Artist: Charlie Haden
Charles Edward Haden was an American jazz double bass player, bandleader, composer and educator whose career spanned more than 50 years. Building on the work of predecessors such as Jimmy Blanton and Charles Mingus, Haden helped to revolutionize the harmonic concept of bass playing in jazz, evolving a style that sometimes complemented the soloist, and other times moved independently, liberating bassists from a strictly accompanying role, to allow more direct participation in group improvisation.
In the late 1950s, he was an original member of the ground-breaking Ornette Coleman Quartet. In 1969, he formed his first band, the Liberation Music Orchestra, featuring arrangements by pianist Carla Bley. In the late 1960s, he became a member of pianist Keith Jarrett's trio, quartet and quintet. In the 1980s, he formed his own band, Quartet West. Haden also often recorded and performed in a duo setting, with musicians including guitarist Pat Metheny and pianists Hank Jones and Kenny Barron.
In May 1959, he recorded his first album with the Ornette Coleman Quartet, the seminal The Shape of Jazz to Come. Haden's folk-influenced style complemented Coleman's microtonal, Texas blues elements. Later that year, the Quartet moved to New York City and secured an extended booking at the avant-garde Five Spot Café. This residency lasted six weeks and represented the beginnings of their unique, free and avant-garde jazz.
Ornette's quartet played everything by ear, as Haden explained: “At first when we were playing and improvising, we kind of followed the pattern of the song, sometimes. Then, when we got to New York, Ornette wasn’t playing on the song patterns, like the bridge and the interlude and stuff like that. He would just play. And that's when I started just following him and playing the chord changes that he was playing: on-the-spot new chord structures made up according to how he felt at any given moment.”
Haden became a member of Keith Jarrett's trio and his 'American Quartet' from 1967 to 1976, with drummer Paul Motian and saxophonist Dewey Redman.
In 1970 Haden received a Guggenheim Fellowship for Music Composition, upon the recommendation of the eminent conductor Leonard Bernstein.
Haden decided to form the LMO at the height of the Vietnam War, out of his frustration that so much of the government's energy was spent on the war (in which there were many fatalities), while so many internal problems in the United States (such as poverty, civil rights, mental illness, drug addiction, and unemployment), were neglected. Haden's goal was to use the LMO to amplify unheard voices of oppressed people.
In 1982, Haden established the Jazz Studies Program at California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, Santa Clarita. His program emphasized smaller group performance and the spiritual connection to the creative process.
In 1986, Haden formed his band Quartet West. In addition to original compositions by Haden and Broadbent, their repertoire also included 1940s pop ballads which they played in a noir-infused, bop-oriented style.
In 1994, Ginger Baker, legendary drummer from the band Cream, formed another trio called The Ginger Baker Trio, with Haden and guitarist Bill Frisell.
In 2001, Haden won the Latin Grammy Award for Best Latin Jazz CD for his album Nocturne which contains boleros from Cuba and Mexico. In 2003, he won the Latin Grammy Award for Best Latin Jazz Performance for his album Land of the Sun.
While he did not identify himself with a specific religious orientation, Haden was interested in spirituality, especially in association with music. He felt it was his duty, and the duty of the artist, to bring beauty to the world, to make this world a better place. He encouraged his students to find their own unique musical voice and bring it to their instrument.
Haden also viewed jazz as the "music of rebellion" and felt it was his responsibility and mission to challenge the world through music, and through artistic risks that expressed his own individual artistic vision. He believed that all music originates from the same place, and because of this, he resisted the tendency to divide music into categories.
Further information about Charlie Hayden is found here.
This content was excerpted from the Wikipedia article, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Haden, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).
Charlie Haden and The New Liberation Orchestra, live in concert • 14-07-1985 • World of Jazz
Charlie Hayden: Videos
Ginger Baker Trio - Charlie Haden - Bill Frisell / live 1995
Charlie Haden: Dream Keeper