Recorded in Nashville, Rambling Boy features the 71-yearold leading family members and notable guests on traditional tunes and compositions by the likes of Bill Monroe and Hank Williams, with performances that both pay homage to and stretch conventional country styles. Haden’s vocalists on the project include his son Josh; triplet daughters Petra, Rachel, and Tanya; and his wife, Ruth Cameron, along with Vince Gill, Bruce Hornsby, Roseanne Cash, Elvis Costello, Ricky Skaggs, and Dan Tyminski. The stellar backup band includes country/newgrass titans such as Jerry Douglas, Sam Bush, Stuart Duncan, and Russ Barenberg, as well as jazzer Metheny. “Ricky Skaggs’s bass player, Mark Fain, helped me put everything together in Nashville,” Haden notes. “He’s a great player—all these guys down there are great musicians. And all the country musicians are jazz fans.”
Since this was not a jazz record, did you take a different approach to your sound, or did you play as you usually do?
I always play as I usually do. I think everybody brings their own personal touch to whatever instrument they play. One of the things I teach at California Institute of the Arts is how to get the sound that you’re hearing inside you out of your instrument, which is not a small feat. When you hear Wilbur Ware play, when you hear Oscar Pettiford or Wellman Braud or Walter Page or Jimmy Blanton, they each brought their own sound to the instrument.
How do you help students find their personal tone?
I have them play as quietly as possible in the classroom. Everybody’s conditioned now to play loud—if you go to any soundcheck, you’ll hear people saying, “Turn me up” … “Give me more drums in the monitor.” But if they would just start from an acoustic sound and play their instruments without any electronic help, they would hear their true sound.
But it’s really about taking the person that you are when you’re playing music and striving to be that person when you’re not playing music. When you play music, it helps you reach humility, and when you’re not playing music, you have to reach humility on your own. That’s one of the great things music teaches.
I believe 90 percent of the creative process is spiritual. It’s about where we are on this planet, where we are in the universe, and where we are inside ourselves spiritually. The more you realize this, the more you can find your own musical fingerprint.
Your intonation is always so centered. Is that something you’ve worked on a lot?
That’s something I have no choice on. Since I was two I was around people who were singing in tune, so I heard really good intonation. Whenever I heard intonation that wasn’t perfect, I recognized it right away, and I wouldn’t allow that to happen with my own playing. Playing in tune is very important to me, because the note that you’re playing is blending with the chord that someone else is playing or with somebody singing. You want to complement what they’re doing, so you have to be in tune.
How do you teach your students about intonation?
Whenever they play out of tune, they know it right away. I tell them, “You’re sharp … you’re flat—you gotta get on the money.”
On Josh’s tune “Spiritual” on Rambling Boy, you depart from a standard country approach and play in a freer style, with more motion and fills.
Each song is different, and I try to make each song better. That’s what attracted me to the bass. In the recordings I used to hear when I was a little kid, the bass made everything sound better and deeper. So when I’m playing different kinds of music, I just try to make everything sound better. Part of the creative process is communicating with people—you don’t just go into a room by yourself and play. So I always try to make the music beautiful so the listener can go on the journey with me and have a good time.
On “20/20 Vision” you’re playing in counterpoint to Bruce Hornsby’s vocal rather than a straight-up bass part.
Bruce came to me and said, “I know this is your country record, but you should have something on the album that comes from what you’re identified with in jazz. I would love to hear you play on this song the way you did on Ornette Coleman’s ‘Lonely Woman’ [The Shape of Jazz to Come, Atlantic, 1959], where you tune your E string down to D.” “20/20 Vision” just happened to be in D, so that’s what I did— whenever I do that kind of drone sound I tune my E string down to D.
What was it like working with your family on Rambling Boy?
It reminded me of working with my family when I was a kid. My mom and dad were really talented and were great people, and they paid a lot of attention to presenting music to an audience. Every morning they would go through all the music in our files and decide what we were going to do for our shows—we did two shows every day. So I took that approach with my daughters and my son and my wife, working with them and deciding what they wanted to sing, and going through the harmonies of the songs. They all have great voices and great intonation and great ears. And Josh has a gift for writing songs and for playing bass while he sings, which I was never able to do.
So it reminded me of the beginning when I was a little kid, and my parents were rehearsing and learning new songs and finding out who was going to sing which harmony part— it brought all that back to me.
CAN BE HEARD ON
Charlie Haden Family & Friends, Rambling Boy [Decca, 2008]; Quartet West, The Private Collection [Naim 2007], The Best of Quartet West [Verve 2007]; Liberation Music Orchestra, Not in Our Name [Verve, 2005]; Charlie Haden and Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Land of the Sun [Verve, 2004]; Charlie Haden and Pat Metheny, Beyond the Missouri Sky [special edition; Verve 2003].
CURRENTLY SPINNING
“Lover Man” from Stan Kenton’s 1953 Sketches on Standards [Blue Note] “I’ve been playing this thing nonstop; it’s one of the great Lee Konitz solos. Don Bagley was playing bass. I also listen a lot to Rachmaninoff, Bach, and Ravel, and I’ve been listening to country music too: Stanley Brothers, Jimmy Martin, and the Delmore Brothers, whom my dad knew.”
GEAR
Basses 1840s Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume plus contemporary upright by Jean Auray (jauray.com). Haden travels with the Auray (w/custom David Gage case) and used it for the Rambling Boy sessions. Both basses are strung with Thomastik Spirocore steel E and A strings, D’Addario/Kaplan Golden Spiral gut D and G strings. “The lower strings are closer to the wood, so they can be a really good metal string, but the higher strings get more of a metallic sound if they’re metal, and I like to go away from that.”
Setup On the high side: “I like to get a deep sound, and if the strings are too low I can’t do that.” Live sound Schertler STAT-B bridge transducer; Gallien-Krueger MBE150-112 1x12 combo Studio sound To three tracks: pickup direct, one microphone positioned low near the ƒ-hole, one higher near the start of the fingerboard. For Rambling Boy: Telefunken Ela M 260 above, vintage Neumann U 47 below, both through DW Fearn preamps; pickup through Aguilar DB 900 tube DI with Amek System 9098 preamp. Reports engineer Bil VornDick, “I positioned the mics according to Charlie’s tone color and recorded the bass without any EQ.”
THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT
“I never dictated to them what they should listen to—I always let them follow their own way,” says Charlie Haden of son Josh and triplet daughters Rachel, Petra, and Tanya. Not surprisingly, their paths have led to diverse musical destinations: Bassist/vocalist/composer/producer Josh leads the slowcore band Spain; vocalist/instrumentalist Rachel has been touring on bass with Todd Rundgren and was a founding member of the Rentals; vocalist/violinist Petra has recorded with artists such as the Decemberists and Foo Fighters and is working on her third solo CD; and vocalist/cellist Tanya gigs with L.A. indie bands such as Silversun Pickups and Let’s Go Sailing. (An animator by trade, Tanya worked on the recent film Kung Fu Panda, whose title role was voiced by her husband, actor Jack Black—who sings a spirited version of “Old Joe Clark” on Rambling Boy.)
“My dad was always really supportive of me playing music or anything else I wanted to do,” confirms 40-year-old Josh. “He bought me my first electric bass and helped me get started.” (Josh now plays two Fender Precisions—a vintage Antigua model and a 2000 Classic Series ’50s P-Bass—as well as fretted and fretless Warwick Infinities.) Recounts 37-year-old Rachel, who plays a short-scale Ibanez bass with Rundgren: “When I was taking piano lessons, he would sit down with me and talk about—not what the notes were, but how they felt. He really wanted to let me know how important it is to feel what you’re playing. And watching him play taught me about listening and not rushing and not trying to be better than anyone else, but just trying to find who you are in the music.” Adds Josh, “Just from a music-history standpoint, having access to my dad’s record collection—any genre you can think of, from classical to pop to jazz to country—helped me not only with my musicianship but with my thinking in general.”And how was working with Dad on Rambling Boy? “It was great,” says Josh, “playing all those ideas that are rooted in traditional American music and also pushing the boundaries a bit. My attitude from the beginning was that Dad’s the boss, so I wanted to participate as an active musician but also let everything evolve the way it was supposed to evolve. I’ve learned that lesson working with other musicians, but it was particularly true here, where the record revolves around my father’s history.”“It was like a dream come true,” says Rachel. “Just being in a vocal booth with my sisters was very rewarding. And being able to sing on songs that my dad was playing bass on, with all these other wonderful musicians … I felt like my true voice came out.”