Charlie Haden
Rambling Boy....
The old folk music of England and Ireland and Scotland came over to America and evolved in the mountains of Appalachia and the Ozarks. Wherever there was a struggle in the hills, the music from that was very moving, very soulful. Jazz grew out of spirituals and the blues, which came from the struggle of the African slave and the freedom movement. So they’re both music of struggle.
- Charlie Haden
When Pat Metheny’s Rejoicing came out in 1984, I was a senior in college. I fell in love with Charlie Haden’s bass playing right then and there. After graduation, I had to head down to Fort Benning, Georgia for jump school. For the road trip from New York to Georgia, I packed a bunch of cassettes, mostly John Mayall and Pat Metheny, into an old, wooden wine box.
Rejoicing played a prominent role on that road trip. As I think about it now, when I played Side B I’d always fast-forward over The Calling, which freaked me out. But I like it now - Metheny’s guitar has a total Sonny Sharrock-like feel.
After jump school, it was on to Fort Sill in Lawton, Oklahoma for field artillery school. Along with Rejoicing, Metheny’s 80/81, again with Haden on bass, took lead roles. After field artillery school, I was off to Monterey for language school. It was back to the wine box again and Charlie Haden’s bass was right there with me all the way to California.
I always felt something soothing in his bass. To me it had more than just a jazz feel, I could feel country and blues too. It was much later that I learned about Haden’s country roots and how he always spoke about the links between jazz and country music. He saw links between jazz and country music. Hanging out as a teen with country musicians touring through Missouri, Haden realized:
Hillbilly music is really close to jazz, because there’s lots of improvisation. And country music was an asset to me (in jazz), because my family really stressed having perfect ears, and if anyone was flat or sharp, they heard about it. The richness of the music that I sang and heard these early experiences in the Ozark Mountains of Missouri has stayed inside my soul, my heart, my being, and I continue to draw on it whenever I play.
For this reason, Haden’s work must be considered as emerging from a particular cultural milieu - both the rural Midwest, where he grew up and matured, and, in particular, the country music he first heard and then played in his family’s country music band.
Haden was born in 1937 in Shenandoah, Iowa. He started singing in the Haden Family Band when he was two years old.
The family would wake up, do their chores, and all meet in the kitchen. After breakfast, their dad would crank up the phone, call up the radio studio on the party line, and they would record the show right there in the kitchen.
When he was four, the family moved to Springfield, Missouri to sing on Radio Station KWTO's “Keep Watching the Ozarks.” They recorded The Haden Family Radio Show twice a day in the early 1940s. His father would introduce him as “the yodelin’ cowboy.”
I dig the cowboy boots. Here’s a clip from a 1939 Haden family show:
Haden shares more about his early years in a 1984 Musician Magazine interview with Rafi Zabor:
“When I was five, my father bought a farm outside of Springfield, Missouri — I was raised in Springfield mostly. The radio studio was right in the house. I'd wake up, watch my family go out to milk the cows, watch them come back in. We'd eat breakfast and then do the radio show, every day but Sunday, fifteen minutes to half an hour. This was during the war.”
He continued singing with his family until he was fifteen when he contracted a bulbar (brainstem) form of polio affecting his throat and facial muscles. He recalled, “I sang with the family until I was fifteen, when I had bulbar polio. I caught it when we were doing a television show in Omaha during an epidemic. The doctor said I was lucky - it hit the nerve to my face and throat and vocal cords, and it usually hits the legs and lungs. It took about a year for the effects to go away and after that, I couldn't really sing, couldn't control the note and hold vibrato.”
It was during this time that Haden took up the bass. It was also during this time that he started to hear jazz music. Haden recalled, “It was country music for me until I heard Bird in 1951.” His older brother Jim brought home what jazz records he could find and Charlie played bass along with the records. Before long, he set his sights on moving to Los Angeles to pursue his dream of becoming a jazz musician.
To save money for the trip, he took a job as house bassist for ABC-TV's “Ozark Jubilee” in Springfield, Missouri. He earned a scholarship to Oberlin College but turned it down to attend Westlake College of Modern Music in Los Angeles, which was like Berklee and had a good reputation for jazz studies. Haden recalled, “I turned down the scholarship, sold shoes until I made seven hundred and fifty dollars, said good-bye to my parents, got on a Greyhound with a suitcase and my plywood Kay bass, and went straight through to L.A. The people from Westlake met me at the bus station.”
In L.A., Haden soon met bassist Red Mitchell, who was Art Pepper’s bass player. When Mitchell couldn’t make a date, Haden stepped in and Pepper hired him for the rest of the gig. Before long, he met Ornette Coleman, a department store elevator operator who played a white plastic horn. Haden recalled that fateful meeting:
Then one night I was at a club called the Haig - I think I was listening to Gerry Mulligan's group - and all of a sudden this guy gets up on stage with a plastic alto and starts playing, and the creative energy level changed completely - it was going through the ceiling, it was the most brilliant sound I'd ever heard and I said, ‘Who is that? Who is that man?’ Someone said, ‘That's Ornette Coleman.’ I wanted to meet him. By the time I got behind the bandstand to meet him they had already asked him to stop playing and he had disappeared out the back door. But drummer Lenny McBrowne told me how to find him.
I went to Ornette's house and told him I'd heard him play the other night and that it was beautiful, and he said thanks, because he wasn't used to hearing someone say that to him, and the first time we played, I found myself able to play what I'd been hearing, though I did do some struggling.
Haden first recorded with Coleman on his 1959 The Shape of Jazz to Come.
Haden was the first, and I think, the best of a succession of white bassists to play with Coleman. In Coleman’s quartet, he found a way to respond to the free flow of melodic and rhythmic invention, as the established role of the bass - Blanton, Pettiford, and Ray Brown - was unsuitable. Interestingly, Coleman’s instructions to Haden were: “Forget about the changes in key and just play within the range of the idea.”
When Coleman’s quartet arrived in New York City, they created an instant sensation with their revolutionary and controversial approach to jazz music. It was, in fact, the shape of jazz to come….
The quartet’s next album, Change of the Century, recorded in October 1959 and released on Atlantic Records in May 1960, is perhaps the best example of their innovative approach.
From that album, Haden’s near-sitar sound propels the classic Coleman song Ramblin’:
During his solo on this song, at the 4:00 minute mark, Haden quotes a country song from his past, Old Joe Clark, which may hold a key to Haden’s ability to excel in the new free jazz style of the Coleman quartet.
Change of the Century was Haden’s second album with the Coleman Quartet, who had now moved from Hollywood to New York City. After the recording, the quartet got an extended gig at the Five Spot - a trial by fire so to speak among the “established” New York City jazz scene, which included one of New York’s favorite musical sons, Leonard Bernstein.
Haden recalls from the Five Spot gig: “One night I was playing - you know, I usually play with my eyes closed - and I happened to open my eyes and looked down and there was Leonard Bernstein with his ear next to my bass, right on the bandstand. He asked me where I'd studied and I told him I was self-taught and he couldn't believe that. He invited me to come up to the Philharmonic, and years later, when I was sure he had forgotten me, he was of tremendous help to me with the Guggenheim Foundation, when I applied for a fellowship in composition.”
Before I ever heard Haden play on Coleman’s early albums, I had been listening to him on all those Metheny albums and perhaps my favorite of all his albums, Etudes, with Geri Allen on piano and Paul Motian on drums.
From Etudes, here is Etude II:
At about the same time as Etudes’ release, Haden formed his legendary Quartet West, a group that drew inspiration from the kind of L.A. noir associated with Raymond Chandler. Their first album, Quartet West, was released in 1987.
From that first album, I really like Taney Country because of Haden’s nice and long bass solo:
However, it was two later albums that hit closer to home for me: Haunted Heart released in 1992, and Always Say Goodbye released in 1994. It was through these albums I learned Haden’s love for film as much as music. He successfully combined both loves on these two albums.
From the CD booklet of Haunted Heart, Haden wrote: “I have conceived this recording as if it were a film telling a story. A story evoking feelings of nostalgia….”
Anyone who has followed my journey knows my affection for old movies - after all, this journey is titled From Fred Astaire to Sun Ra. For those needing a recap, here’s how my jazz journey began:
Needless to say, these albums were right up my alley.
Haunted Heart starts with The Warner Bros. Logo Fanfare. Haden explains, “Most American movie studios in the forties had fanfares introducing their movies. The fanfare heard here was composed by Max Steiner and introduced most of the movies coming out of the Warner Bros. studio. It then leads into music from the film The Maltese Falcon, composed by Adolph Deutsch.”
Haunted Heart also features: Jo Stafford singing Haunted Heart from 1947; Jeri Southern singing Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye from 1954, and Billie Holiday singing Deep Song from 1947. All were sampled from old 78s from Haden’s collection. As good as Haunted Heart is, I find Always Say Goodbye even better.
Always Say Goodbye won DownBeat magazine’s Album of the Year in 1994. The album draws inspiration from Howard Hawks’ 1946 movie The Big Sleep.
Like Haunted Heart, the album takes music and dialogue from the movie. For example, here’s the first track, Max Steiner’s opening of the movie:
Coleman Hawkins makes an appearance on My Love and I (Love Song From Apache), which plays after the quartet’s nice rendition of this Johnny Mercer song:
Here’s another classic, with Jo Stafford singing Alone Together with the Paul Weston Orchestra:
Haden sampled the song from this 1944 Capitol 78rpm:
Here’s one more for the road. Near the end of his life, Charlie Haden got back in touch with his roots. In 2008, he recorded Charlie Haden Family & Friends - Rambling Boy. This is an awesome album featuring Haden’s son and triplet daughters, along with Rosanna Cash, Pat Metheny, Bruce Hornsby, Bela Fleck, Elvis Costello, Ricky Skaggs, Vince Gill, and many others. So many great songs to choose from on this gem, like the Fields of Athenry, He’s Gone Away and Oh Take Me Back, featuring the Haden triplets. But I have to go with perhaps Haden’s swan song Old Joe Clark:
It’s interesting to me how Haden really started his jazz career playing revolutionary music and ended it playing the music of his Midwestern roots. At the time of this release, Haden said, “The beauty of it is that this music is from the earth of the country. The old hillbilly music, along with gospel and spirituals and blues and jazz.”
Next week on that Big River called Jazz, we’ll dig our paddles in to explore the waters of Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra - you were right Steak, Haden held these albums close to his heart….
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Until then, keep on walking….