Fred Anderson’s Velvet Lounge: What It Meant Then, What It STill Means Today…and Tomorrow
Panel discussion held at Hyde Park Jazz Festival discusses club’s history and still-present influence
Bassist Harrison Bankhead walking the dog while saxophonist Bill Perry, (seated, front of stage), trumpeter Billy Brimfield, Von Freeman, and Justin Dillard dig and comprehend. (Photo by Lauren Deutsch)
Ethereal, ensemble expressions – starting with the guimbri, a three-string bass from North Africa – were soon enhanced by tenor saxophone, a meditative chant, frame drum, an acoustic bass, and electric guitar. These sounds embraced everyone’s ears upon entering the Logan Center Screening Room at the University of Chicago.
This exploration, “From the River to the Ocean,” flowed on a loop from the room’s speakers. Its creators – saxophonist Fred Anderson (1929-2010), drummer/chanter Hamid Drake, guitarist Jeff Parker, bassist Harrison Bankhead (1955-2023), and guimbri player Joshua Abrams – had, along with countless other bold souls, lived freely through the moment-based music made on stage at an unadorned (now defunct) sound laboratory on Chicago’s South side: The Velvet Lounge, Established 1982.The song served as a soundtrack for the slideshow seen on the screen situated stage center.
Four photographers – Lauren Deutsch, Marc PoKempner, Michael Jackson, and Mark Sheldon – contributed their images that comprised the presentation. It began with PoKempner’s black-and-white images outside the Velvet’s original location, 2128 ½ South Indiana Avenue, and concluded with Deutsch’s photo montage, featuring Anderson, the club’s patriarch. Also captured by the four were Ernest Dawkins, Ken Vandermark, Nicole Mitchell, Henry Grimes, David Boykin, Von Freeman, and numerous other expressionists.
Despite its demise as a creative music oasis in 2012, this venue’s forever imprint, and the open, honest humility and artist acceptance by Anderson, are still being cherished by performers and patrons everywhere. On September 23, the Hyde Park Jazz Festival presented “Velvet Lounge 40 Years Later: A Legacy of Place.” Its panel included bassist Tatsu Aoki, Velvet handyman and Anderson assistant Andy Pierce, drummers Avreeayl Ra and Isaiah Spencer, and Velvet bartender Donna Joy Wolfe.
At 4 p.m., razor sharp, the conversation began. Moderated by some dude who resembled Idris Elba – minus the money, muscles, and movies – the first thought prompter asked: “What moment, at this moment, is foremost in your mind when someone says, ‘The Velvet Lounge’?”
Ra recalled when the Velvet’s clientele included community folks who enjoyed the space as a neighborhood tavern and a neighborhood tavern only. When Anderson began the twice-monthly Sunday afternoon jam sessions, the regulars’ suspicions were aroused. Then, once a four-dollar cover charge was implemented, “the community members were really salty about that,” Ra said. “Then the clientele turned over from community members to jazz fans and players.”
During these early transitional days, Ra added, he and saxophonist Ari Brown hosted Community Music Workshops on Thursdays. “From there, (the music bookings) went from Thursday to almost every night,” he said. “It was Ari, myself, and (bassist) Fred Hopkins. When Fred got ill, we replaced him with Malachi Favors. And, at one time, it was Malachi and Rollo Radford, who was my bass mate in Sun Ra’s Arkestra. This is very meaningful to me when you start talking about the Velvet.”
For Aoki, performing Black-influenced, Asian-American creative music served as spiritual mentorship. Chicago’s Asian-American creative musicians, he explained, were not accepted at other venues due to the city’s segregated scene. (Aoki also mentioned Fred Chicago Chamber Music, an album he recorded with Anderson and drummer Afifi Phillard, as a major accomplishment.)
“The Velvet was much more than a place to play. It was okay for us to play who we are and okay to be who we are,” said the Tokyo-born artist, who, along with Ra, played in Anderson’s trios and quartets. “We could do whatever we wanted. We would bring in taiko drums, and Avreeayl and I would play them, the horn, and the shamisen. The Velvet was the only place (for us) during the late 90s’ to 2012.”
Isaiah Spencer described how he and his homeboys – trumpeters Maurice Brown and Corey Wilkes, keyboardist Justin Dillard, and bassist Junius Paul – were able to find and enhance their voices at the Velvet, where Anderson allowed everyone to explore.
“He never berated anyone,” Spencer began, “but he was also adamant that we understood the traditions and different trajectories that go along with the music and other ethnic music.”
When first asked by Anderson to lead the weekly jam sessions, Spencer hesitated. After additional encouragement from Fred – “Naw, man, I think you can do it. The cats dig you,” – he agreed, and would then lead the house band, which included saxophonist Matana Roberts, bassist Joshua Abrams, keyboardist Jim Baker, and drummer Chad Taylor.
“That was my first gig as a bandleader,” said Spencer, whose groups have played at Andy’s and other spots for some years now. “Being a bandleader and composer today, twenty years later, and working with youth, is what I do as an educator. If that moment (when I accepted the challenge) didn’t happen, I would not be on this stage doing what I do now.”
Spencer’s previous ensemble would play the final gig at the original Velvet and the first at its second and final location, 67 East Cermak Road. (A recording from the former, The Last Day of Velvet, is still in Spencer’s possession. He may release it in the future.) He did not know about the first distinction until receiving a call at home the next day from Anderson, who needed to tell him something serious had happened.
The roof had caved in.
On his drums.
“‘Say, man, I think we got an accident,’” Spencer recalled being told. “ ‘I don’t know if anything is bent. All I see is a lot of white stuff.’”
Spencer’s attention soon went from the Bears game to his gear. Anderson promised to reimburse him for any damages, but this proved unnecessary. (The cave-in culprit will be revealed soon, so keep hanging out here for the revelation.)
Abstrakt Pulse, Spencer’s ensemble with Paul, Wilkes, saxophonist Kevin Nabors, and tap dancer (tapist?) Jumaane Taylor, opened the new Velvet.
“Fred could not charge, because he had not yet gotten his entertainment license. He could only get donations,” Spencer said. “In those first two nights, we made three grand. We gave Fred five hundred.”
When the Sunday sessions at the original Velvet were led by trumpeter Billy Brimfield, Donna Joy Wolfe confronted her fears experienced when walking briskly past the club and decided to venture in.
“It was so desolate and scary around there,” she recalled. After meeting Anderson, Wolfe began vibing with the house band, which included drummer Ajaramu, bassist Louie Varro, and Dudley Ammons, who, she said, “sang like Arthur Prysock.”
When break-time came, Wolfe continued, the questions from Brimfield began: “ ‘Who are you? Where you come from? You married? You coming back?’ ” she said, smiling, while the forum’s attendees laughed along with her. Wolfe returned regularly to the sessions, bringing along Debra Wyatt, her good friend. Soon, both would become the Velvet’s bartenders. “We had crazy fun with those guys,” she said.
“When I came to work at the Velvet, I had them all in one place,” she continued. “And now they’re everywhere. I see their names and smile. They’re doing fantastic stuff.”
Once Wolfe became a Velvet employee, she decided to finally confront something that threatened her last nerve: the women’s restroom.
“Unacceptable!” she said, while those in the know laughed. “I brought some hand towels, so you didn’t have to pull down that pull-down thing that you didn’t know was ever clean. I think I even left a bowl of potpourri in there.”
Fred Anderson’s real focus, Andy Pierce began, involved paying every invoice so that the Velvet’s doors would remain open.
“He knew when that bill was going to hit the mailbox, and if it wasn’t there, he worried that he had lost it,” said Pierce, who has contributed numerous Anderson performance recordings to the Creative Audio Archive at the Experimental Sound Studio, 5925 North Ravenswood. “He went to great lengths to keep the Velvet square and subsidized it, too, with his gigs.”
Then, as his lips and legs began trembling in double time, Pierce admitted to being the cave-in culprit. Above oath, he testified that he and Clarence Bright, Velvet’s audio engineer, had fixed the roof, because a tree, cut down during demolition done nearby, had poked holes in it.
“Several months later, the plaster dried out, so it eventually fell,” he explained. “I told Fred, ‘We don’t have to close. We can fix this. Nobody will know.’ But Fred said, ‘No. We’re done. That’s it.’”
Fred’s Legacy, Fred’s Limits
Jazz journalist John Litweiler, who joined the panel as the audience Q & A began, likened the Velvet to an international jazz festival. Then, directly addressing the panel’s musicians, said: “I’m sure you’ve seen the world’s greatest jazz venues, the world’s greatest jazz cities, and I wonder if any place you’ve been can match the quality of the Velvet Lounge,” he said. “I’m just beyond flabbergasted that we had this right next door.”
Spencer added that the Velvet’s legacy is being preserved today by local venues like the Hungry Brain and Constellation.
“The actual bar from the Velvet is at Constellation,” he noted. “And the picture from the Velvet, of the African-American lady (Julie Nice) with the ‘fro and things showing, is there. Almost any place where there’s creative music, you can’t help but think of the Velvet Lounge and Fred Anderson.”
While Anderson’s legacy and openness nurtured artists from embryonic expressions to international presence, Velvet alumna Linda Marusarz Platt shared a story where limits were imposed. It happened during an AfterFest performance at the original location.
“Saxophonist Hanah Jon Taylor, who is very tall, was playing beneath the chandelier that he hit with his horn while he was playing, and he liked the effect,” she said. “And he kept bouncing it with his horn. Fred noted this, and said, ‘No!’ That’s the only time he did not allow freedom of expression.”
(Moderator’s identity: Said dude, word has it, done published pieces about Von Freeman, Roy McGrath, Eric Hochberg, and other cats on this very website.)
