In 1994 during a visit to London, Derek Ansell talked to ‘one of just a handful of bassists who changed the way the instrument is played’.
WHEN Charlie Haden starts to play he wraps his entire frame around his bass, head down, intense, seeming to pull those plump, woody notes from somewhere deep within his instrument. Lately he has had some ear trouble so he mostly plays on a raised part of the stage, behind large perspex-covered shields as he did at the Jazz Café on Easter Saturday. He is meticulous about the sound going out to the audience and asked me what the balance was like when I met him the following morning at his London hotel. It was clear and bright I assured him, with each instrument audible and no overlapping of frequencies. Charlie leads his Quartet West (Ernie Watts on tenor, Alan Broadbent at the piano and veteran drummer Lawrence Marable) through a programme of new compositions and old standards in a musical style designed to pay homage to nineteen-forties and fifties West Coast jazz. It is strong on melody, form and conventional chord changes and it comes naturally to him because this is the music he grew up with. Haden is a man who recognises no barriers of style or time in jazz and takes to this music as easily as he did to providing surging free jazz bass lines behind Ornette Coleman in the first great quartet in 1959.
As the band built up to a pulsating, flowing rendition of a calypso at the Jazz Café I glanced at a notice on the wall that informed everybody that at the personal request of Charlie Haden we were required not to talk or smoke during the performance. The room was jam-packed wall to wall and standing room only. But that sign was superfluous; as the ovation at the end of the final selection died down and Lawrence Marable and Alan Broadbent waited for Charlie’s nod from his glass booth to start the encore, you could have heard a pin drop.
IT has been a hectic tour and not without problems. Charlie Haden is tired but ready to talk as he gratefully drinks a cup of capuccino in the lounge of his London hotel. We discuss the sound balance of his Quartet West on the previous evening and he tells me that it is critical to him to get the right combination of acoustic sound from his bass with just enough amplification to make it audible to everyone listening but not enough to distort his powerful, natural tone. I ask him when he first started to play the double bass.
“My parents were musicians and they were on the Grand Ole Opry before I was born and then as each one of my brothers and sisters and I were born we were added to the band. We had radio shows every day when I was two until I was 15. I never really played the bass, my brother played it but I always stuck around and when he would leave I would play his bass. Then I would play with some jazz records that we had and IJ actually started playing seriously in high school thinking about that’s what I wanted to do and listening to a lot of records. And then, you know, the first time I heard Charlie Parker and Hampton Hawes and people like that, it was pretty much decided that that was what I wanted to do. That would be about 1952/53. I was about 15. I went to a Jazz At The Philharmonic concert and saw Bird and Lester Young and that kind of made me realise I didn’t really have any choice, that’s what I had to do.’
I wondered if he could remember his first professional jazz gig.
‘Serious jazz gigs? That was in Los Angeles. I left Missouri and went to LA to go to school and started working right away. I went to all kinds of jam sessions and the first really serious gig I had with anybody you would know was with Art Pepper. I worked with him and the first night I sat in with him he hired me. Sonny Clark was playing piano. So Art asked me if I could play the rest of the week and when he came to pick me up the next night Hampton Hawes was playing for him. I was about 19 years old and it was like a great learning experience to play with all those great musicians. Because, you know, when I was listening to jazz records I told myself that someday I was going to play with this person and that person and I did.’
Charlie Haden is one of just a handful of bassists who changed the way the instrument is played so it seems like a good opportunity to talk about the time when he was making history with the original Ornette Coleman Quartet back in 1959. How did he manage to blend so seamlessly with Ornette on those early records?
‘I um, had been going to a lot of jam sessions and playing all the jazz standards, Bird tunes, Monk tunes and sometimes I was hearing other ways to play, not just on the chord structure but out of it and whenever I tried to do this it was very uncomfortable for other musicians and, well, the first time I heard Ornette play was at a club called The Haig. I went down there on one of my nights off and he came in and sat in and he played and all of a sudden I heard everything I had wanted to do. And as soon as he started to play the leader of the band told him to stop and they asked him to leave. I found out it was Ornette and he came down to The Hillcrest club to meet me and I went to his house and it was real easy for me.
‘Country music is a spontaneous music. There are two art forms that were born in the United States—country music and jazz—and it’s very easy to blend country with jazz and it was easy for me to blend jazz with Ornette. Everybody says his music is avant garde but this is for critics and writers to write about—categories. All jazz is free if it’s played on a very high level. Coleman Hawkins played just as free as Ornette as far as I’m concerned. So it was really easy for me because I was hearing challenges and more challenges. Ornette was doing that.’
Was it something to do with both of them coming from the south and having country music roots? ‘Well, if your family’s involved in it I guess it’s easier. My dad started out in the business when he was very young and he met my mother and they travelled all over the Midwest and Texas, Kansas, Nebraska and I guess it’s just like a dedication. They knew the Carter family and the Delmore brothers, Roy Aycock and all the Opry people and I was exposed to all that beautiful harmony and I’m very grateful and lucky that I was brought up that way. It was a very musical training for me.’
Did he know which direction Ornette was going in at all times or was it purely instinctive? ‘Well, all of jazz is instinctive and intuitive and I learned more about listening playing with Ornette than any other musician because he’s constantly modulating from one key to another so in order to follow him you really have to listen, you know? It's very challenging and it’s very joyous.’
The first time I heard Change Of The Century in 1960 I loved it. I didn’t know what was going on but I liked what I heard.
‘That’s great.’
A reasonably good way to come to it?
‘Yes. A lot of people didn’t. They rebelled against it. People get very insecure when something happens that’s new.’
It was surely the same thing with Charlie Parker: People were frightened of bop when it came in and the boppers, in turn, saw free jazz as a threat to them?
‘Hmm, the musicians, yes. Although sometimes the fans are closer to the music than the musicians. The musicians get so involved with it they kind of lose their perspective, sometimes, on new music. I think sometimes the people who are fans of jazz still retain their ability to be objective and be open to new things. There were a lot of musicians who were against what we were doing and some who were more open and saw what we were trying to do.’
I said that I was surprised that Thelonious Monk was not more sympathetic. Charlie asked me what he had said and I mentioned a quote I had read from Monk about Ornette saying ‘That cat is nuts’.
‘As far as I’m concerned, that’s a compliment.’
Was there a lot of rehearsal prior to the first Atlantic dates?
‘Oh yes, Ornette loves to rehearse. In fact we still rehearse. It takes two weeks at least.’
And was The Hillcrest club in Los Angeles where Charlie and Ornette first worked together?
‘Uh-huh. I worked with Paul Bley and a drummer named Lennie McBrowne and Dave Pike who played vibes. And then after I introduced Paul to Ornette and he heard Don Cherry and Ornette play, he hired them. And pretty soon the crowds started drifting away and we were without a job.’
That was with piano wasn’t it?
‘Oh yes. We were playing a lot of changes then. I don’t know if you’ve heard an album called Something Else (Contemporary OJCCD-163-2) he did with Walter Norris on piano. That was all changes.’
I told Charlie that I liked that record very much but I didn’t think it had the same spontaneity as the Atlantics.
“Well you know they’ve just issued a six-CD set of all Ornette’s Atlantic dates. It’s very well done, the packaging is great and the liner notes are well written and there are some great photographs.’ (Beauty Is A Rare Thing, Rhino R2 71410.)
‘All jazz is free if it’s played on a very high level. Coleman Hawkins played just as free as Ornette as far as I’m concerned.’
Charlie Haden won a scholarship to Oberlin College but did not take it up. Why was that?
“Well, because I found out it was pretty much a classical-oriented university and I wanted to go to a place that had more jazz. I learned about this place in LA called Westlake College Of Modern Music and it didn’t turn out so great either so I ended up working every day and cutting classes because I was sleeping late and I just dropped out.’
So at that time you were pretty much self-taught?
“Yeah. I still am really. I taught myself how to read and I wish I’d stayed at school because it’s very painstaking for me when I write and it takes a long time.’
Did he think that if he’d read earlier he might not have played so spontaneously as he did in the early years?
‘Well, I mean, who’s to know?’
Before leaving the subject of the first Coleman quartets I mentioned the late Scott La Faro who had, of course, followed Charlie into the band in 1960. Because he hadn’t lived very long he was, I suggested, a shadowy figure.
‘He was a brilliant musician and one of my closest friends in life. I was devastated when he was killed.’
I said that many people thought that La Faro didn’t fit in with Ornette’s group and found him over-decorative but I loved his work with the quartet even though it was a different approach.
‘Oh yeah, he was great. It was really nice playing on the record together too. That was the last time I saw him.’ (Free Jazz, Rhino R2 71410).
You all seemed to inspire each other on that record.
“Yes, it was quite a night. It was like a big snow storm in New York and everybody was playing new music they’d never seen before and it was very fresh.’
Some reports have suggested that Freddie Hubbard wasn’t too keen on making the date because it wasn’t music with chord changes.
“Well, I can’t remember Freddie being unhappy.’
Was the Liberation Music Orchestra originally conceived as a one-off record date or were there long term plans for it from the beginning?
“Well, I never conceive anything as a fleeting thing, I always think of a project and then carry it on and other projects start forming. The Liberation Music Orchestra was my way of voicing concerns of mine about Vietnam and lots of other things, injustices, so I put it together and it was very successful critically. It didn’t sell very many records but everybody kept wanting me to do another record and I guess it’s no accident that each one of the records was recorded during the Republican administration.’
Then came Ballad Of The Fallen and Dream Keeper?
“Yeah, Dream Keeper had the choir. That one was nominated for a Grammy. And I’m thinking about a new one now and we’re going to do some new songs in the United States.’
Charlie said that he plans to return to Britain in the summer and observed that it is very difficult to play over here because of the lack of funding. The last time he played here was with Geri Allen and it was a nice gig. I mentioned his new band Quartet West and asked when it had first been formed.
“1986. It was a way of being able to play in LA. I’d just moved back to LA from New York and I did most of my playing there and in Europe and when I met my present wife Ruth, she said she wanted me to get a band in LA so that I could play while I was there. And I really loved Ernie Watts’s playing and Alan (Broadbent) and Billy Higgins were living there. One of my favourite things to do is to get people together who have never played together before and see what happens. Usually it works out and we decided to make a record and the concept was about LA. It was about Raymond Chandler and the movie industry in the forties right after the war and the cultural thing there, the jazz that was going on on Central Avenue, the architecture and the art deco; it was a very special place and time.’
Humphrey Bogart’s voice is heard on the new CD Always Say Goodbye (Verve 521 501 2) and Jo Stafford sings Alone Together following the band’s interpretation of this standard. Charlie told me that Jo Stafford has heard the record and she and husband Paul Weston love the music. Also featured are Coleman Hawkins on an old recording and Stephane Grappelli playing in the studio with Quartet West.
I asked about record sales and Charlie told me that the first two albums had been disappointing but he had high hopes for the new CD.
‘I was really inspired by that period of time and to bring it into the present and make people aware of it. Giving people the ability to imagine going into a place and hearing Jo Stafford singing in 1940; I don’t know, all the stuff I wanna do I want to show other people, so they can want to do it, I guess.’
That was nice, I thought and said so. Charlie beamed and I asked him if he found it easy to go into that style of playing after the free music or, I added, catching the look on his face, did he not see a great difference?
‘Well I really don’t see a difference. I approach music the same way with the same conviction no matter who I’m playing with; it’s playing at a level and giving up your life and I always put my whole life’s energy into every note I play whether it’s with Pat Metheny or Herbie Hancock or Ornette or whoever. I’m going back now to play on this 50th anniversary of Verve Records with Abbey Lincoln and J J Johnson, Hank Jones and Al Foster. And I'll be doing something by Antonio Carlos Jobim with Pat Metheny and Joe Henderson.
Some people might say, I suggested, that playing the old West Coast jazz on the new CD was just an attempt to cash in on the nostalgia market. How would he respond to that?
‘Actually, it’s my way of trying to expose people to this music and make them aware of people like Jo Stafford and Jeri Southern and Billie Holiday. And it’s treating with great respect original recordings and paying homage to the people, playing the song with Quartet West then bringing them in playing their version of it. It inspires me; it shows people what inspires them. Rather than write about it, you hear it.
‘Jazz is based on inspiration and people want to know what inspires you when you’re improvising. It’s bringing in the actual music that inspired me.’
This was the music you grew up with?
‘Uh-huh. I mean playing the old soundtracks that I was inspired by.’ No interfering with the originals or sampling but just putting the recordings into his own CD, complete?
That’s right.’
So what else is in the planning stage? Anything with Ornette Coleman?
‘Not that I know about. I was supposed to tour with him last October but I wasn’t able to make it but we’re always talking. We got together in 1987 for a reunion with the original quartet which was nice.’
Ornette Coleman is the father of free jazz but Charlie Haden was more than just an integral part of that original quartet in 1959. He was a kindred spirit whose bass innovations put him in the same league as Jimmy Blanton, Oscar Pettiford and Charles Mingus.
On the sleeve notes of Beauty Is A Rare Thing, the comprehensive six-CD set that collects all Coleman’s surviving Atlantic recordings, annotator Robert Palmer describes the opening of Focus On Sanity, the first selection played at the very first Atlantic session. Palmer describes the opening fanfare by Coleman and Cherryand comments on Haden’s ability to elaborate on the minimal materials of the fanfare: ‘A handful of chromatic intervals and a single melodic skip that might imply a modulation or a chord change. With nothing more to work from, Haden begins to sketch the dimensions of a new world.’
Ref : Jazz Journal Oct '94
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