THE LANDFILL CHRONICLES — Charlie Haden Quartet & Trios (Part 2 of 3 parts)

Dan Ouellette’s The Landfill Chronicles — Pivotal Conversations on Eclectic Music Elevated to a State of Art (the archival conversation memoirs by Dan Ouellette published at Medium)

THE LANDFILL CHRONICLES — Dan Ouellette’s book-in-progress on Medium. The entire book will be available in print in 2024 on Cymbal Press

Part 2

Charlie’s Quartet & Trios

Link to Part 1 of the Charlie chapter:

https://link.medium.com/AdziE3FgRFb

CHARLIE’S QUARTET WEST WITH STRINGS OPENS THE 1999 SAN FRANCISCO JAZZ FESTIVAL

San Francisco Chronicle

Playing music with passion is Charlie’s professional credo. Even when the jazz bassist informally talks about his career, he keeps returning to one theme: the importance of approaching music reverentially.

A month before his show at the San Francisco Jazz Festival’s press luncheon where the lineup for this fall’s classic was announced, Charlie briefly spoke to the assembled scribes and explained why he chose to premiere his latest project here.

“San Francisco’s festival is one of my favorites because it has remained true to presenting beautiful and deep-valued music,” Charlie said. He’s openly pleased that his lush and lyrical The Art of the Song, complete with a string section and guest vocalists Shirley Horn and Bill Henderson, opens this year’s 17th annual jazz celebration on Wednesday. “Randall Kline is one of the few jazz festival directors today who has not watered down his festival with pop music.”

As for the concert itself, Charlie says in a telephone conversation from his Malibu home a few weeks later that he hopes festivals in such jazz centers as New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Chicago get the message. “I want others to see how elegantly this art form can be presented,” he says, “Jazz really needs this. It’s in a sameness mode right now. There aren’t many innovators who are offering changes for presenting music.”

Charlie’s The Art of the Song performance features music from his sixth album recorded with Quartet West, a Los Angeles-based group he founded in 1986. He formed the band — featuring pianist and arranger Alan Broadbent, saxophonist Ernie Watts and drummer Larance Marable who replaced charter member Billy Higgins after the first recording — to rekindle his love for music of the ’40s and early ‘50s.

HIGHLY UNUSUAL AND INCREDIBLY CHARMING

Called a “highly unusual and incredibly charming” album by liner note writer Orrin Keepnews and deemed one of his personal favorites by the leader himself, The Art of the Song comprises tunes Charlie has been collecting over the years. He says he wanted to not only showcase numbers that had rarely been recorded but also highlight complete melodies that tell a story.

There are several classic numbers including Cy Coleman’s “I’m Gonna Laugh You Right Out of My Life” and Leonard Bernstein’s “Lonely Town” as well as two classical pieces by Rachmaninoff and Ravel given chamber jazz treatments and a couple of Haden originals with lyrics penned by Arthur Hamilton.

If the swells of orchestral beauty and the timeless quality of the songs serve to play up the theme of nostalgia, that’s fine with Charlie, whose Quartet West projects in the past have conjured up that same spirit. As he had told me a few years ago, he reiterates that he champions the notion of nostalgia.

“I do believe in nostalgia because it helps take people away from all the madness and violence of our culture today,” he says. “I see my albums as a way of returning to our roots and recognizing that popular music has a deeper value. It’s a reminder that you have the ability to dream about how you want your life to be. I think music can draw people closer to that reality.’’

For The Art of the Song project, he decided to enlist the services of two vocalists he admires, Bill Henderson and Shirley Horn. Of the former Haden says that the L.A.-based singer is one of the best male vocalists in jazz, although he’s not as well-known because he also has a career as a television and movie actor.

Charlie was equally delighted to work with Shirley, who rarely performs on projects outside of her own gigs (the pianist-vocalist opens the show with her trio). “Shirley is a legend,” Charlie says. “She’s been singing and making records for years. She’s the only female vocalist I can think of who sings on the level of Billie Holiday. This summer Shirley and I played at the same festival, the Jazz on the Water Festival in Portland, Oregon. She sang a couple songs with Quartet West. After the show she asked me, ‘How many songs can I do in San Francisco?’ And I told her as many as you want.’’

The San Francisco Jazz Festival show marks the first time the chamber orchestra and Henderson and Horn will perform this material in concert. Charlie is excited by the prospects. ``I’ve never heard Shirley and Bill sing better than when we recorded the album,” he says. “So for this show, I want us musicians to inspire them to sing better than they ever have in their lives.’’

Even though Charlie had gone from Los Angeles to New York with Ornette Coleman to spread the gospel about the new-styled free jazz, he remembers well his times gigging on the West Coast, especially in San Francisco. “Oh, yeah, my first trip to San Francisco was in in 1957 at the Jazz Workshop playing with [pianist] Paul Bley,” he says. “Around the same time I was playing with Ornette and Don Cherry at a club called Mr. Smith and jamming a lot at Jimbo’s Bop City, where the tenors were all standing in line waiting to play and the bassists all had bleeding fingers.’’

“If you think back,” Charlie says, “the music that moves you the most is that which is the most honest, vulnerable and true. Part of my mission is being committed to bringing beauty to the world. I approach music with a willingness to give up my life for every note.”

THE ARTISTRY OF THE DUO PERFECTED

(Qwest.tv)

When Charlie died on July 11, 2014, the youthful-looking, acutely reasoned and fervently committed peace-seeking devotee to political activism left us with a variety of advanced music that documented his legacy as a pioneering solo artist beyond his groundbreaking collaboration with the iconic shapeshifting contrarian Ornette. With Carla Bley, he formed his leftist-leaning Liberation Music Orchestra in 1969 and later after moving from New York back to Los Angeles launched his more bop-oriented Quartet West project in 1987. But where Charlie was at his most soulful and insightful best was in his duo adventurers with such a diverse cast as Pat Metheny, Keith Jarrett, Hank Jones, Jim Hall and even his former avant partner Ornette. Haden was quoted in his website blog: “Before music there was silence, and the duet format allows you to build from the silence in a very special way.”

In an NPR interview about his 2010 duo album Jasmine with Keith Jarrett, Charlie said, “The priority is to create something new that’s never been before. And you put your life on the line every time that you play.”

Keith added: “We’re trying to find the dynamic — not exactly blend, but add the right color at the right moment based on what the other player is playing.”

Charlie recorded well over 20 albums of his intrepid duo explorations with some previously unreleased sessions only eventually seeping into the album world, especially on Impulse! In 2014 the label released Charlie’s duets with guitarist Jim Hall — a sublime show that had been recorded in 1990 at the Montreal International Jazz Festival.

It was about time, as the release was a posthumous affair, given that Jim had passed away the year before. In 2015, label also offered the rare duo date with pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba (who Charlie mentored after discovering him in Cuba). It’s another moving live documentation, Tokyo Adagio, from a 2005 date at the Blue Note Jazz Club in Tokyo.

At the Charlie memorial produced by his wife Ruth Cameron Haden at New York’s 1,500-seat concert venue Town Hall on January 13, 2015, numerous collaborators gathered together to pay their respects. Ruth reflected on her husband, noting that “he felt a responsibility to impart beauty to the world and see creative music as an alternative way of looking at the world. He felt at home and safe when he played music. He faced challenges in his life — polio and addiction — and he felt like he had to keep a constant vigil. He would say, I’m in trouble when I put my bass down.”

One of the performances at the show featured pianist Brad Mehldau dueting with saxophonist Lee Konitz. It was fitting given that the two had recorded with Charlie on 1997’s Alone Together album on Blue Note and again with Paul Motian on drums in 2011 for the Live at Birdland ECM album. At the memorial Brad acknowledged how Charlie, a one-time heroin addict in his twenties, had helped him through dark times of his own. “Charlie was a musical and spiritual mentor to me,” he said.

Charlie had recognized Brad’s ability to advance the language of jazz with his distinctive voice on the piano and his harmonic sophistication. He eagerly sought future encounters with his soulmate, which led to an invite from the Enjoy Jazz Festival in Heidelberg, Germany to play together in November 2007 in the art nouveau cathedral, the Christuskirche, in Mannheim. It was their first duo appearance and was recorded. Haden possessed the tape that he listened to often and desired to have it be documented as a live album. That dream came true in October when Impulse! Records/Universal Music Canada released Long Ago and Far Away — yet another brilliant addition to the Charlie Haden duo oeuvre. Brad reflected on the concert: “It’s thrilling to play with someone who improvises like this…Ornette’s quartet often was free of a fixed harmonic schema…and Charlie was improvising the harmony from the ground up.”

Long Ago and Far Away opens with Brad and Charlie in a playful anarchic space on “Au Priv” with the pianist at times dancing the melody with the bassist surrounding him with a soft lyrical tenderness, setting the improvisational fluidity to come. Like most of Charlie’s duo shows, this has the emotional undercurrent of quiet — a contemplative spiritual realm.

There are also no repertoire surprises, but a deep element of listening and conversing at work throughout. The title track, an Ira Gershwin and Jerome Kern tune from the 1944 film musical Cover Girl (starring Rita Hayworth and Gene Kelly), has Brad stepping up with a tinge of swing and a staccato single-finger fling in the midst while Charlie, intent on his partner’s searches, brings his bass to a space of new ways of hearing the tune. The pair also relaxes into solo transcendence on one of Charlie’s all-time favorite tunes, “My Love and I,” composed by David Rasmin for the 1954 film The Apache. The bassist, who recorded the number with Quartet West, is on the record as describing the song as having “a deep melody and very deep chords.”

The entire live recording has that pleasing mystical sense of tension and release, with each improviser developing the other’s ideas, bouncing off each other’s inventiveness, in a relaxed trust. They are two storytellers having a loving conversation.

This new chapter of Charlie duos brings to mind more from his heralded history as an artist eager to engage in free musical discourse. Below is a very selected list of Charlie Haden duo heroism on record:

• Closeness (with various artists, A&M/Horizon, 1976) Charlie loves duets, so why not link up with four of his friends to have some fun and lay down eight tracks. It’s lovely Charlie with Ornette Coleman, Keith Jarrett, Alice Coltrane and Paul Motion. Quite a feast.

• Soapsuds, Soapsuds (with Ornette Coleman, Artist House, 1979) Some listeners call this one of the greatest Haden duos ever. There’s a good reason as he and his former band leader Ornette Coleman push boundaries in this raw and edgy setting, inspiring each other in an active way. It’s all about telepathy here with Ornette on tenor sax and trumpet playing peek-a-boo in counterpoint to Charlie’s sonic lyricism and pizzicato dissonance. Great track: “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman” — the theme from the bizarre late-night soap opera on TV at the time where Ornette blows and Charlie scampers his bass line in support. It’s one of Charlie’s hardest albums to track down. Rare.

• Steal Away: Spirituals, Hymns and Folk Songs (with Hank Jones, Verve, 1995) A true gem, this meeting of two icons praising with spirituals, hymns and folk songs is a rewarding spin through music that had largely been forgotten by the fast pace of our culture. Charlie and Jones lovingly play the melodies straight from their hearts on piano and bass. In the liner notes, Abbey Lincoln wrote: “Hank and Charlie together are a magical, musical entity….[they] use a brilliant, simple, masterful approach to these forever songs.”

• Beyond the Missouri Sky (Short Stories) (with Pat Metheny, Verve, 1997) Both the guitarist and bassist shared Missouri lineage which prompted them to contribute their originals as well as old-time music from the Midwest and popular tunes. While Metheny’s guitars dominate the proceedings, Charlie plays the intimate card with gorgeous lyrical basslines that rudder and drive the songs. A big hit in the jazz world as well as a Grammy winner for best jazz instrumental performance. At the memorial where Metheny fingerpicked three of Charlie’s tunes on acoustic guitar, he said, “Even though he was 17 years older than me, Charlie was like a brother in that we understood each other without talking.”

• Jasmine (with Keith Jarrett, ECM, 2010) In the liner notes to this charged album, Keith writes: …”Art is dying in this world, and so is listening…Charlie and I are obsessed with beauty. An ecstatic moment in music is with the lifetime of mastery…” With pockets of high energy mixed with contemplation, this is one of the best duos Charlie created with pure and robust spontaneity.

• Charlie Haden Jim Hall (Verve, 2014) From the onset, Charlie syncs up with the guitarist on an almost rowdy take on Monk’s “Bemsha Swing.” It’s a travesty this tasty live recording mostly of standards but with originals had to wait nearly 25 years after it was recorded in Montreal. The two circle each other, listen to each other and open up wide spaces for lengthy improvisation on ballads and swingers. Pat Metheny commented in the liners: “This is a recording for the ages.”

• Tokyo Adagio (with Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Impulse!, 2015) After meeting and hearing the young Cuban pianist in Havana, Charlie went to bat to get him a recording deal in the U.S. in the midst of the embargo, proving what a talent he was to Bruce Lundvall who pulled some sleight of hand with the Cuban government and signed him to Blue Note Canada. Gonzalo always touched base with Charlie, but this 2005 meeting in Tokyo at the Blue Note Jazz club has the markings of journey music with great respect. Some of the tunes are uptempo, some soft spoken, but all with a generosity and romanticism of improvisation.
• PART 3 NEXT
• Charlie BFTs