Mitchell prepared four original compositions for the occasion - “Song for Fred Anderson,” “The Velvet Lounge,” “Hey Fred” and “Cermak Road” - and interwove them with two Anderson tunes, “Bernice” and “Ladies in Love,” reimagined for this instrumentation. The set opens with the 17‑minute “Song for Fred Anderson,” a slow‑building piece that establishes the quartet’s collective logic: Mitchell’s alto, soprano and sopranino saxophones sketch and worry melodic fragments, Reid’s cello moves fluidly between counter‑line and rich, low‑end support, Paul’s bass grounds and challenges the harmony, and Davis’ drumming frames everything with elastic time and sharply placed colour. Rather than a simple tribute theme, the music unfolds as an evolving topography of density and space, reflecting the way Anderson himself often stretched a single idea across extended durations.

The two Anderson compositions are treated with the same blend of respect and risk. “Bernice” and “Ladies in Love,” long associated with Anderson’s own groups, are refracted through Mitchell’s sensibility and the quartet’s unusual timbral mix. Reid’s cello gives the ensemble a grainy, singing middle register that can behave like a second horn or a plucked rhythm instrument; Paul, a key figure on the current Chicago scene, toggles between deep, walking lines and freer, textural playing; Davis draws on decades in the city’s jazz and creative music circles to shape the music from the drums without ever overdetermining it. Together, they find new angles inside Anderson’s structures, letting his melodies surface clearly at times and, at others, dissolving them into collective abstraction.

Mitchell’s own pieces evoke Anderson’s world without pastiche. “The Velvet Lounge” compresses a whole era of Chicago nights into a compact, 6‑plus‑minute portrait, its title alone conjuring the club that served as Anderson’s base of operations for decades. “Hey Fred” stretches over 17 minutes, its call‑and‑response energies and surging climaxes suggesting both greeting and invocation, while “Cermak Road” closes the program with a concise, street‑level vignette, named for one of the city’s key thoroughfares. Throughout, Mitchell plays with a characteristic blend of austerity and fire, his lines alternately clipped and declarative, his sound capable of turning from pinched, high‑tension cries to round, singing tones in an instant.

Recorded live at Constellation and released on Nessa, Celebrating Fred Anderson captures not just a night’s music but a dense network of relationships: between two elder AACM saxophonists; between generations of Chicago improvisers; between composition and free exploration; and between memory and the present tense. It stands as a testament to how tributes in this scene tend to work best - not as museum pieces, but as occasions for new work, grounded in deep listening and mutual recognition, to take shape in the name of someone whose spirit still very much occupies the room.