lived with, he left behind drawings and poems and things like that, and I have been trying to get some of those together, but not too many photographs yet.

Frank Wright was the same way. We had a lot of his drawings and his poetry. Yeah, these are archive problems. We need some researchers. We need to pay people. (laughs)

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Brigitte Fontaine letter, translation & notes by Pierre Crépon:
A short letter sent by singer Brigitte Fontaine to writer Delfeil de Ton (a pseudonym often abbreviated DDT) and published in the December 12, 1970 issue of L'Hebdo Hara-Kiri, p. 10.

Delfeil de Ton covered free jazz extensively in his "Petit coin de la culture" column, announcing concerts and writing reviews. He was instrumental in the music's visibility in France during this period as L'Hebdo Hara-Kiri (soon to become Charlie Hebdo) had a substantial print run.

Following is a translation of Fontaine's letter. I've tried to keep the unconventional punctuation and writing style intact. Fontaine is of course being ironic.

##############

dear Mr DDT,

here's an information, both human and musical.

I am Brigitte Fontaine

me and musicians friends of me are starting to make sounds on October 9 [1970] at the vieille grille [a café-théâtre in Paris]

we haven't been able start on the date first scheduled, because of a disgusting member of the band, Earl Freeman, who cowardly got himself expelled from France for reasons probably so despicable that they were kept secret from him out of decency.

you will do whatever you want of this information, you can even send the expression of your contempt to Earl Freeman who is meditating in Holland on his unknown misdeeds. hunger and fever, those two twin flowers, are helping him a lot in repentance

long live the republic
long live france

PS and NB: I am writing to you on neutral paper (cautiously) [a joke regarding the Swiss hotel letterhead]

Article on Earl Freeman, c.1970-2 perhaps, with Brigitte Fontaine at left; thanks to Mylo Freeman & Benoit Mouchart

Earl Freeman on bass with Brigitte Fontaine:

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Selwyn Lissack, Grachan Moncur III, Dave Burrell, Richard Pierce, c.1970, photo Jacques Bisceglia

Selwyn Lissack:
On October 18, 2014, the great drummer Selwyn Lissack recounted how Earl Freeman came to be on the Friendship Next of Kin Facets of the Universe LP in 1969.

For about three weeks of my life, [Earl] sort of crashed at my house [in London] and didn’t leave. (laughs) And in that time I was just doing the record [Facets of the Universe] so I sort of had him come along, to have two basses. That was my goal but of course he took over. (laughs) And that was really all I have on Earl. The next time I saw him was in Paris, walking around in his suit, with a whip. And that was it! So I know nothing else about him other than what you’re going to tell me.

How did you connect with him?

He just happened to be in London at the moment that I was recording this record, Facets of the Universe. A mutual friend introduced us.  So I had him join the ensemble, as two basses are better than one.

The guys that I chose for the record were people that came to my place once a week and practiced. We had no set plans to play anything specific “we’ll do this” or “we’ll do that.” It was just a spur-of-the-moment thing. We recorded at midnight on a full moon eclipse [in September 1969]. These conditions were very powerful. But Earl’s sudden control over the situation and overtaking the flow of things in the studio ... as far as I’m concerned, changed the intended mood of the music. The ensemble adapted immediately to his mood and composed a suitable background for Earl's unusual poetry. Never, ever done before until that moment, with those people. That was some extreme classical music composed on the spur-of-the-moment. …Even though there’s a big complaint ever since it happened … critics, criticizing that music, and said that, “Oh, that was poetry and that’s what they did in those days…” But anyway, the music around him was just right for his recitation.

* FOOTNOTE: Transcriptions of the poems Freeman recited on Facets of the Universe, as well as additional works drawn from an audio recording made in Santa Cruz, California in 1983, appear in Second Stutter Volume Two, edited by Colin Partch & Solomon Rino, published in an edition of 100 copies in 2017.

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From Too Much UnConvenience: Recollections of a Blues Gypsy by Lincoln T. Beauchamp Jr. & Chicago Beau (info here):
with thanks to Pierre Crépon

Archie Shepp had another scene happening. He had a large apartment on Rue de l’Universite. There, others would hang out when he allowed it. I was there on several occasions. I remember once when BYG had failed to pay musicians for gigs or recordings, a strategy session was held at Shepp’s. Present among several were Cal Massey, Hart Leroy Bibbs, Earl Freeman, Clifford Thornton, Julio Finn, Alan Silva, Yasmina and Joseph Jarman from the Art Ensemble of Chicago. At this session, Hart Leroy Bibbs was the most rational and vocal about how to get paid. But others there preferred almost military type action. Earl Freeman, seated at an architect’s table and wearing a Snoopy pilot’s cap and a green military jumpsuit, drew up plans for a raid in the BYG offices.

Did they actually raid the offices?

Hell, yeah! Led by Earl Freeman. One morning as soon as the office opened, a group of about ten New York cats bursts into the office threatening secretaries, Jean Luc [Young], and everybody else. They stood on desks, kicked over chairs, grabbed a few people. Earl Freeman, who always walked around with a long bullwhip, cracked that whip at everything and everybody. Then [Jean] Georgakarakos came out and shouted, “Stop, I’ll pay!” And he did.

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Mannley Collins:
Email correspondence from November 2016. In addition to the activities described below, Collins also mentioned playing with Pony Poindexter (as Freeman did; see above) & having recorded an album called Brainbloodvolume in Israel c.1978/9, which I have been unable to trace. He can be heard on the release by Maneesha, Rolling Home, a duo with Grene Collins on bass, recorded in January 2019. According to a post online, Collins passed away on November 26, 2022.

I met Earl on Boulevard St. Germain in Paris on the day that the US made its first unmanned Moon landing. June 2nd 1966. The place was absolutely buzzing--everyone in the streets were smiling and laughing at this stupendous achievement.

I was walking with my pregnant wife, Annette, when coming towards us was this figure. From the feet up upwards he was wearing a pair of brand new White Tennis sneakers then an Olive Green US pilots flight suit with many pockets and zips and connecting tubes for oxygen and pressure dangling. On his head was a tan leather flight helmet with goggles perched on top of his head. He was holding a 2-foot long stick with a stiff US flag on it--approx. 1 foot by 9 inches. Huge ear-to-ear smile. We knew straightaway that he was a doper. In that get up he had to be.

Annette said to me, "Isn’t he just adorable?" and I agreed because he was. So we walked up to him and made our introductions and started a friendship that lasted for quite a few years--we were still friends when he died—we are still friends now.

Well we went into a nearby Bistro and had lunch together where we swapped bios. Earl as you know played Acoustic Bass. I played Alto Saxophone. I was playing, at Ronnie Scotts in London, with a group of South African guys led by Chris McGregor called The Brotherhood of Breath. We both claimed to play 'free' jazz as we both realized that it was very unlikely that anyone would ever pay us.

Later that day we were in Earl’s hotel room on Rue Du Buci in the Latin Quarter playing and honking and squealing and generally wringing our horns’ necks--smoking Thai Sticks-drinking coffee and eating grapes.

My name then was Colin Wilson which was my father’s name and his father’s before him et al et al and it was also the name of an infamous English writer of a book called The Outsider. I told Earl of my dissatisfaction and he immediately started to call me 'Collins'--which I took to straight away. 5 years later in 1971 I formally changed my last name to Collins which I still have on all my documents, passport, etc. to this very day.

That's just the bare outlines.

Memories of Earl Freeman.
Imagine a cavern miles deep down in the earths interior.
It's pitch black.
You can faintly hear the deep shuddering groans of the tectonic plates
slowly, ponderously rubbing against each other.
And over that you can hear the plip plops of water drops falling from the roof of the cavern into a still limpid pool of cold clearest water.
Those water drops are Earl.

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Earl Freeman in the wedding band for William Parker & Patricia Nicholson (then Patsy Wilkins), c.1975. l-r: Michael Keith or Bill Lowe (trombone), Malik Baraka (trumpet), Ellen Christi (voice), Nancy Ancrum (flute), William Parker (cello), Earl Freeman (bass), Melvin Smith (guitar), & a barely visible Daniel Carter (trumpet [?])

William Parker:
William Parker, the legendary bassist, organizer, writer, historian, scholar & much more, offered rich memories of & insights about Earl Freeman at his home in the East Village on December 29, 2014. Special thanks must be extended to Mr. Parker for all the inspiration & support he has given to this effort.

My introduction to [Earl] was, of course, all the music that he made when he was in Paris. Pitchin’ Can, Black Gipsy, also some other things with Archie Shepp, the record with Kenneth Terroade called Love Rejoice. And you’re surprised to see someone who you’ve seen on a record, a record that you’ve enjoyed, and now, wow, they’re in New York. Because in our eyes, myself and the other musicians who enjoy that music, these guys on the BYG records were like celebrities. They were our heroes, in a way, because they were doing it and we didn’t have any records out at the time, but they did.

I’m not sure Earl’s entrance into our lives. I know he was playing with us as the Music Ensemble. I know when I first met him, he was playing acoustic bass here in New York. He played cello at one point and he played electric bass toward the end. But I’m not really sure of his entry into our lives. But whatever it was, we were happy that he was here, because he was part of the real deal squad, the generation before us. And here it was we were getting to play with a guy that played with Archie Shepp, Grachan Moncur III, and the crew from Paris.

So I just remember him coming in. We did a lot of sessions at lofts, probably Anita Weschler’s loft was toward the end of the period of the Music Ensemble, because the first period was out of Roger Baird’s house and I don’t recall Earl ever coming there. And then we played in 1973-'74, at Someplace Nice, 97 Saint Mark’s Place. I don’t remember him coming there, either. I think it was at Anita Weschler’s, because he didn’t come to the Basement on Waverly Place, as far as I know. Dewey Johnson did, Billy Bang. It was a low ceiling; Earl was tall. But it was around later on, because in ’84, skipping a bit ahead, I remember him being around quite a bit, playing at the Shuttle Theater up the block from me. And then of course us doing the record with him, which is probably the true marking point, the Universal Jazz Symphonette. What year was that made?

1975.

Yeah, that was the year I got married. So I’m not sure if Anita Weschler’s was a little bit before 1975, maybe, or ’76, but it was around that period. Earl, I know at one point was down on Canal Street with Jemeel Moondoc, I remember him being there. I never remember him being at the Firehouse over on 11th Street, or Studio We, I don’t recall him being over there, or Rashied [Ali]’s place [Ali's Alley], but he must’ve been there at some point, because if you’re a musician, you always end up showing up where the music and the musicians are. Studio We was a key place, [as was] Studio Rivbea. It’s just a matter of whether he had been in town long enough or when did he arrive in town. He might not have gotten here until ’74; I’m not sure.

Music Ensemble flier c.1974, by Marilyn Sontag
from William Parker's Sound Journal, published 1996

But those things you notice. You notice Earl’s appearance, that he was very thin and he wore this leather hat with goggles up top, I guess like a pilot hat and goggles, like he was in the Air Force, but almost like his own secret Air Force that he was the captain and the colonel and the general and the sergeant and all the workers. And then Earl, when you spoke to him, he almost whispered. He had a very quiet voice. He had a sophisticated street thing. What I mean is that you could see where he was not foreign to being a street guy, but he also had a large element of him was being sophisticated, and what I mean is that he had traveled and he had learned things and he had a deep reservoir of knowledge and understanding of things that he didn’t really just put out there in your face, but you felt these things all the time. And he was cool. He didn’t talk too much. He didn’t say too much.

He was always there, musically, when you needed him. He wasn’t the kind of bass player that pushed the music forward. He was almost like a poet on the bass, like a painter, someone that would make a snapshot of the fire to cool it down in a way and bring out the elements of beauty in the fire. So if you look at a fire and it has colors, green and red and blue, he would take those colors and make a lake out of those colors in his music. But the colors started from the fire. And that was his role in the music that we played. He’d always make a lake out of fire and then it would begin a new story.

So Earl was a catalyst for poetry. He was a catalyst for almost calming the fire so that it would last longer and change direction. Always seeking out the beauty in things. He could always take any element of the music and just flip it around. And then his sound. At first I said, “Oh man, why is he playing electric bass?” But the sound he got on the electric bass was just so beautiful. It was sort of, wow, unworldly. And I don’t know how he did it. I never did play his electric bass to see, well, how does he do this? Does he have the strings detuned? Is it the amplifier? What is it that makes it sound that way? He had this bubbling sound, like a drone, almost like he was playing a tanpura in Indian music. And that’s what he would do through the set. No matter what was going on, he would just play what he played. And I always wanted to do that and I never could do that. I was always kind of at the mercy of where the music was going, like being a good bass player and following the role of, you know, if they’re playing a blues, I’m gonna play a blues. If they’re playing 6/8, I’m gonna play 6/8. But Earl, wherever the music went, he stayed in his boat and followed his journey and his path of what he had to do, which is a very sophisticated system and very hard to do, to follow your path. Your natural inclination is to just follow the stream of the music, they’re playing the blues so I’m gonna play a blues…And Earl was playing a blues, except it was just different. It was a different kind of fire and a different kind of color system he was using, rhythmic system. And so for those who liked it, it was very inspiring what he was doing.

So, we had a lot of good times. Earl would play the piano sometimes, which was different. We had the great Stony Brook concert, I think in 1974. Daniel Carter was teaching up at Stony Brook University. We went up there and it was a really long concert with the Music Ensemble; it was great. We touched upon so many different areas and did so many things. What we were doing in a sense was almost like the equivalent of the Art Ensemble, except we were like what that music sounded like internally. We didn’t have an outward sound. We had an internal sound. Maybe that was the thing. You know, me and Billy Bang wanted to go outside the music. Daniel would go either way. But Earl had an internal sound, internal combustions of the music.

personal collection of Jim Eigo

The last time I remember Earl playing was at the Shuttle Theater up the block. This must’ve been sometime…I was living on First Avenue still. I didn’t move to 6th Street until ’86. So it could’ve been somewhere between ’83 and ’86, when he played at the Shuttle Theater and he collapsed because he hadn’t eaten in a few days. [note: this concert was held in 1984; see postcard below] I think he was living over in Fire Island. And then we found out that Earl only had one lung, because his lung had been taken out. And they took him to the hospital and I didn’t see him again. Because they took him and then we heard that Earl moved back to the west coast. Then later on Frank Lowe came by, said he had heard that Earl had passed away.

He didn’t pass until ’94, so he still had several years…

Right, but he was out there [in California], so we didn’t know. Somebody said he was living in a men’s shelter here, then he was at Fire Island. New York was too rough so he left.

When he fell at the Shuttle Theater, was that during the performance?

Yep, that was during the performance. The music stopped, everybody went up there, and the paramedics came. They said he hadn’t eaten for a couple days. Earl was always skin and bones, skin and bones.

one of Sabu Toyozumi's collection, by Kaitai Records

Sound Craft itself, on the credits for the record, they have dancers, there are recitations, Richard Dunbar is listed as photography…Do you recall, were there rehearsals or were there things that Earl was going for with that production?

Well, Earl certainly knew what he wanted. I don’t think there were any rehearsals. We got together that afternoon, evening of the performance, and Earl was giving out things and words and kind of telling us about the direction. But mainly we had been playing together, so he didn’t really have too much to say to Daniel [Carter], myself, and Roger [Baird], who was on the record, and Billy Bang. So we had been playing together for a while. He basically just crafted it from his experiences conducting and guiding the musicians through from A to Z. Patricia [Nicholson Parker, then Patsy Wilkins] is on the record, she’s reading. It was a very interesting concept. We were very surprised, because this is the first time I saw Earl’s artwork. ... I said, “Wow, who did that artwork?” He said, “Oh, I did it.” He would just say that nonchalantly, like it was nothing to do that intricate artwork. He said, “Well, you know, Frank Wright does artwork, too.”

Obviously you’ve met a lot of people, but Earl is among those who you have chosen to write about…

I thought Earl was an interesting character, an inspiring person, because he was so different. Whereas some people would say, “Oh, this guy was just out of it,” I think he should’ve been put in the history books. I knew he wasn’t. I knew he was gonna get left out. So when you write a composition about somebody or mention their name, they get a little play. Pelikan [aka] Carl Lombard...there’s a bunch of them that I think are really right on, and I know they’re gonna be left out of the history books. But that’s why you mention them, you reflect on them, and they become like missing links, except this time they’re gonna be found.

Did Earl ever tell you things about his past, where he’d been or where he was from or anything like that?

Was he in the Air Force?

I think it was the Army.

OK, well he mentioned he was in the Army. He said, “Oh we had to do such and such in the Army,” but that’s all. Or that, “I had enough of that in the Army.” He wanted to be free. He didn’t want to be regimented to anything.

Earl, he was something else, that’s all I can say. Special guy.

from William Parker's Sound Journal, published 1996; hear it on Compassion Seizes Bed-Stuy

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Raphe Malik, interview by Ed Hazell, Opprobrium #4, December 1997, p.48:
Trumpeter Raphe Malik (1948-2006) recalls his first chance to record, the Universal Jazz Symphonette Sound Craft '75: Fantasy for Orchestra LP:

Let's talk a second about your first recording, the Earl Freeman LP.

We rehearsed quite a bit for that record, five or six times. Earl always wanted to have a large group. I met Earl in Paris. He was a very iconoclastic guy. Very spacey. Wore leather aviator hat and dark glasses. Very thin. He was kind of the ultimate hipster on the fringes. He could play, too. Electric bass. He always played electric [sic]. He never got that much together commercially. But he brought all the musicians from downtown and all the musicians involved in Cecil [Taylor]’s thing in New York, and some of his friends. The project was very ambitious. I remember making that recording and feeling when I played that it was the first chance I had ever had to play my own music, as opposed to playing in the ensemble and playing Cecil’s concept. So when this record came out, it may not be as great art as Cecil’s compositions, but it did offer the people in the ensemble a chance to play. Then, here’s a guy who put out his own album [sic, the LP was released on Anima] and at the time, 1975, that wasn’t that prevalent. It was very ambitious. It’s in the right spirit, and I felt good about what I played on it. It was a good first record to be on.

It’s an interesting mix of people who went on to do more things – Billy Bang, William Parker – and people who just dropped out of the scene.

It was the beginning of the loft scene. There was this industrial space in downtown Manhattan, available for pretty cheap, and people could just rent them and put things on.

Seeking info on this...publication?
This drawing was used for the cover of the Sound Craft '75 LP, so perhaps it is from that period?
Thanks to Margaret Lee.

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Review of Studio Rivbea festival, June 28-July 7, 1974, by Randy Hutton in Coda, September 1974:

Arthur Brooks via email, February 22, 2015: As I recall, I arrived at Rivbea looking forward to hearing the great percussion master and I happened to be carrying my horns. Sunny spotted me, looked at my instruments case, and asked me to play with them. I had never met Sunny or Earl before that time. I was awestruck at the prospect but consented and did my best. So, if there was a workshop, I wasn't a part of it, except for that night. As far as I recall, that was the one and only time I played with Earl.

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photo by Horace, from Sunny Murray's Big Chief LP

Becky Friend:
Becky Friend was a flutist who early in her career recorded / collaborated with Alan Silva, Sunny Murray, Leroy Jenkins, Paul Motian, & Earl Freeman, among others. In the promo literature for the Sound Craft '75 album (see above), Freeman noted their collaboration, & how they attempted to create a climate similar to the one he knew in Paris a few years earlier. I hoped to formally interview her as part of this retrospective but regrettably our schedules never synced before her unfortunate passing in October 2019. Below are excerpts from an email she sent on August 25, 2014.

I am sorry to hear Earl passed. He is one of those people who had his foot in the future a long time ago.

He was a very emotional man. And very creative. He enjoyed living in Europe. I think being in America for any length of time would have sent him spiraling down into a depressive abyss. At the same time his output was constant and unusual. In Europe - I think he was more liberated to be himself. Here, he felt locked in, and in need of spiritual protection...and I believe he struggled with -- as so many of us do -- the lack of compassion or interest in the kind of art that stood in time - as it was - rather than what others may have wanted it to be...

The one thing I had always hoped for Earl was that he be secure in himself, and found a way to Love the deeper self of his person. He certainly was trying to move in that direction, and I'm sure in later years he did find a more peaceful side to his soul. Certainly that would be my present prayer for him.

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From Avant-Garde Jazz Musicians: Performing 'Out There' by David G. Such (info here):

Bassist Earl Freeman, after returning to New York City from Europe, observed that most out musicians have become too preoccupied with their own approach to performing. He comments, “Each faction in the avant-garde has its own direction and center point. They are all off into a different thing. …It’s hard to say who are the important influences in the music, who are the real leaders in the music, not in the sense of Coltrane or Coleman in the sixties. I wrote a poem called ‘The Death of the Hero.’ We don’t have any real heroes anymore in that sense. I came to that conclusion over five years ago. It’s like up to every man to develop the sense. They are finding out that the self is not always workable. Therefore, you got groups or cults working, like Sartre’s [sic] quote, ‘No man is an island.’ You have to join something or be with something, I suppose.” – p. 7, December 30, 1983, at a friend's apartment in New York City.

[the undated flier above is also from this book]

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from The Music Ensemble s/t CD (Roaratorio)

Roger Baird:
Roger Baird, drummer in the Music Ensemble, from the notes of their self-titled CD on Roaratorio, recordings made in 1974-75 that were not released until 2001 (note: Freeman does not appear on this release).

Earl Freeman was also in the group. I think he showed up after William [Parker]. I first saw Earl playing with Noah Howard at Studio We. He just blew me away. He was so out there. Earl was really tall and skinny and wore an aviator’s jump suit with a leather helmet and goggles. Earl got arrested a couple times for just carrying his bass and walking down the street! I guess his appearance flew in the face of normalcy to too great a degree. His playing was amazing. He’d sort of recreated the bass. He played a fretless electric Fender bass and made it sound like some other kind of reality. Earl’s energy was right there from note one and he was always an inspiration.

flier by Marilyn Sontag for July 1974 concerts by the Music Ensemble, thanks to Patricia Nicholson Parker

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Earl Freeman, NYC, 1983, photo: Mylo Freeman

Daniel Carter:
Daniel Carter is a musician, writer, visual artist, conversationalist, and all-around inspirational spirit based in New York City who has been creating freely improvised music since the early 1970s. He contributed to the Universal Jazz Symphonette album that Earl Freeman conceived & executed, and also collaborated with him in groups that included the Music Ensemble, Spiritual Fire, and the First American Jazz Kamikaze Squad (see flier above). He shared his rich insights on July 29, 2013.

Somebody that sensitive, you have to have some armor on this planet.

--

As I was leaving the house, I was saying to Marilyn, my wife, that I thought with Earl, it would be good to have somebody like Roger [Baird] or William [Parker], because they would maybe tell stories about a particular incident and then that would jog my memory. But without that, it’s largely an impression, a big impression. I know that with electric instruments, he was uncanny with how he could tune in to these instruments that many people not that much older than him, or maybe the same age as him, they would say, "Look, it’s anathema. Don’t even touch those instruments, because they are the way in which Satan…another barrier between the soul and..." you know. He didn’t seem to flinch and went in there.

I had a messed-up, pretty ugly sounding synthesizer. I don’t know what they were thinking when they made that synthesizer, man. Earl played it like it was…you know, the way the angels were able to sing through messed up instruments. He just had a way. I don’t know how he could do that. For one thing, I think it was a stillness he was able to get to. A stillness and intense focus, an expression that could be like laser. I always thought of that as being, that’s really something to be able to achieve. I always wondered, if Earl was around now to play with, if I would’ve improved enough to feel like I got more in that zone with him. (laughs) Because I mean, if I think back, some of the last times, that thing at Sound Unity [Festival] (Spiritual Fire, a group with Carter, Freeman, drummer Rashid Bakr [now Charles Downs], and hardcore punk guitarist Susan Miller), I don’t know if there was much more we played together after that [in 1984]. I may have time a little mixed up. Roger could probably…I know Earl was around Roger’s place before Roger had to leave that place. Earl was playing with some different people. But the Music Ensemble, what was left of the Music Ensemble, we would still get together at Roger’s long after William and Billy were not playing with us anymore. I think they vaguely must’ve known what was going on, but they had to really bear down on, for want of a better term, anchoring their career. They had bills to pay…I mean, to go over to Roger’s house, with Earl, and me, that’s just like, man, what planet are you all on?! (laughs)

--

By the way, you’ve heard some of his playing, right, on electric bass?

Yes.

So, I mean, it’s a little different, isn’t it? You don’t hear any electric bass players playing like that. Or any upright players.

And I have to say, and I don’t feel good about it, I don’t think that I ever felt confident, to be able to say that I really learned…You never learn fully, maybe. Certain people you play with, what they can come up with is inexhaustible. There’s always something else happening. I’m not saying 100%, but just enough so I have the sense. I think one reason I could play with Earl, because most of the time, whether I was doing a good job or not...You don’t call stuff like that "a job," but I mean, whether I was playing well with him or not, there was enough of a rapport with him during that period. It’s like saying enough of a rapport with somebody that you feel like, to a certain extent, you have to be really on your p’s and q’s with, because you always felt that Earl was catching everything. (laughs)

--

My memory is just really foggy. I don’t know. In a way, being in Earl’s presence, it makes me think of when people hang out on a UFO or something. It’s not that easy to remember specifically, but you know it really was an experience!

Sound Unity festival, 1984; see Spiritual Fire on May 31; thanks to Rick Lopez

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from Blu-Nile IV / Henry P. Warner: The Art of the Ensemble CD

Henry P. Warner:
Henry P. Warner (1940-2014) was considered “one of the cats” in a variety of underground jazz circles in & around NYC, probably best known for his contributions to the Freestyle Band, Billy Bang's Survival Ensemble, & William Parker’s Through Acceptance of the Mystery Peace LP. Henry was a wonderful musician with a darting & emotional sound (“Dr. Nunez” on the Freestyle Band’s record is a personal favorite) who maintained a great spirit with music throughout the years while staying rooted in & contributing to his community. His interview in William Parker's Conversations has some deep history of the music & his experiences on the Lower East Side jazz scene: sitting in with Sun Ra at Slugs’, hanging with Pelikan & C Sharpe, jamming all night in the Basement with Wilbur Ware, triumphing over hard times that had him sleeping in Tompkins Square Park for a brief period (sometimes with trumpeter Dewey Johnson on the next bench over). He subsequently went on to lead his own bands, perform with groups such as the Vibrational Therapists, & take part in jam sessions in a multitude of scences. He was a teacher of long-standing at Mind-Builders Creative Arts Center in the Bronx.

On a personal note, when I started up the mailorder wing of 50 Miles, Henry was one of the first people I contacted, as I hoped to get copies of the Freestyle Band album. He was so enthusiastic & encouraging, and being able to offer such a singular & scarce title at a fair price was a big help in getting me started. We stayed in touch & I would try to catch his performances whenever he came down from Mount Vernon to play in the city. These events would often bring together musicians & listeners who hadn’t seen each other in years. You never knew who was going to turn up! Regrettably Henry & I never had a formal interview about his experiences with the Freestyle Band, but thankfully William Parker’s interview noted above covered some of this ground. From the first volume of Parker's Conversations, interview conducted on November 11, 2004:

Let me just talk about Earl Freeman for a minute. See, the sound that Earl Freeman got out of that bass was like nothing I've ever heard, and it was really like an organic, almost like a nature-type sound. Even though it was plugged in and there was electricity involved, it was really connected to the clouds, connected to the earth, and connected to the mountains. And it's unfortunate that Earl is not here.

Earl, man, Earl.... the most sensitive human being I've probably known. When I would meet him, man, he'd be smilin', he'd be happy, even though he'd be messed up sometimes, you know? He would always be happy. We would talk and go on for hours, man. And I'm saying, "Well, this is a sensitive cat, man." And he played like that. He had some kind of...a certain kind of touch. I would've loved to have heard him play upright.

Well, he had the same kind of thing on upright. He played cello for a while and then he played upright and then he went to electric. He was just an all-around interesting cat. The artwork and...

The wordsmith, you know. But Earl, man...I was so happy with that group [The Freestyle Band, with Warner on clarinets, Freeman on electric bass, and Ade Yeme on conga]...

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Sonny Simmons, San Francisco, 1971, by Jacques Bisceglia

Sonny Simmons:
On July 13, 2014, I sat down with legendary saxophonist Sonny Simmons at a restaurant in Hell's Kitchen NYC to discuss Earl Freeman. Thanks to Janet Janke.

When did you first make Earl’s acquaintance?

Back in the ’50s. He just had got out of the service. He was in the Army. Some of the brothers that was in the ’hood that played said, “There’s a new bass player in town.” I didn’t know him before that. And the cat is really hip, you know. I said, “Cool.” So this brother took me over to his house and introduced me to him and he was a cool cat, man. We began from that point forward. Several other brothers that he knew in Oakland before he met me, they were cool. They knew Earl. I think I was the only one that was a musician that didn’t know Earl. But the guy was a real sharp cat, man. He dressed nice, he had an up-to-date car, and he had a beautiful bass that he carried around with him just in case he was going to hit, you know? Things began to roll from that point on.

Where was he coming from musically at that time?

He was coming out from George Morrow, the bassist in Max [Roach]’s group. Mostly a cat in Oakland that he was most definitely influenced by, his name was Skippy Warren. Several other cats, you know, he was influenced by, but he had a unique style of his own. We just started practicing together and working on different compositions and it grew into something as a group.

Who else was in it?

We built a group in Oakland with some great jazz musicians there. You ever heard of a drummer named Smiley Winters?

Sure, yeah.

OK. So we put a group together with Smiley Winters and a few other cats. It was just cool, you dig? We can just keep travelin’, man. Yeah, he was cool.

Where would you be traveling to?

Just around in the local Bay Area scene. It was goin’ on back then in Oakland. Yeah, the cats was burnin’. They was cookin’. There was a whole lot of things goin’ on. Earl was ... the new bass player in town and all the cats dug him.

Did he ever talk much about his time in the service? He was in the Korean War, is that correct?

I think that’s where he was, but no, he didn’t talk about that too much. In fact, he was impaired where he had a bad lung. He only had one lung and I never did question him about that too much because that’s a sensitive area dealing with guys, asking a lot of questions and all that. So I let him mostly take the way on that issue.

Earl Freeman with Alan Shorter's quartet c.1972, photo by Horace. Thanks to Pierre Crepon.

You mentioned Earl’s beautiful bass. What kind of bass was it?

He bought it when he was in Europe. It was an expensive German bass, really high quality. Earl had a beautiful sound. He bought it when he was in the service and he brought it with him.

Were there a number of years where you guys were out of touch with one another and you reconnected in the ’80s? Or did you stay in touch throughout his life? How did that work?

He would come and go. Every time he would come, we would play. Smiley Winters was the master of ceremonies. We had a great band. Skippy Warren, he was the master bassist in Oakland at that time, and Earl was studying under him. Skippy Warren, he was a great bass player. We grew together from that point, and this is goin’ on in the ’50s until Earl got out of the service. We started a band on a permanent basis. It was the greatest band in Oakland at that time, so we had a great time, man.

How long was that particular band together?

On and off for a number of years.

 --

Earl was quite a guy. He was a traveler and he loved the music so much, he wanted to be around the cats that would give him inspiration besides being back in his hometown Oakland. But it was cool. He had a hard time trying to get up and down stairs because of his one lung, but he done it anyway. And then pretty soon his lady bought a car so he wouldn’t have to exert himself with the bass and he wouldn’t have to walk so far, especially when he got a gig, you know?

Just based upon Earl’s drawings and poetry that Kirk Heydt sent to me, from when they lived together in the ’80s, it seems like that might have been a hard time for Earl. There was one drawing, seemingly of himself on one side, and on the other side he writes, “Why can I not keep my bass out of pawn?”

That’s right. It was a tragedy, man. We both lived out of the pawn shop, you dig it? That’s the way it was then. No work and we had to exist some kind of way so that’s what we done, you dig? Earl and I both, and a number of other musicians. It was heavy, man.

So there just weren’t as many opportunities…

No.

One thing that I haven’t been able to figure out is, people tell me they think Earl had both a Chicago period and perhaps a period with Sun Ra. I don’t know if those two would’ve been at the same time or different times. Do you know about either or both of those?

Yeah, I know a bit about that period. He was crazy about Sun Ra because he was unusual. In fact, when he came back from Chicago, it’s good that you mentioned that, because all he could talk about was Sun Ra. He kept telling me that that’s who I should’ve been with at that time. He wanted me to meet this guy but I never did until way later on. But I dug it, I dug his music. I just left it there.

Do you think that Sun Ra might have also had something to do with his sense of visual presentation? Because obviously Sun Ra was very visual in terms of his garb and Earl was also taking a somewhat cosmic approach with his goggles and headgear and all that.

Yeah, he did, man. And it fitted his personality, his stature, physically. He was a unique guy. He didn’t look out of line but he certainly was unusual for that period.

Do you know if he ever worked a regular day job or anything like that?

No, Earl never did work no day job. The only thing Earl did was practice his bass and try to get acquainted with some guys to play with.

Did he ever lead a group?

No. He would do a lot of things but he didn’t lead no group. He mostly depended on me when we could be in contact with one another to deal with that, because remember that he had one lung and he was ill a lot. He would be silently suffering because of that problem.

There was an article written about Earl by Val Wilmer in the ’70s that talked about how he lived in France and he got in some trouble with the authorities for political activities. But it was very vague about that.

He was definitely against the authorities for that particular reason. He was quite intelligent about handling it. They didn’t like Earl because he was unusually weird because of the way he would dress and the way he would talk.

I guess the whole picture could just throw people off.

Yeah, the whole entire picture. So they hassled him. He didn’t back away. He kept forward.

at the Amougies Festival, Belgium, 1969, photo by Jacques Bisceglia

Many of records he’s on are with Archie Shepp. He played on Black Gipsy, the one with Archie and Philly Joe...

Yeah, that’s the way it was because Archie dug Earl because he was unusual in his whole persona.

Most of those records he was on came out on the BYG/Actuel label, who was recording a lot of the American expats who were over there at that time.

I didn’t get a chance to hang with Earl during that period that much because sometimes he would become very unusual and hard to deal with because of his illness. I understood his illness but the other people, the other musicians, didn’t. So I was sort of like his protector in a sense. We lived in Olympia, Washington, together [in the '80s]. We had an association there. He didn’t like it.

Why not?

I hated it. I didn’t like it. He didn’t like it, either. … The racism was so heavy and he was always being hassled by the cops because of his unusual dress. …And of course Earl would get really out there in his diction, the way he would talk. There wasn’t nothin’ wrong with it; it was just that people thought that he was highly weird and unusual. And they didn’t like Earl too much because he was very forward. He would tell them just how he felt.

The way Daniel Carter described it to me, he said, “Earl did not appreciate unnecessary idiocy.”

That’s right, he sure didn’t! He didn’t deal with it.

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Kirk Heydt performing with Sonny Simmons & Earl Freeman, 1990

Kirk Heydt:
As an emerging young player on the Bay area creative music scene in the early 1980s, Kirk Charles Heydt regularly collaborated & briefly lived with Earl Freeman. We discussed these times via phone on August 27, 2015. Today Heydt owns Spin Records in Boise, ID, & is involved in an array of musical projects: see https://spinrecordsboise.com/

I met [Earl Freeman] when I was playing with Sonny [Simmons]. We knew [about] him before then, those BYG records with Archie Shepp, that picture of him with that aviator hat and all that. So I remember we were just doing something with Sonny [and he said], "Hey, we gotta go get somebody: Earl Freeman." So we went down and he was living in this crazy situation with these crazy people. Sonny referred to it as dogpatch…It was a couple of really strange…I don’t know how he knew these ladies, but he was staying there. Going back, he had a lung thing and I’m sure you heard about that.

It isn't clear to me quite what happened. Henry Warner, who played with Earl in the Freestyle Band, said that he thought something happened to him in the Korean War. What did you hear?

He was in the military. He told me...they were doing experiments, mostly on young black men at the time, with radiation and other things. I guess one lung stopped working and I guess his father had said, "Hey, this is a young man, you’ve got to do something," so they gave him a stipend, like a lifetime amount of money. I don’t know if it ever went up. He basically got a check, which in later years kept him just par for the month. So that’s probably why he was in that situation with those ladies, just staying where he could stay.

So we started playing right away and talking. We went and did poetry [readings]. Bob Kaufman and some of the heavyweights from the Beat scene were still going. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Bob Kaufman, Solitudes [Crowded with Loneliness]... Anyway, he was a very heavy poet. We used to go to this place called the Spaghetti Room in North Beach in San Francisco and we’d sit in behind these poets and play.

So it would be just the two of you?

Just the two of us. I was playing sax and he was playing the bass. And then we did the album with Sonny, Global Jungle [in 1982]. It’s interesting because it seemed like Earl, in an improvisational situation, he would fill all the other notes, just kind of be able to intuitively do that.

He had a couple things where he wrote and read his poetry. We did a couple of really big things where we had a larger group. There was this guy, I guess he made money in the stock market, and he would drag this old car down to funky clubs and the wires would be dragging down the street, and he’d set up these keyboards. We played some real out stuff with the large band.

 
Norris Felton Cogell, photographers unknown

That “Constellations” flier had you with Earl, Jeff Grubeck, Norris Cogell (1944-2019)…

That’s him, Norris.

Hasaan Dawkins…

Hasaan was a horn player, right?

Only known video footage of saxophonist Hasaan (sometimes "Hassan") Dawkins, from Sonny Simmons' Live 1990 DVD-R. Here the band includes Earl Freeman (electric bass), Chris Amberger (upright bass), Kirk Heydt (cello), Dylan Morgan (drums), & an unknown-to-me percussionist. Recorded at Koncepts Cultural Gallery in Oakland, CA.

Yeah, and Lynne Wildey was reading and Ernest Anderson on conga.

Yeah, a lot of those people never showed up. It was in this funky little club in the Tenderloin in the middle of nowhere, typical for the music.

But my time with him was super brief. Near the end…I don’t know about end, I guess it was about a ten-year span, and he was staying in funky places. He stayed with me for a while, stayed with another drummer friend, and it wasn’t the best of times for Earl. He was getting older.

When you lived together, did he practice a lot?

Not excessively, I wouldn’t say, at that point. He always wanted to play, whenever. Always. Any situation.

Did he talk much about his earlier life and his history? There are gaps that I don’t know about. Some have said that he spent some time in Chicago but I don’t know when that was. People talk about him being with Sun Ra at some point, but I think if he did do that, it would’ve been even before Marshall Allen got into the Arkestra in the late 1950s. I can’t really get a bead on it.

I vaguely remember him talking about Chicago and I think he did talk about Sun Ra. I mean, he was one of the cats. He remembered Sonny back in Oakland. He said, “Man, Sonny was out and crazy back when he was a teenager when he first came from Louisiana.” I guess they knew each other in the ’50s in Oakland. I would give that credibility, about the Chicago.

He was a very quiet guy, even for a long time, but then sometimes he would become very…it would kick in and he would become very pissed off or whatever. At a certain point with certain things he could get very irritated, almost to the point of maybe some violence, but not really. Just internalize…And then usually he’d get some little kind of a drink or something and then he’d be happy, talking and positive, talking about art, after a couple drinks. ... He had a real beautiful spirit about all that. Obviously a little bit of fantasy, y’know, considering his reality, but that’s the way everybody deals with things. That’s the way I deal with things, too.

But yeah, I don’t know how much I can add. My memory fades. I was in my 20s, [and] he was in his, I don’t know, 50s? He was a very young spirit. He was timeless, and of course he had that look about him, almost from another world. Tall, skinny guy - he was a rail - the hat, the big, big eyes. He was, I think, very sensitive to light. I don’t know, a lot of that has to do, I think, with his health. I think that’s what probably slowed him down more than anything in life, fighting against that. He had one lung, so...he could only go so far with strenuous physical activity, a lot of walking and stuff. Of course, he was a lot older when I met him, too.

But basically, what I could say about Earl is that he was a true Renaissance man. An old school poet, really into the arts, at one point was over in Europe and I guess was inspired to live his whole life with art and music. That’s what he was about.

Earl Freeman, San Francisco, early '90s, photo by Mylo Freeman

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Dylan Morgan:
Dylan Morgan has worked as a jazz drummer (seen in the video above, accompanying Earl Freeman), cellist, painter, poet, & filmmaker. After studying drums with Milford Graves in 1982, he recorded with Sonny Simmons on Global Jungle (Deal With It, 1985). Morgan’s paintings were published in Lorna Cervantes’ Drive, the First Quartet (Wings Press, 2006), and he has exhibited nationwide. He directed & performed with Roberto Haven the project A Wiser, More Beautiful Death, combining live original chamber music with readings of Miklós Radnóti’s poetry, throughout the San Francisco Bay Area in 2009-2010. He is preparing poetry & music pieces with the writings of Hernandez, Machado, Okigbo, Torga, Stanescu, and others. Morgan lives in Santa Cruz.” (bio from Morgan’s A Chosen Harvest) Morgan spoke with me about Earl Freeman in April 2021. Below are some notes from our conversation, not quotes, approved by Morgan.

Kirk Heydt recruited Dylan to play in the band with Sonny Simmons and Earl. Earl was very encouraging to Dylan about his drumming. Dylan had studied with Milford Graves but was by this time focused more on painting and didn't really want to be a drummer anymore, but Earl was very respectful and encouraging about his playing, whereas Sonny could be difficult to work with. Dylan thought Earl was in another dimension than the rest of the band and seemed to be hearing something of his own. Earl's approach to the bass within this group was very elastic.

Earl would always wear his one-piece jumpsuit with an army helmet, goggles, and big boots. He was eccentric, slow moving, and deliberate.

One time, Dylan and Kirk were trying to find Earl. They went to search for him at a video game arcade where he was known to hang out. They found him paying some kids to not play games for a few minutes, while paying other kids to play particular games. He was in a sense conducting them and the sounds of the games, while standing in the middle to hear it all.

apparent self-portrait, mid-late 1980s? courtesy of Kirk Heydt

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Leopanar Witlarge:
Born in Guyana & currently living in Brooklyn, NY, Leopanar Witlarge is a multi-instrumentalist & visual artist. He started out as a painter in 1962 & subsequently expanded his ambitious vision to include photography, video, music (acoustic & electronic), digital art, architecture, and designing/constructing original musical instruments. In the creative improvised music world, over the years he has periodically organized his own projects & occasionally collaborated with prominent musicians such as Roswell Rudd, Bill Dixon (see this outrageous 1968 lineup), William Parker, Juma Sultan, Daniel Carter, & Cooper-Moore. Unfortunately, there does not seem to be much easily accessible documentation of his creative output. Visions, Susan Littenberg's very fine documentary of the 1997 Vision Festival, includes clips of Witlarge speaking & performing, & this video gives an introduction to his art. Mr. Witlarge reminisced about collaborating & living with Earl Freeman via telephone on May 23 & August 24, 2021.

I first met him in the '70s. I was walking down in the East Village and I walked by a storefront run by a guy named John Mingione [trumpeter & flugelhornist who ran Anima Records/Productions]. The door was wide open and I met Wilber Morris, Jerome Cooper, Billy Bang, and Earl Freeman. Who else? I don't think there was anybody else. So I just walked in and sat down, and the next thing you know, I was playing with them. Not the same day, but in future meetings. That's how I met Earl Freeman.

Was that a regular venue? Did it have a name?

No, that was just his storefront, where [Mingione] lived. He had a couple instruments there, so musicians would drop by.

You also knew Earl in Boston...when was that? I'm not aware of his period there.

That was the '70s. I left New York in '70 [to go to Boston] and I came back in '75, so it was some time between '70 and '75.

When I came back to New York, there was a loft festival. It was 1977, I think, where there was simultaneous, around-the-clock music. All the lofts were involved. I did a concert at Joe Lee [Wilson]'s loft [The Ladies' Fort] at six o'clock in the morning, and Earl was one of the musicians.

Who else was in the band? What did you play?

There was Roger Baird, he was a drummer from Canada. Daoud Stevens played alto clarinet and I played alto clarinet...and Earl was playing his fretless [electric] bass.

Was that a group that you organized?

Yeah, I organized it.

What prompted you to want Earl to be in that band?

I had played with him a few times, with Daniel Carter. I remember playing at Plexus on the Lower East Side. ... What I heard him do, man, was incredible. I could hear what he was doing and it was more advanced than what I heard him play with other people.

Was that the only time that group performed in public?

That was the only time. I tend to do things project-based. Or, put it another way, I don't have a group. I've never had a group. I've always managed to get a bunch of people together and it's usually one time. I really don't believe in having a group, you know? I'm thinking of myself more as a composer or a multi-media artist, things like that. So it's always unique, you know?

Was that group under your own name or did it have a collective name?

I can't remember. Sometimes I used the New Age Folk Art Ensemble, and most recently I've been using Ships of Light. That was the most continuous name. [subsequently unearthed info suggests the group was likely billed as The New Frontier Ensemble -ed.]

Did this group have any compositions or was it freely improvised throughout?

At the festival? It was freely improvised.

So, you & Earl also played together with Daniel Carter?

Yeah. He had organized something at a place called the Healing Center. That was interesting. And sometimes we would play at Roger Baird's apartment. He had a penthouse apartment and we would play until dawn sometimes.

You said you and Earl lived together in Boston. How long was that for? It sounds like it was pretty brief?

Yeah, he stayed briefly. I was in Boston from '70 to '75. He came through and he stayed maybe a couple months.

What was it like living with him?

(laughs) He was an interesting cat. Interesting cat. We didn't talk much. He played. He didn't eat very much. He would cook a big pot of kidney beans and eat two tablespoons full. That was his meal. He would just play and play and play and play. He didn't take care of himself, man.

One time I guess the heat got to him...This was at Plexus. He was playing and all of a sudden he fell over, like a tall tree, and we were kind of worried.

Did you see him drawing much?

Sometimes he would draw, but more practice, more playing.

only known painting by Earl Freeman, date unknown, courtesy of Mylo Freeman

Since you mentioned this Boston period, my understanding is that you may have collaborated with Phill Musra and Michael Cosmic...

No, I didn't play with them. I played with Jamyll Jones, the bass player. He had a group called World's [aka World's Experience Orchestra]. He had a very good violin player, John Klein. Larry Lerner, drummer. He also had a radio show at WBUR, which was very eclectic. Anything from Buddhist chants to Art Ensemble of Chicago and Cecil Taylor. And he had a cello player, Robert Ruff. And myself, I played alto saxophone.

OK. One reason why I asked, someone told me that Earl might have done some informal recordings with Phill Musra and Michael Cosmic, but I had no idea when that would have been, or if it could have been in this Boston period that you were talking about.

It's possible. There was a place called the Black Avant Garde. Many people played there. Michael Gregory Jackson played there. Larry Roland played there. Quite a few people.

As a musician, do you have any comments on his style on the electric bass?

Well, I would say...when there was a whole bunch of musicians, his playing in that environment had to be more spare, because if everybody's playing a thousand notes, it becomes noise. But what I heard, and what I wish he had more chance to have recorded, it sounded like flamenco with a bit of atonal stuff. Very, very, very interesting. Because it was a fretless bass, he could do a lot of glissandos, a lot of slides and stuff like that. That was very, very interesting.

The records that I've heard him on didn't do justice to him because everybody was playing at the same time, really. Sometimes it was very cacophonous. You couldn't really hear what he was capable of doing.

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Patricia Nicholson Parker & William Parker, 1978, photo by John Wilkins

Patricia Nicholson Parker:
Patricia Nicholson Parker has been actively engaged with dance, movement, & creative improvisation since the early 1970s. For over 40 years she has been a leader in organizing this community in NYC, most prominently as the founder & artistic director of Arts for Art. Her earliest recorded appearance (as Patsy Wilkins) was on Earl Freeman's Universal Jazz Symphonette Sound Craft '75: Fantasy for Orchestra LP (Anima), where she recites text that is unfortunately difficult to fully decipher on the recording but clearly indicates the spiritual direction of the concert & the moment. We spoke about that event & other related topics on July 15, 2022.

The Universal Jazz Symphonette record that you did a recitation on seems to be a major work for Earl.

It was so intense. ... I remember sitting outside on the steps of the church, listening, because you could hear it better from outside. Inside the sound was too dense. ... It was too intense and I couldn't hear the music, when I was in the room.

I feel like I didn't really know [Earl]. I was around him. It was really seeing him more from the sidelines, from William [Parker], although I was thrilled to be part of it. But I think, for everyone that was there, it must have been a lot to take in. There were so many instruments, all playing at the same time. But if you listened from outside of the building, you could hear it.

[Earl] was a mysterious figure to me. He didn't talk a lot. He moved quietly from place to place. In that moment, I remember him as part of the Music Ensemble. Although he wasn't part of the beginning of the Music Ensemble [Daniel Carter, Malik Baraka, William Parker, & Roger Baird], he was there. I remember him at Anita Weschler's gallery [with the Music Ensemble], as being important in that. But I have to say my experience of him was as a mysterious figure that William looked up to, I think, or highly respected.

Looking at the credits on the record, you see all these people who were involved. Not only in terms of musicians, but of course you do a reading, as does Barbara Blick. There's choreography, there's photography of Richard Dunbar...For those of us who only know the concert from the record, can you give some context of how the visual elements worked?

I would think of it as a happening, almost. Not quite, because it wasn't hippy-dippy. I think he had music, but I remember it as very loose. He certainly had a concept. He brought everyone together. People did their part and then they probably, like me, stepped outside, and then they may have come back in. It happened over time. It wasn't like anything else, I would say. It was like nothing else. The best way to hear it probably it is on the record, or else sitting outside the church, which was amazing. But then you couldn't see it all. The only way to see the piece is through other people's eyes, because there was so much going on. No one set of eyes could see everything that was going on, because there was too much to see all of it.

It expressed the incredible openness of the time. Right now, people are fighting over turf and defining music. ... At that time, there weren't categories in the same way, although this would have been considered tremendously avant-garde at any point in any time. But it was a period of time that allowed for that. He had the imagination to call for that.

I'm not getting the sense that there were a lot of rehearsals coming up to this event.

No, I don't think there were any. ... There certainly weren't any as far as I remember.

The concert was at Washington Square Methodist Church...

Also known as the Peace Church.

Right, that is one of my other questions. I understand they were also pioneers for acceptance of the gay and lesbian community in the church. Do you think any of this factored into the selection of the venue? Or was this just a place where concerts happened all the time during that period?

Well, both. It was a place where concerts happened because it was so open and accepting. It was a creative space. It was accessible and a creative, experimental space. You'd think of it because, "Oh, where are we going to do this? Oh, let's do it there..." But I don't think it was a political choice, exactly.

I'm guessing that Earl must have self-produced the concert, or perhaps with John Mingione [of Anima, who released the album]?

With John. I am 90% sure [Earl] didn't have any money. I never remember him having anything.

There was an insert that appeared in some copies of the record where he has a sketch of the stage. (shown above)

This looks familiar. It looks really clear and specific, but also it's incredibly vague at the same time. It's just the placement of everything. ... It doesn't have a place for dance or for speakers ... so this is pretty partial. This is a sketch of a basic set-up, but in reality the room was filled with people and filled with sound. He must have called me in at some time to read. I don't remember dancing, but I may have. I must have, because I loved to dance. When I was that age, my energy was almost unstoppable. Look at me now - I can still move. When I was in my 20s, I didn't get tired, hardly. I was just stronger than your average bear, or your average dancing bear. (laughs)

You have to understand, I was really young. I was just taking everything in. I was participating, but Earl was developed. This was a culmination for him, of a lot of stuff. It was really a grand opera, in a way. I wish that I had understood it, but I didn't. I was too young and it was too dense to hear it really clearly, which probably was somewhat on purpose, because Earl was a secretive person. So he was expressing it and hiding it at the same time, is the way I would interpret it now.

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Earl Freeman & Barre Phillips from the Magick Brother gatefold, photos by Christian Rose &/or Guy Lequerrec

Gong:

Another on the long list of Earl Freeman related mysteries is how he came to be involved with Gong & appear on a couple songs on their Magick Brother LP, which was released on BYG/Actuel c.1969. Unfortunately, details of the connection may be lost to the fog of jazz. I contacted Gong’s co-founder Daevid Allen via his colleague Michael Clare in 2014 & Allen replied, "I hardly knew Earl so I would have little to contribute there."

In 2015 I emailed pianist Burton Greene, who also appeared on that album, to see if he might remember. He replied, "You are talking about events more than 40 years ago. I don't recall much details other than the fact that Daevid booked us for that date (and also Barre Phillips). I guess we were the jazz contingent on that LP. Earl was a lovely, friendly and talented guy... I remember doing a gig somewhere with him in Paris that I thoroughly enjoyed! I do remember him always wearing that aviator cap!"

Further info always welcomed!

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Juma Sultan, Noah Howard, Frank Lowe, Rashied Ali, Bob Bruno, & Earl Freeman c.1975, photo by Val Wilmer



Wind Pattern, est. 1980s; thanks to Kirk Heydt

Hommage to George Jackson, est. 1980s; thanks to Kirk Heydt


Fun Center, c.1990; thanks to Margaret Lee



Matinee, est. 1980s; thanks to Kirk Heydt

in Skien, Norway, c.1960; thanks to Mylo Freeman

Earl & Mylo Freeman, Skien, Norway, c.1960; thanks to Mylo Freeman

Earl Freeman, Skien, Norway, c.1960s; thanks to Mylo Freeman

Untitled drawing, published in unknown periodical; c.1980s/'90s? Thanks to Margaret Lee.



Seeking info on Volta 77, a group with Earl Freeman & Hasaan Dawkins,
mentioned in this article from Massachusetts Daily Collegian, April 15, 1977

Seeking info on "Poet Ela" & further Freeman collaborations with Alan Shorter
article from the San Francisco Bay Guardian, May 9-18, 1979

Seeking more of The Turbo Chimes, seemingly self-published c.1975 or so; thanks to Margaret Lee

drawing from The Turbo Chimes, published in Kitabu Cha Jua, 1975

Seeking info on this collection, perhaps titled 12 Micro Graphics, again seemingly self-published, maybe c.1980s?
cover drawing almost certainly a reference to his stint in a mental hospital noted near the top of this page

Ron Welburn's review of Noah Howard's Patterns LP in the Syracuse New Times, September 23, 1973:
"Earl Freeman['s]...firm tone could not be bested in his ability to keep the music loose..."

Sound Craft '75 reviewed by Ron Welburn in The Grackle No. 4, 1977-78

from the collection of Margaret Lee (not entirely clear which way is up...)

Earl Freeman in silhouette c.1961, courtesy of Mylo Freeman

Further contributions / corrections / suggestions / etc. all eagerly welcomed.