Bud Freeman & His Famous Chicagoans

• Genres: Jazz

Biography

This band was a sort of fiction perpetrated by Columbia Records and producer John Hammond for a 1940 album -- yes, an "album" consisting of four LP-sized shellac discs in a book that looked like a photo-album -- called Comes Jazz. The group was built out of an Eddie Condon-organized outfit based in New York that had billed themselves on-stage as the "Summa Cum Laude Orchestra." For the July 24, 1940 gig that yielded the album,Bud Freeman was the frontman on tenor sax -- the rest were Max Kaminsky (cornet), Jack Teagarden (trombone, vocals) (subbing for Brad Gowans from the "Summa Cum Laude Orchestra"), Pee Wee Russell (clarinet), Dave Bowman (piano), Eddie Condon (guitar), Morty Stuhlmaker (bass), and Dave Tough (drums). The fiction, as related by Dick Sudhalter, was that none of these guys (not even Freeman) had much -- if any -- connection to Chicago-style jazz in any idiom. The music was good enough, however, to get reissued several times, on the Columbia in 1950 under its original title and also on Epic. ~ Bruce Eder, All Music Guide