Freddie Freeloader

Recorded on 2 March 1959, it is a twelve-bar blues in B-flat with an A-flat seventh chord in the final two bars. Wynton Kelly, a blues specialist, plays piano instead of Bill Evans. The solos run Kelly, Davis, Coltrane, Adderley and Chambers.

The title has three stories. One is that Fred Tolbert, a Philadelphia bartender with a card reading Freddie the Freeloader, was the inspiration, as Jon Hendricks and Ashley Kahn tell it. Another is that it was a man who tried to hear the musicians without paying, as the documentary Kind of Blue: Made in Heaven has it. A third points to Red Skelton's hobo clown. Hendricks later wrote vocalese lyrics for it.