[PEN-L:11632] Charlie Haden

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

I have been moved to write about jazz bassist Charlie Haden after listening
to his latest and greatest CD, "The Art of the Song". It is consistent with
a number of others that he has released over the past half-decade evoking a
sort of romantic and retro approach to jazz, strongly influenced by a
vision of the more innocent Los Angeles of post-WWII years and of movie
culture.

The songs on the latest include some decidedly obscure tunes drawn from
even more obscure films. Typical is "You My Love", a ballad originally sung
by Frank Sinatra in the 1954 "Young at Heart". With west coasters Ernie
Watts on tenor sax, Larance Marable on drums and Alan Broadbent on piano,
vocals by Shirley Horn and Bill Henderson, and a 28 piece string section,
the lush mood created is reminiscent of Charlie Parker's famous (infamous
to some) Verve records backed by string section and led by Mitch Miller.

I am not sure what led Haden to make these kinds of old-fashioned CD's, but
I have a feeling that it is the same impulse that leads me to buy each one
faithfully when they come out. Haden, like me, is somebody who was deeply
involved with the 60s radicalization but on the cultural front. Although
his politics have not changed, his mood has become more wistful and
nostalgic, not unlike my own. Perhaps this is what it takes to keep old
time radicals going in a cold and heartless world, where cash seems to be
the only thing that matters.

Haden, who is white, burst on the scene in 1959 as the bassist in a combo
led by African-American Ornette Coleman, who played a white plastic alto
saxophone. Ornette Coleman had completely redefined the jazz idiom by
emphasizing his own highly original approach to melody in a departure from
the typical bebop style of the time. The beboppers, still strongly
influenced by Parker who had died only 3 years earlier, played superfast
improvisations over tightly wound "heads" derived from popular tunes,
scarcely recognizable from their source.

Coleman believed the bebop obsession with chords or key changes had led
down a blind alley. He also had ideas about rhythm at odds with
conventional thinking of the time. His drummers sounded more melodic; his
bass players were freed from having to signal chord changes. Ultimately,
this type of music gave more freedom to the players, but it also required
more responsibility. Coleman was constantly evolving each tune during
performances and demanded that the musicians' listen to each other with
much more attention than the beboppers were used to. In a typical bebop
performance, each musician took lengthy solos and it was not unusual for
one to walk off the stage in the middle to go smoke a cigarette until it
was their time to blow. The collective improvisation of the Ornette Coleman
combos was in some ways a throwback to the earliest days of jazz in New
Orleans, before the solo had been invented.

After 40 years of avant-garde jazz, none of this sounds particularly
controversial but in its day it unleashed tremendous passions. In 1959,
when Coleman's band made its first appearance in New York at the Five Spot,
fights broke out between Coleman partisans and those convinced that he was
perpetrating a hoax. One night, Miles Davis showed up and sat in; another
night, a stranger walked up to Coleman and punched him in the face. Coleman
was 22 and his bassist, Charlie Haden, was the same age.

For all of their connections to the avant-garde, both Coleman and Haden had
roots in working-class dance hall culture. When Coleman was traveling
around the country in the '40s and '50s with rhythm-and-blues bands and in
tent shows, Haden was performing with his family, a country-and-western
troupe from Springfield, Missouri. In the liner notes of "The Art of the
Song," there's a 1942 photo of the Haden family standing in front of the
American flag at country station KWTO. They are all wearing cowboy boots,
including the 5 year old "cowboy" Charlie. A January 19, 1997 LA Times
profile on Haden reports:

===
His father, Carl, was an itinerant Midwestern country singer who married
another singer, Virginia Day. A country vocal group with echoes of the
Carter Family and the Delmore Brothers, they played the Grand Ole Opry. A
little later, when children arrived, they became Uncle Carl Haden and the
Haden Family. Charlie was born in Shenandoah, Iowa, in 1937, a brief
stopover before the family settled in Springfield. Carl began broadcasting
daily radio shows from the Haden home. The house was full of country music
and products from radio sponsors--Green Mountain Cough Syrup, Sparkalite
Cereal, Cocoa Wheats with vitamin G. Chet Atkins and Roy Acuff performed on
the shows with the family, and Charlie remembers the Carter Family visiting
and Mother Maybelle singing him to sleep.

"My mom would sing to me at night, but she didn't know that I wasn't really
sleeping," Haden says. "I was checking everything out, you know? Then all
of a sudden one day, I started humming with her, and then one day I started
humming the harmony with her. This was like when I was 11/2 or something,
and when I was 22 months old, that's when they first took me to the studio
and I started singing. Charlie Haden made his musical debut with a version
of "Little Sir Echo."

Brother Jimmy was considered the black sheep of the family, drinking as a
teenager, spending a few nights in jail; he also played bass on the show
and was a jazz fan who owned Billie Holiday, Stan Kenton and Dizzy
Gillespie records. When Jimmy was out of the house, Charlie would play his
brother's bass. When Charlie and his dad caught Charlie Parker on a swing
through town, the Future Farmers of America lost a prospect.
 ===

Haden eventually moved to LA, where his jazz career began in earnest. Paul
Bley, the famed pianist, remembers the country boy bassist showing up
barefoot for his audition. One night Haden went to a club to hear Gerry
Mulligan's group. The LA Times reports,

===
"The place was packed; there was barely room to stand. And then a
well-dressed guy carrying a white plastic saxophone squeezed his way to the
front. This was how Ornette Coleman performed back then: a shy, deferential
insurgent requesting to sit in."

"He starts playing, man, and it was so unbelievably great I could not
believe it. Like the whole room lit up all of a sudden, like somebody
turned on the lights," Haden says. "He was playing the blues they were
playing, but he was playing his own way. And almost as fast as he asked to
sit in, they asked him to please stop." Spotting a kindred spirit, Haden
ran out after Coleman into the alley, but the saxophonist had already
disappeared into the night.
===

Haden eventually tracked down the musician with the white plastic
saxophone. Haden describes the scene at Coleman's apartment:

"There was music blocking the door; you couldn't get the door open. Finally
it opened, and the place was filled with music. Manuscripts, things he had
written out all over the rug and chairs and bed and everywhere. I got my
bass out, and he picked up one of the manuscripts off the rug and said,
'Lets play this.' I said, 'Sure,' but I was scared to death. He said, 'Now
I got some chord changes written below the melody here that I heard when I
was writing the melody. You can play those changes when you play the song,
but when I start to improvise, make up your own changes from what I'm
playing.' I said, 'With pleasure.' Man, we played all day and all night.
And the next day we stopped to get a hamburger and we came back and we
played some more."

Coleman solidified his free-jazz ideas at the Hillcrest Club, which closed
down years ago. Like many famous venues for jazz, there's only a barred
front door today and no historical marker. (These are the Buena Vista Clubs
of North America.) The Coleman group's Hillcrest perfromances earned Haden
a reputation among Hollywood hipsters. Actors Dean Stockwell and Bobby
Driscoll came to hear him, and Martin Landau advised Haden that he might do
well to try acting. Coleman's band caused a stir that led him to the East
Coast where fame and notoriety awaited them.

Haden eventually separated from the Coleman band and hooked up with the
thriving avant-garde scene in NYC, where his political beliefs took shape.
He eventually formed the Liberation Jazz Orchestra, which was co-led by
Carla Bley, Paul's ex-wife, and an outstanding songwriter and pianist in
her own right. The 1970 classic recording of this band includes Spanish
Civil War tunes "Song Of The United Front and "El Quinto Regimiento (Fifth
Regiment) as well as "We Shall Overcome" and "Song For Che."

A January 31, Minneapolis Tribune article on Haden describes the
willingness of Haden to act on the belief that "music can't be separated
from politics." In 1971, while appearing with saxophonist Ornette Coleman
at a festival in Lisbon, Portugal, Haden dedicated his "Song for Che," to
the black liberation movements in the Portuguese African colonies. The day
after the concert, he was arrested at the Lisbon airport. "I would actually
have done some time if Ornette hadn't gotten the American Embassy to come
and get me," recalled Haden. "It was really a fascist government then, and
this was the first jazz festival that they had allowed there. But as soon
as I made this dedication, they canceled the rest of the festival. It was
scary."

"Music can bring people of all races together," he said. "My mom used to
take me into the African-American church when I was, like, 8 or 9, and we'd
sit in the back row and listen to the choir. That was one of the most
meaningful experiences in my whole life."


Louis Proyect

(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)