In 1950, the American author Raymond Chandler wrote: "Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all the tricks and has nothing to say." If you change three words--"writer" to "musician," "fiction" to "music," and "write" to "play"--this insight becomes a telling diagnosis of the disorder infecting too many accomplished musicians today: they know all the tricks and have nothing to say.
Charlie Haden does not have this problem. He doesn't know any tricks. It has been said he's not a virtuoso, but that's exactly why he's so great: his musical expression is unencumbered by a repertoire of slick licks and technical gimmicks. Instead, he has a truly exceptional ear. What Haden plays begins with what he hears--and he listens hard, taking the music inside, before his hands ever touch the bass. When they do, what comes out is some of the purest emotional expression you'll ever hear, on any instrument, in any style.
Haden has great humility about his gift. He says he often cringes when he listens to his recordings because he always believes he could have done better. Another reason, I suspect, is that he exposes himself so completely when he plays. It's sometimes said that a person wears his heart on his sleeve, but Charlie Haden goes way beyond that--he wears his soul on his sleeve, especially when he's soloing.
Charlie's eloquence goes beyond his playing. Throughout his life, he has stood up for causes he believes in, whether it was protesting the Vietnam War, dedicating a song to freedom while standing onstage in Portugal when that country was ruled by fascists, founding the Department of Jazz Studies at the California Institute of the Arts, or speaking up in a recent Billboard commentary (March 23, 1996) about funding for the arts. "In the debate over government funding," Haden wrote, "what seems to have been missed is the arts' importance, even necessity, to a growing and prosperous society. It's more than simply a matter of national pride, it's a matter of values."
Haden's values were shaped by his childhood in the Heartland. Born on August 6, 1937, in Shenandoah, Iowa, he grew up in a setting that was steeped in traditional American music. Before he was two, he was singing (and yodeling) with the Haden Family Band on their radio show. His introduction to jazz came later, in his teenage years, when he listened to his brother Jim's records and heard Duke Ellington and Count Basie on the radio. Charlie got some formal training on bass in high school and was good enough to be offered a scholarship to Oberlin Conservatory, but he chose to follow his heart instead. After he had saved up enough money to pay for a bus ticket, Haden headed west to Los Angeles, where he plunged headlong into the burgeoning jazz scene of the late '50s. He was soon gigging with some of the best players in town and sharing a room, for a time, with fellow bassist Scott LaFaro, whose brilliant but brief career would end in an auto accident in 1961.
Before long, Haden encountered Ornette Coleman, whose radical ideas about improvising were perfectly suited to Charlie's emerging desire to play in an entirely new way. As a member of the Ornette Coleman Quartet, Haden helped to forge a revolution in the way jazz was written and played. In the '60s, he worked with such fellow trailblazers as saxophonists John Coltrane and Archie Shepp, founded the Liberation Music Orchestra, and was a member of the legendary Keith Jarrett quartet that recorded more than a dozen albums. Since then, Charlie has worked in a myriad of contexts ranging from jazz to pop to classical. (See discography, below.)
Haden was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for composition and has contributed his tunes to many of the recording projects he has played on. His best-known piece, "First Song," has been covered by such well-known artists as Stan Getz, David Sanborn, Abbey Lincoln, and Ray Brown; it's well on its way to becoming a jazz standard.
At the core of Haden's career since 1986 is his role as the leader of Quartet West, a hard-swinging group that also includes saxophonist Ernie Watts, pianist Alan Broadbent, and drummer Larance Marable. Ruth Cameron, Haden's second wife, suggested the formation of the ensemble in 1985, and their five albums and numerous concert appearances have established them as one of the most distinctive ensembles in contemporary jazz. "My wife was really the developer of this quartet," explains Haden. "I had just moved back to L.A. from New York, because I wanted to be near my kids, and I met Ruth. She said, `You spend all your time going to Europe and New York but you don't have a band in L.A. You should have a band here.' I can't say enough about Ruth's contribution to this music--she has not only been an inspiration, but her ideas and her production work have had immeasurable value. It's almost like Quintet West, really."
While Haden's life can rightfully be seen as proof that brilliant musicians can sustain long and productive careers, his path has not been an easy one. Along the way, Charlie has struggled with a drug problem that led to stays in rehabilitation centers and threatened more than once to end his career. His first marriage, which produced his son, Josh, and triplet daughters, Rachel, Petra, and Tanya, ended bitterly. He has faced poverty, indifference, misunderstanding, and critical disdain. In recent years, Haden has had to endure a complex hearing problem that combines tinnitus (ringing in the ears) with hyperacusis (extreme sensitivity to loud sounds)--a particularly cruel combination for a musician gifted with such an extraordinary ear. Yet Charlie has had the strength to face these problems, to continue to grow, and to continue to make music that's truly deep and meaningful. During the past year, Quartet West released its fifth album, Now Is the Hour, the first Liberation Music Orchestra record was reissued on CD, and Charlie has been involved in a series of projects ranging from a blues album with James Cotton to a classical recording with composer Gavin Bryars to a duet project with his good friend and musical soulmate Pat Metheny.
How did you get started in music?
My mother used to sing me to sleep when I was a baby, and she knew all these great songs that she sang on the radio with our family, like "Barbara Allen" and "Wildwood Flower." She knew all the old Mother Maybelle Carter songs, too. My sister, Mary, and my two older brothers, Jim and Carl Jr., were on our radio show. Carl Jr. played guitar and Mary Elizabeth played mandolin. Jim eventually played bass when he got older. When I was a baby, they used to sing the harmony with my mother when she was rocking me to sleep. My mom said that sometimes she would be singing, and they would take over the melody, and she would hum the harmony with them. And one day she was humming and I started humming the harmony with her--before I was even one and a half!
I guess they took a clue from this that I was ready for the show, and my first appearance on the radio was when I was 22 months old. I was billed as "The Yodeling Cowboy Charlie," and my mom held me up to the microphone and I sang. I learned all the harmonies, and I learned them with really good intonation because you couldn't sing sharp or flat and be happy--it had to sound good. I was able to hear all the harmony parts and actually experience singing all the harmony parts to the different melodies of the folk songs we sang. Not just the second harmony parts, but the third harmony parts too--and those are the harmonies that are really important in country music. The Delmore Brothers were a big influence on everyone back then, and they sang this unbelievably beautiful harmony on things like "Precious Jewel," which is one of the songs that Pat Metheny and I are doing on our new record, by the way.
It seems you've carried the sound of those songs with you throughout your career.
Those harmonies are very deep, and they were a big influence on all of the American music that followed. So my musical training was by ear, and it was a special thing because I sang every day--that was my discipline. Whether I wanted to sing or not, we had a radio show to do and I was part of it. All the time I was growing up, from the time I was two years old until I was 15, I sang every day on the radio. And then later on, when we lived in Omaha, we did a TV show once a week.
When we learned songs, my brothers and sisters would do trio things; sometimes I would be in the trio, or my mother or my dad. We always alternated different singers on different songs, and the harmony parts would weave in and out; somebody would be singing the first harmony part, and somewhere in the middle of the song it might go out of his or her range and another person's range would take over, so they would switch parts. We were constantly switching back and forth, which is what the pop singing groups back then--the Pied Pipers, the Andrews Sisters--were doing. You can hear the different voices shifting and changing parts while they're singing.
How old were you when you started to play bass?
I was 14. Jim, who was five years older, played bass on our radio show in Springfield, Missouri. I just loved the bass. I loved the way it sounded, and I loved the vibrations of the strings. I would watch him play and see those big strings vibrating, and I would hear how good they made everything sound. He never would let me touch his bass, but as soon as he would leave, I would pick it up and try to play it.
When did you learn to read music?
When I was in the North High orchestra in Omaha. The orchestra teacher's name was Sam Thomas, and I'll never forget it--he showed me how all the open strings looked on the bass clef in the Simandl book, and when we went to the next page, he said, "I have to go out of the room. I'll be back, so just practice this while I'm gone." I started practicing and got really anxious, because I was doing something completely foreign. I was so used to using my ear, and I'd never been confronted with reading music. I felt as if I was getting a heart attack! I set down the bass, ran out of the room, and went to the water fountain and drank a whole lot of water. When Sam Thomas came back, he started cracking up. He said, "You're not havin' a heart attack! You're just learnin' how to read music!"
How did you get from country music and the high school orchestra to jazz?
Well, I listened to a lot of radio shows, and my brother had some jazz records. Jim was a big influence, because he loved jazz; he brought home an article in Life magazine about Dizzy Gillespie, who had the goatee and the zoot suit and the beret--that just knocked me out! When I was 14, I went to a "Jazz at the Philharmonic" concert in Omaha; I didn't get to meet anyone, but Bird was there.
Then, after we had moved to Forsythe, Missouri, Stan Kenton's band played in Springfield, which was close by. I was 15, and my dad took me. After the show, we went backstage and met Stan. I was with a friend, and my dad said, "Okay, I'm gonna leave you guys here," and he told us to be home by a certain time. The guys in the band invited us to go over to their hotel. The room was filled with smoke--cigarettes and whatever else--and bottles of gin and vodka and whiskey were sitting on the dressers. They said, "C'mon in, fellas!" We went in, and one of them said, "So you wanna play jazz? Man, look around the room. Do you wanna end up like this, in a hotel room, on the road?" And I said, "Yeah!" [Laughs.] And he cracked up. He said, "Well, I guess you really do or you wouldn't be here." So those guys gave me advice and told me I should go to New York or L.A.
After that, I got every record I could get my hands on. There was a music store I used to go to after school. They had listening booths; you could go in and listen to the records, and I used to stay for hours. One of my favorites was the first Hampton Hawes Trio record. I loved [pianist] Hampton Hawes, and I said, "Someday I want to play with this guy."
When did you go to L.A.?
When I was in high school, I applied for a scholarship to Oberlin. I taught myself how to play this classical piece with a bow, which I'd never done, and I taped it and sent it in. They gave me a full scholarship, and my mother really wanted me to go. But the Oberlin Conservatory was a classical school, and I had seen advertisements in Downbeat for a jazz school called Westlake College of Modern Music. It was in L.A., so that's where I decided to go. I was accepted there, but they didn't give scholarships. So, after I graduated from high school, I sold shoes for a year. And I played bass on the Ozark Jubilee, which was a network TV show hosted by Red Foley. Red's guitarist was Grady Martin, and he had a band called Grady Martin & His Winging Strings. I played bass with them when I was 17 or 18; we did a few dates on the road, but mostly it was just the Ozark Jubilee every Wednesday night. One time Eddy Arnold was the guest, and Eddy's guitarist was Hank Garland--and Hank was a jazz player, you know. We were messing around on the set during rehearsal, and he started playing "All the Things You Are" or something like that. I started playing with him, and he looked up and said, "Oh ... okay." So he kept playing, and after that we jammed every time he was on the show.
You just did it by ear?
Right. I mean--I had no idea about tunes like that. I had heard them, but I had never tried to play them. Hank told me, "Man, you should get out of this town as fast as you can." And I said, "That's what I'm trying to do." Finally I had saved up enough money, so I got on a Greyhound bus and went to L.A.
How long did you study at Westlake?
I think it was a couple of semesters. I was cutting class a lot because I was playing 'til two in the morning, so I decided not to go to school anymore.
When did you meet Hampton Hawes?
One night at about three in the morning, I was doing my homework at a restaurant and Red Mitchell walked in. He was the bass player on the Hampton Hawes records I had listened to in high school. I sat down next to him, introduced myself, and said, "Do you teach?" He said, "No, I don't have that much time. But why don't you come over some Sunday? I'll play piano and you'll play bass, and we'll talk." So I did that for a few Sundays. Red was a great guy, a really beautiful guy. He told me, "There's no one who can teach you about improvisation and soloing. That has to come from you."
One day he said, "I'm playing with Art Pepper at the Digger's Club in East L.A., and I'm not going to be able to make the rest of the gig because I've got a recording. Come out tonight and sit in, and I'm sure when Art hears you he'll hire you for the rest of the gig." I said, "Okay"--but I was scared. I don't even remember what we played, but when we finished the tune Art looked over and said, "You wanna finish this gig?" And I said, "Yeah." He introduced me to the piano player, Sonny Clark; I'd heard Sonny on records, but I'd never met him. The next night Hampton Hawes was on the piano, and that was when I met him.
I got to meet a lot of great musicians at that time. At a jam session I went to one night, [pianist] Paul Bley came; we played together, and he approached me about working with his quartet. He said his bassist had to go back to Montrv©al because his wife was having a baby, and asked if I'd like the gig. Next thing I knew, we're going into the Hillcrest Club, and we stayed there for a couple of years.
And not long after that you heard Ornette Coleman for the first time.
That was at a club called the Haig, which was on Wilshire Boulevard over by MacArthur Park. I went over there on my night off to listen to [saxophonist] Gerry Mulligan's band. The place was mobbed, and at one point this guy went up to the bandstand and asked to sit in. He took out this white plastic horn, which immediately got my attention. Then he started playing--and that just threw me for a loop. The whole thing changed. All of a sudden, I heard somebody playing from inspiration rather than just the chord structure. This guy was playing on the inspiration from everything and making a new chord structure, which was something I had tried to do before. When I was at jam sessions, I would want to play longer at different places in the tune, or not stop at a certain place and go to another change. I wasn't able to do that.
People don't like it when the bass player alters the form.
There you go, man. People would get really upset!
Did you meet Ornette that night?
No. Almost as soon as he had started to play, they asked him to stop, and he disappeared out the back door. I couldn't catch up to him. When I went to my gig the next night at the Hillcrest, Lennie McBrowne was setting up his drums, and I told him, "I heard this guy play at the Haig, and I've never heard anything so brilliant in my life. It sounded like a human voice." Lennie said, "Was he playing a plastic horn?" I said, "Yeah, how did you know?" And he said, "I know him. That was Ornette Coleman."
So I asked Lennie if he could invite Ornette to come by the club. We had these Sunday morning jam sessions. We'd finish the gig at two and take a break to get something to eat--over by the Digger's Club, they had these little stands where you could get a French dip sandwich, and I lived on those things! Then we'd go back to the club at four for the jam session, which would last until nine on Sunday morning.
Ornette came by and Lennie took me over to his table. I said, "I heard you play the other night, and you sounded really beautiful." He said, "Thanks, not many people tell me that. Sit down." We talked, and he said he'd just gotten fired from Bullock's department store. He had been running the freight elevator, and they fired him 'cause nobody could ever get the elevator--everybody would be ringing the buzzer, and he'd be in there practicing his horn!
He didn't play at the club that night, but he listened. Afterwards, we got into his Studebaker and went to this house where he had a little room. He had trouble getting the front door open because it was sticking on manuscript paper. He finally got it open, and when we walked in there was music everywhere. He reached down on the floor and picked up a piece of manuscript paper, put it on a music stand, and said, "Let's play this one. I wrote some changes I want you to play when I play the melody. But after that, I want you to take the changes you play from what I'm playing in my solo, not from the song." I couldn't believe somebody was giving me permission to do that!
So what he gave you was like a lead sheet?
Yes. He had the melody, and the chords he had composed with the melody. But when you took your solo, you made a new chord structure. We played all day and all night. And the next thing I knew, we were going over to [trumpeter] Don Cherry's house every day and playing, with Don and [drummer] Billy Higgins.
When I look back on this now, I see how important it was that we all met at that time. Every day we would play, and then we would stop playing and talk. It was almost like being in school. We would talk about the changes and what they meant to the melody and what they meant to the soloist. We would talk about the changes being composed spontaneously as you're playing, and making the changes something that would be beautiful.
At the beginning, Billy and I would play in the pattern of the song. You can hear that on the first two records, The Shape of Jazz to Come and Change of the Century; when we started to improvise, we were pretty much following the pattern of the song. I felt that would be a good thing to do on the records. But when we were playing at Cherry's house, we wouldn't always follow the pattern of the song. I took my bass lines from what I heard. We made our arrangements as we went along, the arrangements on "Lonely Woman" and "Change of the Century" and "Focus on Sanity" and "Face of the Bass" and "Congeniality"--all of those tunes. Ornette would write out the music in a way where the arrangement was really thought out; we would start and stop together very precisely in the phrasing. They were great arrangements, and the harmonies Cherry played with Ornette were beautiful. They were completely new--new melodies and new harmonies that no one had ever heard before. It was just so exciting to play this music every day.
The way you played that music seems to be connected to the way you sang with your family, where one person would pick up another's harmony part and they would switch roles. Isn't that similar to the way the instruments would exchange their roles in Ornette's music?
That's a great observation, because that's exactly right. I'd be playing the bass part, but I would sometimes switch to a harmony part. And Ornette might be playing the melody, and then Cherry would take over the melody and Ornette would play the harmony. That's how it happened.
Even some technically accomplished players do not have the ability to follow what's going on in Ornette's music. Is that kind of hearing a gift, or is it something that can be learned?
When your ear is developed to a point where you hear music beyond the level of most people, then you're a musician. And there are different levels. Musicians who want to play classical music hear music at the level of interpretation where they want to play. It's not a judgmental thing, like this kind of ear is better than that kind--I'm not saying that. I'm just saying there are developmental stages of the ear, and different people might be going in different directions. One ear might have a different perception than another ear. For instance, I loved classical music when I was growing up, and I loved the thought of playing in a bass section. But when I heard jazz, it gave me the desire to create melodies. I didn't want to spend the rest of my life just playing the notes somebody had written for a classical bass section.
The class I teach at Cal Arts is called "Discovering Your Voice on Your Instrument," and one of the things I tell my students is that every musician hears music differently. You have to think about all the melodies and all the harmonies your ears are hearing. The sound that happens inside you is the sound that should come to your instrument.
You certainly do that. I can hear one note and say, "That's Charlie." How did you develop that voice?
It's a matter of becoming one with your instrument--and the closer you get to your instrument, the closer you get to your sound. The more you discover your music, the more you discover your voice on your instrument.
Because of my hearing problem, the students in my class have to play really softly--and if you play softly, you will discover your sound faster than anything. You have to take more care in the way you approach your instrument. All musicians should be aware of the gentleness and the tenderness inside them. You have to bring out the beauty that's inside you, like the whisper in the reed that Bird had.
One of the challenges of playing is that if you're in a bad mood or just had an argument with somebody or feel really sad, you've got to put all that behind you. You've got to be unselfish and giving. And you have to give as beautifully as you can, and with as much appreciation for your gift as you can. You should be saying, "Thank you for the gift I've been given, and now I have to give this back to the world." And know that your gift is not your own.
It's important for young musicians to know about humility and to have humility in their lives. I tell my students: "Strive to become a good human being, with humility and appreciation in your life, and then you'll have a chance of becoming a great musician."
I'm still not happy with my own playing. I'm always striving to make it better, and I'm striving to learn how to approach music in a new way, as if I'd never heard music before. And to play something that's going to touch somebody's life.
Do you think it's harder for young jazz musicians now than it was when you were starting out?
We're living in the age of marketing and e-mail, and there are about a million records coming out every month on a million different labels. There are no apprenticeships being served anymore. Many young musicians are starting out as leaders, and all this hype is being written about them by record companies and critics and publicists. All of that has made its way into the jazz world, which is a deeper world than the pop world, where you expect it to happen.
The tragedy is that it's taking young minds away from innovation and focusing them more on mass appeal. It's good to get the music out to a lot of people--I think that's very important--but it shouldn't be done to the detriment of the music. Think about [trumpeter] Fats Navarro, [saxophonist] Stan Getz, Charlie Parker, and Jimmy Blanton--they all started playing when they were 17 or 18 years old, but they were thinking about the purity of improvisation and spontaneity.
You've worked in so many different settings. Is there a common element? Is there something that lets you know when a project is right for you?
The first thing would be honesty. If I see an honest approach to beauty, then I feel I could be a part of it. Some musicians don't think about categories--not the ones who are doing it with their lives on the line. I play music with my life on the line every day. I will give my life for my music. What is life, if you don't do that? So I look for people who have this same feeling, and whenever I find them I'm happy, because I'm not exposed to that kind of honesty and commitment very often. When I am, I really want to be a part of it.
Looking back at your career, what do you think is the most important thing you've accomplished?
I hope I've had some kind of impact on the way people think about how we're living today. This music means you should really pay attention to life, every day you're living it. It's very, very precious, and very, very spiritual. That's why, in my class, I talk about spirituality. I talk about the spiritual part of improvisation, not the technical part. You can learn all the licks, and you can learn all the scales and chords, but the spiritual part is what you should really be aware of. Every day we live on this planet, we should be thankful we're here and have the ability to make something good happen. We should be thankful we have the ability to improve the quality of life. I would hope my music has helped to do that.
Many thanks to Gregory Isola and Susan Deneau for their help with this article.
For more on Charlie Haden, see the July/Aug '91 and April '94 issues.