Charlie Haden Biography
Charles Edward Haden, 6 August 1937, Shenandoah, Iowa, USA. Haden began his musical career when still a child, broadcasting daily on local country music radio. After formal music study he moved to Los Angeles, playing bass with Hampton Hawes, Art Pepper, Red Norvo and Paul Bley. While with Bley's trio he met Ornette Coleman and began rehearsing with him in 1958. By the following year he had moved to New York and become Coleman's regular bass player, exhibiting an exceptional understanding of the saxophonist's music (notably on the seminal The Shape Of Jazz To Come). Haden stayed with Coleman until 1960, but has played with him since on several occasions, including some gigs in 1968 and 1972, where he played in tandem with one of his successors, David Izenzon. Because of drug problems, which he subsequently defeated, Haden was out of circulation for a while, but returned to the scene in 1964 to play with Denny Zeitlin and Tony Scott. He returned to Coleman's group in 1966, joined the Jazz Composers' Orchestra Association, and began playing with pianist Keith Jarrett. He worked with the latter from 1967 to 1976. In 1969 Haden established the Liberation Music Orchestra with Carla Bley. The orchestra's debut recording Liberation Music Orchestra (credited to Haden) used themes from the Spanish Civil War and from Latin American resistance movements as the raw material for intense arrangements by Haden and Bley. Along with Crisis, a recording of a concert from a tour which Haden made with Ornette Coleman in 1969, Liberation Music Orchestra has the distinction of being the object of an attempt by the record companies' shareholders to withdraw it from the catalogue because of its "anti-American" content. Both albums featured Haden's "Song For Ché" and Crisis also contained tunes inspired by the Vietnam conflict. A second Libertation Music Orchestra recording followed in 1983, inspired by the same themes as the debut. The Ballad Of The Fallen was voted Album Of The Year in DownBeat magazine in 1984. Haden continued his interest in politically motivated music in 1991 when he issued an album with Carlos Paredes, a Portuguese fado musician who had been an active anti-Fascist and also released a third Liberation Music Orchestra album, Dream Keeper, the title track a suite based on a poem by the African American writer Langston Hughes. During the 80s Haden widened his composing horizons, writing for a variety of instrumental combinations, collaborating with other composer-musicians such as Gavin Bryars and leading his own relatively mainstream group, Quartet West (with Ernie Watts Alan Broadbent and Larance Marable) He also worked with Pat Metheny, Alice Coltrane (1968-72), in Old And New Dreams, virtually a reconstruction of the Ornette Coleman quartet but with Dewey Redman (an associate of Coleman during his later Blue Note Records period) on saxophone, in Magico (a trio with Jan Garbarek and Egberto Gismonti), and Geri Allen and Paul Motian. He also played with Chet Baker, on one of the trumpeter's last recording sessions (Silence), and was instrumental in introducing Cuban pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba to a wider audience, producing and playing on his Blue Note debut, Discovery: Live At Montreux (1991). In 1994 Haden worked with Ginger Baker and Bill Frisell on Baker's well-received Going Back Home. He continued to set standards during the decade, notably his 1997 collaboration with Pat Metheny on Beyond The Missouri Sky (Short Stories). In the new millennium, Haden revived the Liberation Music Orchestra for the 2005 recording Not In Our Name, an album inspired by the contemporary political situation in the USA. Through his own ventures and his contribution to the crucially important Ornette Coleman quartet, Haden carved out his place as one of the most skilful and adventurous bass players at a time when several exponents of the instrument (including Charles Mingus and two other Coleman bass players, Scott La Faro and Izenzon) were building on the achievements of the likes of Paul Chambers, Ray Brown and Percy Heath, pushing the instrument into the spotlight with their virtuosity and range.
Source: The Encyclopedia of Popular Music by Colin Larkin. Licensed from Muze.
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