The Jazzman

Charles Freeman Lee, was born in New York City on August 13, 1927 the only son of three children born to Louella Simpson Lee and Charles Henry Lee. Freeman, as he was always known, grew up with his sisters, Mary Lee White and Jane Lee Ball in Springfield and Wilberforce, Ohio with their Grandma Mary and their father Charles Snr., after the death of their mother in childbirth.

Although Freeman graduated in 1948 with a B.Sc. in Biology from Central State College, he had actually attended Wilberforce University: Central State College from which he graduated, formally dissociated from Wilberforce University in the 1940s and became an independent institution, issuing its own degrees.

Freeman Lee and his sisters Mary Lee White and Jane Lee Ball as students at Wilberforce University circa 1946
Freeman Lee jamming at the Paradise Club, Harlem in 1952 as shown in this photograph which appeared in the October 1952 edition of Ebony magazine.

While at Wilberforce University in the late 1940s, Freeman joined the Wilberforce Collegians, where Frank Foster was the bandmate in charge of the arrangements for the band. Wilberforce Collegians had been formed in 1920s by early jazz pianist and arranger Horace Henderson, brother of Fletcher, who was enrolled at Wilberforce at the same time as trumpeter Benny Carter. Composer and jazz theorist George Russell also attended high school and Wilberforce University with Freeman and was later helpful to Freeman when he tried to make it on trumpet in New York.

Freeman joined Snooky Young’s band on piano in Dayton, Ohio in early 1950 – Snooky Young ended up in Doc Severinsen’s band on the Tonight Show - and eventually left Snooky's band in Ohio after a few months, to gig around the east coast on trumpet with saxophonist Candy Johnson’s band which included Jack McDuff, still a bassist then, and “Moon” Edward Mullins a tenor sax man. The band gigged around the Jersey shore – a lot of one-nighters – and a bitter argument over money had Freeman quitting the band to look for work in New York.

There, he joined saxophonist Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson’s band in 1951. He later recalled his surprise that the song Tune Up had, in recent years, been attributed to Miles Davis because when he was with Vinson in 1951, the band regularly used that number to tune up at rehearsals. Tune up was, by his recollection, an Eddie Vinson creation and not Miles Davis. During 1951 to 1952, Freeman played with saxophonist Sonny Stitt's band and with saxophonist Joe Holiday in 1953.

Between 1954 and 1955 Freeman free-lanced around the east coast with various jazzmen including gigs with saxophonist Lou Donaldson, pianists Thelonious Monk and Elmo Hope and trumpeter Howard McGhee. In 1956, Freeman then joined saxophonist, James Moody’s band and played New York City and around the east coast. In 1957 Freeman free-lanced around New York with various jazzmen and had a regular Monday night gig at Birdland where he recalls seeing Ava Gardner, Sydney Poitier and others among the patrons.

Freeman spent much of his time as a young musician at the Paradise Club and Minton's Playhouse in Harlem where he jammed with the more well- known jazzmen like Thelonius Monk, Wilbur Ware, Idrees Sulieman, Sonny Rollins, Joe Gordon, Blue Mitchell, Art Farmer, Benny Bailey, Elmo Hope and Lou Donaldson and others. In a 1980s Interview of Freeman by his late sister and Professor of English, Jane Lee Ball Freeman discusses jam sessions at the Paradise and Minton's Playhouse and, in particular, the competitive spirit among musicians, when it came to who could “show up” whom in handling their bebop key changes on the bandstand at the Paradise and Minton’s.