Concert: Solos & Duos Series - Fred Anderson/Chad Taylor Duo
The Solos & Duos Series, produced by the Fine Arts Center, concludes its sixth season with a concert by The Fred Anderson/Chad Taylor Duo.
Tenor saxophonist Fred Anderson is one of Chicago’s most powerful soloists, and a founding member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), the most successful musician-run collective in jazz history. He is also the owner and operator of the Velvet Lounge, a South Side working-class bar by day, and legendary jazz club by night. After many years of being largely unrecorded, Anderson is currently enjoying great popularity, so it's easy to forget that he has been a leader of Chicago's jazz community for over 30 years. He appears on Joseph Jarman’s 1966 Delmark Record, Song For, a landmark recording and an early testament to what Anderson was doing. He also headed several AACM-related groups in the '60s.
In the late '70s, Anderson ran his first club, The Birdhouse, named for Charlie Parker. While two recordings from 1980 came out on CD almost 20 years later, no other available recordings document Anderson's work from 1981-1993. When the Chicago label Okka Disk started in the mid-'90s, the first thing it did was issue an unreleased 1980 duo recording with drummer Steve McCall. Not long after came Birdhouse, recorded in 1994. Since then there have been a steady supply of new recordings released on Okka Disk, Asian Improv, Delmark other labels. His Eremite Records release, 2 Days in April, (with ‘Kidd’ Jordan, William Parker and Hamid Drake), recorded in Boston and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, was considered one the top ten recordings of 2000 in Wire, Cadence, Magnet and Coda Magazines.
Percussionist Chad Taylor was born in Tempe, Arizona in 1973, and moved to Chicago when he was 1O years old. In 1991, he moved to New York to play with Lou Donaldson, “Junior” Mance, Leon Parker, and Mark Turner and returned to Chicago in 1996 to help form the Chicago Underground Ensemble with Rob Mazurek. Since then he has worked with Derek Bailey, Bobby Bradford, Peter Brotzmann, Roy Campbell, Eugene Chadbourne, Ernest Dawkins, Malachi Favors, Henry Grimes, Leroy Jenkins, Joe McPhee, Roscoe Mitchell, Jemeel Moondoc, Marc Ribot, John Zorn, and many other extraordinary improvisers. He is also part of Chicago's post-rock scene, where he has recorded and/or collaborated with Brokeback, Isotope 217, Mouse on Mars, StereoLab, Tortoise, Jim O'Rourke, and Sam Prekop.
