**2026 stock** Have No Fear catches Earl Lavon “Von” Freeman in 1975, at once utterly himself and pushing that self to the edge. Decades before he would be named an NEA Jazz Master in 2012, Freeman entered the studio for a marathon date that would yield not only this album but also Serenade & Blues, laying down music that distilled the rough‑hewn elegance of Chicago’s South Side into a single, charged stretch of time. The circumstances were deceptively simple: a relaxed producer, an open schedule, and a tenor player whose sound already carried a city’s worth of history. Yet what happened on tape felt, to Freeman, like “a miracle” - not because it was easy, but because he was given the freedom, and the pressure, to “do it my way.”

In conversation with historian Terry Martin, Freeman recalled how that atmosphere affected him: “Now the thing we did with Chuck to me was a miracle because he just let me do it my way and I have never been in the studio and seen a man so relaxed... and I’m generally a very relaxed man. I must have been the most nervous man in there.” That tension between outer looseness and inner urgency runs through Have No Fear. Freeman’s tenor tone - grainy, vocal, capable of veering from sly understatement to scorched‑earth intensity in a bar or two - sounds like it’s constantly negotiating between the security of the blues and the risk of stepping into open air. Choruses stretch and compress, phrases tilt unexpectedly across the bar line, standards and originals alike are treated as springboards rather than sacred texts.