THE LANDFILL CHRONICLES — Charlie Haden’s Wide World of Wonders (Part 1 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
(final) Chapter 26
Part 1
When I lived in the Bay Area, I came into friendly contact with Charlie Haden a lot. Not only was he a grand master of the jazz bass, but he was a top-tier conversationalist.
He philosophized with a Left Coast new-age sentiment (“I love beautiful music from the heart and purity of someone’s soul to give back to the universe because the universe has brought all of us together”).
He quibbled over the term jazz (“I can’t even call it jazz what some people are saying is the art form of jazz. As a matter of fact, I hate jazz”).
He shared entertaining anecdotes, including his response to a cell phone ringing during a performance (“I stopped playing in the middle of my solo and said, ‘Suicide hotline — please hold’”) and his comic experience of supermarket Muzak (what he calls “brain-damaging, back-beat, dysfunctional noise, or Maytag musics”).
We liked each other and that was special.
This part interviews Charlie in long-form for Strings;
Part 2 converses with him about his Quartet West band for the San Francisco Chronicle; his Art of the Duo for the now shuttered QWEST! Magazine
Part 3 Two DownBeat live Blindfold Tests
CHARLIE SITS AND TALKS 1995
At age 59, jazz bassist Charlie Haden is a 57-year veteran of show business. He’s one of the heavyweights of the jazz world and a prolific recording artist, both as leader and top-notch session man. We’re sitting in the sparsely populated lounge outside the main dining room at Claremont Spa & Hotel in Berkeley, California, where he’s staying during his five-night headline engagement at Oakland’s prestigious jazz club, Yoshi’s Nite Spot, with jazz elder saxophonist Benny Carter and upstart pianist Eric Reed.
Looking dapper in a gray shirt and gray corduroy vest, Charlie wants to start out by expressing how he approaches music. “If you think back, the music that moves you the most is that which is the most honest, vulnerable and true,” he says. “Part of my mission as a musician is being committed to bringing beauty to the world. I do what I do because I feel it with my heart and soul. I approach music with a willingness to give up my life for every note.”
It’s an early Saturday afternoon in June, and Charlie appears to have recovered from whatever bug that made him feel a tad under the weather earlier in the week. His walk is brisk, and he says he’s excited to talk about his years in the music business.
When we’re fully ready to have a long talk for a 1995 Strings magazine cover story, Charlie shakes his head and says we’ve got to find a different place. The lounge won’t do as the place for him to be fielding questions this afternoon.
“I can’t talk when this is playing,” Charlie says, in reference to the soft, canned, elevator-like music filtering into the lounge from speakers set into the high ceiling. His disgust with flowery background music prompts us to find a conference room nearby where we finally park and, with Charlie sipping a cappuccino, begin our bass conversation.
It’s no surprise that one of the main themes Charlie keeps returning to is how reverentially he approaches music.
Charlie made his professional music debut when he wasn’t yet 2 years old as Little Cowboy Charlie with the Haden Family Band, a well-known country and western group helmed by his parents. He continued performing with his family throughout his high school years, even though by that time he had become a jazz fan. While he didn’t start playing bass until he was 14, he was convinced he would be performing as a jazz bassist as soon as he was able to leave his Midwest home. At 19, he moved to Los Angeles to attend the Westlake College of Modern Music, which Charlie eventually quit because he found a home in the jazz clubs.
With his closely cropped hair and eager smile, he still has that Cowboy Charlie boyish look about him. But during our conversation, you can tell that he’s lived the jazz life, especially when he reminisces about jazz colleagues who weren’t able to handle the fast life. He recalls the joy of working with people like cool-jazz trumpeter/vocalist Chet Baker, who died an early death, and wishes he had had the opportunity to perform with piano great Bill Evans, who also died prematurely.
As if thinking of his own bout with substance abuse in the mid ’60s, Charlie, at one point in our conversation, says, “The most important thing as a musician is to be healthy so you can stick around long enough to give your gift back to the world. You can’t deprive the world of your gift. All of today’s musicians have to be squeaky clean. They must be in great mental and spiritual shape to play this music at their full power. They have to stay away from all chemicals including alcohol. You cannot be at your full creative power if you are sedated. Bird [Charlie Parker] was a great musician in spite of his addiction, not because of it.”
After his SoCal landing in the jazz world, at 21 Charlie made his his way to New York, the center of the jazz universe, in the band of one of the new revolutionaries of the idiom, Ornette Coleman. It was Charlie’s melodic bass patterns that undergirded the new-styled free jazz Ornette’s quartet played. Charlie’s improvisation independent of the chord changes of the pieces made him an instant star.
In subsequent years, Charlie performed in the bands of dozens of contemporaries before launching his own solo career. His first solo project came in 1969 with protest piece album Liberation Music Orchestra that featured a big band that overtly mixed jazz and political critique and garnered the bassist a composition Guggenheim Fellowship in 1970.
In recent years, Charlie’s formed Quartet West in 1986 to rekindle his love for the music of the ’40s and early ’50s. His project featured saxophonist Ernie Watts, pianist Alan Broadbent and drummer Larance Marable. It has released several albums, including Haunted Heart, which was nominated for a Grammy Award in 1992, and Always Say Goodbye, which was named Album of the Year in DownBeat magazine’s 1994 Critics Poll. Charlie was also named top bassist in both 1994 and 1995.
Charlie’s most recent studio album is Steal Away — Spirituals, Hymns and Folk Songs, a bass-piano duo date with Hank Jones of such gorgeous melodies as “Wade in the Water,” “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and “Amazing Grace” that are deeply ingrained in American gospel culture.
The album was recorded in Montreal in 1994, after Charlie and Hank premiered the project at the Montreal Jazz Festival concert. When they took the stage, the full house at Theatre Maissonneuve knew the piano-bass duo would be performing spirituals, hymns and folk songs, but audience members had no idea how elegant, moving and arresting the listening experience would be.
As a matter of fact, it wasn’t until the eighth number — a sublime rendition of that hopeful anthem of the Civil Rights movement, “We Shall Overcome” — that concert goers emerged from their rapture long enough to applaud the extended improvisation Hank offered. Before that, the playing had been so heartfelt and reverential that it seemed as if you were at a meditative church recital where clapping was appropriate only after the last note of a piece was played.
In addition to working on his own projects, Charlie has been busy lending his bass lines to albums by such jazz stars as Abbey Lincoln, Bill Frisell, Ginger Baker, Kenny Barron, Joshua Redman and Toots Theilemans as well as pop singer Rickie Lee Jones. He’s also contemplating collaborating on a new Haden family project, this time with his own children, his 27-year-old son Joshua, and his 23-year-old triplet daughters, Rachel, Petra and Tanya. He and his wife Ruth live in Santa Monica, California.
THE CONVERSATION
Why did you decide to play bass?
I come from a musical family. My parents performed on the Grand Ole Opry as a team. When each child was born, we were added to the family band. I was born in Shenandoah, Iowa, where my family was singing on this radio show on this big station called KMA. This was before television, and they were on a lot of radio stations that covered vast areas. So, when I was 22 months old, I sang my first song on the radio. I was billed as Cowboy Charlie. From that point on until I was 15, I sang on the radio every morning and afternoon. We moved all over the place, but most of the radio we did was in the Midwest.
One of my brothers Jim (he was called Smokey Mountain Jim) had started to play bass on the radio after one of the guys in the band left. My dad needed a replacement, so Jim, who was five years older than me and had been playing the guitar, was the likely candidate. As soon as he started playing, I noticed how the bass made everything sound deeper and better. It added so much fullness to the music. I loved the way it sounded. So, every chance I got when Jim was leaving to go to school or going on a date, I’d grab his bass and start playing it. I was 14 at the time., especially around Springfield, Missouri
Your brother was also a jazz fan, right?
That’s right. He bought records. So when I was trying to learn how to play the bass, I’d play along with his records. That’s how I first became interested in jazz. Plus, when I was 14, my dad had taken me to see a Jazz at the Philharmonic touring show in Omaha, Nebraska. We were doing a weekly TV show in Omaha at the time. So we went to this concert. I heard Charlie Parker and Lester Young, and I knew right then that this is what I wanted to do.
That was it. I knew nothing could stop me from playing jazz. That was all I thought about. I formed a band in high school. We called ourselves the Cool Four. I played bass, and we’d perform at assemblies and other school events.
Around this time my dad decided to take a break from show business and touring. So we moved back to Springfield, Missouri. My dad was a fisherman who loved fly fishing, so he built a lodge out near this new lake called Lake Bull Shoals in this tiny town called Kisseemills, population about 100. I finished high school in a town called Forsyth, which is very near Branson, a town known for its country music today. I was still playing bass and was playing along with records I was buying, but there weren’t any other musicians around to play jazz with at Forsyth High. My senior class had 30 students who all belonged to Future Farmers of America and wore their FFA jackets to school. I used to invite some of my friends to the lodge and play them Charlie Parker and Billie Holiday records. They thought I was crazy, but I did convert a few.
So, you knew you didn’t have a future in music there in the Ozarks.
Right. I knew I had to move away after I finished school. At first, I was interested in Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio. I had read about the school and contacted it for a scholarship application. I didn’t know any classical music on my bass because I had never taken lessons. But the band director at Forsyth High got a hold of a little classical piece for bass. I taught myself how to play it, recorded it on a tape machine and sent it to Oberlin. They gave me a full scholarship.
I was planning on going until I read an article in DownBeat magazine about this school in Los Angeles. It was called the Westlake College of Modern Music, and it was like the Berklee School of Music in Boston. I decided that would be a better place to go because they had teachers and students who were centered around playing jazz.
I had also been to Los Angeles once before in 1946 or ’47 when I was nine. My mother’s Aunt Margaret was an aspiring actress who was on track to become a movie starlet. But she discovered she had a heart murmur, and the movie studios wouldn’t insure her. So she was dropped. My mother, my sister Mary and I drove to see her in Long Beach. I’ll never forget it. It was during the heyday of the Raymond Chandler film noir period. I saw Sunset Strip, the corner of Sunset and Vine, all the major radio network buildings. It left an impression on me.
But it was the jazz connection that really drew you to Los Angeles.
Yes. Besides playing the bass, I was listening to a lot of jazz. It was difficult to get jazz records in Springfield. You had to order them. Every once in a while, a stray record would come into the Hoover Music Store. I spent all my time there after school, sitting in the listening booths to everything I could get my hands on. I listened to all the greats like Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, the Duke Ellington band, the Stan Kenton Band with Art Pepper. One of the people I listened to a lot was Hampton Hawes. I loved his piano playing so much. Someday, I thought, I’m going to play with him.
When I was 15, I went to see Stan Kenton’s group play in Springfield. I talked to a couple of the guys in the group and then went to the hotel after the dance. I had been in the booths so much that I decided to knock on the door of the room at the Colonial Hotel. The guys I met opened the door. All over the room there were bottles of gin, vodka and bourbon. I told them how they great they had sounded. And they said, you wanna play jazz, and I said yeah! They said, look around the room. You want to end up like us? And I said yeah! You want to tour and do a lot of one-nighters in smoky jazz clubs? And I said, yeah, that’s what I want!
So you headed off to Westlake as soon as you could.
I had to wait awhile to make enough money to go. I started playing bass on this weekly TV show called Ozark Jubilee which originated from Springfield. Musicians from Nashville would come and play. I performed in a band led by Grady Martin, who was the band leader of Red Foley. I saved as much money as I could to pay my way through school. I was also selling shoes at the Walkover Shoe Store.
The manager of the store was a drummer. He wasn’t very good, but he had a band that I played with a couple of times. But as soon as I had enough saved for my tuition and a Greyhound bus ticket to L.A,. I packed my bags and my bass and I were gone.
I was so happy to leave. One of the things I didn’t like about the Midwest was the racism. It’s beautiful country, but I found it real backwards when it came to values and education. My mom and dad weren’t that way. They were interested in all kinds of things. I remember my mother taking me to an African-American church when I was a kid. We went into the back row and listened to the gospel choirs. I loved it.
I hated the racism in Missouri. I didn’t understand it at all. I thought I’d be getting away from that when I got to L.A., but it was still there. It just had a more cosmopolitan spin.
Getting to L.A. was a big culture shock for a boy like me from the Midwest. I’ll never forget the L.A. bus station waiting for the people at Westlake to pick me up. It was unreal. I had never seen anything like it in my life. There were all different races, people from Mexico and China, African Americans.
Didn’t your education at Westlake pale in comparison to what you learned in the clubs?
Westlake had some pretty good teachers, but I did start going to jam sessions in clubs so I could find players better than me to play with.
One night I was in Tiny Naylor’s Drive-In at the corner of LaBrea and Sunset. It was 3 o’clock in the morning, and I was doing my homework there. I looked down at the end of the counter and I saw this guy who looked like Red Mitchell, who played bass with Hampton Hawes. So I introduced myself and told him how much I enjoyed his playing. Then I said that I really wanted to meet Hawes.
Red invited me over to his house to talk. I went there every Sunday for a month. He’d play piano and I’d play bass. We also talked a lot, about being on the road with different bands like Woody Herman’s. I asked him a lot of questions about living the jazz life and playing music.
One day he called me and said that he was playing at a club in East L.A. with Art Pepper but couldn’t finish the gig because he had a recording date lined up. So Red said, “Why don’t you come down and sit in on a couple of tunes. I’m sure Art’ll hire you after he hears how you play. So I went to the gig. Red introduced me to Art and I played Red’s bass. I was scared to death, but Art turned to me and said, “You’ve got the gig the rest of the week.”
That first night Sonny Clark was playing the piano. But the next night, guess who was there? Hampton Hawes. We ended up becoming close friends and playing a lot together.
Being a young kid from the Midwest in the big city, were you worried that jazz musicians wouldn’t give you the time of day?
The big city jazz musicians are very open people. I never had any trouble. But that may have been because I was possessed. There was nothing that was going to stop me. I used to go to jam sessions, walk up to the bandstand, grab a guy’s bass and say I wanna play. I met a lot of musicians that way. I think people who are involved in music are always looking to make it sound better. If you can play, people welcome you.
My experience playing with Art Pepper was good because I met a lot of other musicians. I was at another jam session when I met [pianist] Paul Bley who had just come from New York. His bassist had to return home because his wife was having a baby, so I sat in with him too. He liked my playing so much that he invited me to play with him at a gig he was starting at the Hillcrest Club on Washington Boulevard between LaBrea and Crenshaw. I met a lot of other people there at the Sunday afternoon jams when a lot of musicians sat in with us. We packed the club every night the rest of the week. We were there for months.
How did you meet Ornette Coleman?
Around this same time, I went to this club called The Hang on Wilshire Boulevard on one of my nights off. I was listening to this band when this guy came up to the stage and asked the leader if he could sit in. He took out an alto sax that was made of plastic and he started playing. That whole room lit up for me. I had never heard anything like that in my whole life.
Pretty soon, the leader stopped playing and told this guy to put his sax away. He did and then disappeared out the back door before I could catch up to him. The next night I told Lenny McBrowne, the drummer in Bley’s band, about this brilliant alto player I had heard playing on a plastic sax. He told me that was Ornette Coleman. I said, could you introduce me to him. The next night Lenny brought him to the club. I told Ornette how great I thought his playing was. He told me to come over to his place to play after my gig that night.
That was the beginning of a whole new world for me. I was finally able to play music the way I had been hearing it in my head. You see, what Ornette was doing was playing in a free way in which you didn’t have to improvise on chord changes. We started rehearsing every day with trumpeter Don Cherry and drummer Billy Higgins. We were all thinking the same things musically. It was a matter of everyone being at the same place at the same time. The quartet blossomed and soon after we made our first record together.
Why were so attracted to playing free?
It’s not that I didn’t like playing on the chord changes. That’s what inspired me to play jazz in the first place. But I was hearing other ways of playing that didn’t involve the written chord structure of the composition but involved the emotion of the piece. I wanted to play on the feeling and the inspiration of the piece instead of sticking to the chord structure. During the jam sessions back then, I’d be playing along with the chord structure but then stay on the bridge of the song for a while and just play on that. A lot of the musicians I played with didn’t like that. So I had to choose carefully when I would play that way. A couple of people at Westlake were thinking about playing in different ways, but it was for the most part pretty much a straight-ahead jazz scene. You’ve got to remember that jazz was still a young art form then. Bebop was still relatively new.
I was just hearing another way of expressing myself through the music that was deep inside me. It’s hard to explain in words when you improvise on a feeling rather than a chord.
It’s interesting that the music that Ornette was playing originated on the West Coast. What was it like going to New York where the music you were playing was met with a lot of criticism from jazz fans and musicians alike?
Obviously, the criticism was inside me. It’s hard to explain and what you were doing didn’t feel good, but we weren’t thinking about that. We were just excited to be able to play for people. We had been playing the Hillcrest in L.A., but the crowds were dropping off so we got fired and figured we were ready for New York by that time anyways.
Our time in New York was very inspiring and challenging. It was a time of exploration and discovery. We weren’t trying to show off there. We just wanted to present what we were doing to people.
Were you surprised by the negative reaction?
We were playing controversial music and people were putting us down, but on the other hand, we packed the Five Spot every night. It was so lucrative for the owners of the club that they opened up another place called the Jazz Gallery on St. Mark’s and Second Avenue. We were only making $490 a week, but they were making a lot of money. But it wasn’t just the jazz crowd coming to hear us. Everyone in the art world — painters, composers, actors — came to the Five Spot to hear this band of funny looking guys from Los Angeles who were wearing short little coats and playing free styled music with weird horns. They hadn’t heard anything like us. As far as I’m concerned, we knocked everybody out.
That’s the way it’s gone down in the history books. In the Ornette Coleman boxed set of CDs, Beauty Is a Rare Thing, which chronicles that period, you open the piece “Focus on Sanity” with a moving bass solo. It’s a very melodic part, which isn’t what most people associate with Ornette’s music.
But Ornette’s music is so melodic. He approaches music with a strong folk music sensibility. His pieces sound like folk songs. When he improvises, you can hear the folk and blues influences in his magical melodies. Innovators like Ornette are rare. He brought a strong message and changed the course of jazz. He added to the genre’s vocabulary the way Louis Armstrong did in the swing era and the bebop guys did after that. When our quartet played together, we did everything with intricate precision. We played freely, but it was like clockwork. We could start together and stop on a dime together. We were in top-notch shape.
You’ve performed with so many people from Ornette to jazz singer Abbey Lincoln to pop singer Rickie Lee Jones. How do you approach playing with artists from such different musical backgrounds?
The bassist’s job is to make everything sound better and deeper. As for the variety of people I play with, I like working with musicians who share the same honest, creative, human values I hold. I value depth and beauty in music. With the bass, I try to enhance that and inspire everyone to play at that same level. My payback is to inspire the musicians I play with and get them to play the greatest they’ve ever done. I think the bass is an instrument that’s conducive to that.
When I was a kid listening to classical music, Broadway tunes and folk music on the radio, I could always tell when the bassist stopped playing. The fullness and deep sound of the music stopped until the bass came back in. I can hear that even in a choir. I think that love of the bass sound is why I prefer a chamber orchestra to a string quartet. I’d rather hear eight basses, nine to ten cellos and several violas and violins instead of just hearing two violins, a viola and cello. I’m a romantic in that respect. I love adagios and the fullness of pastoral music. I love Rachmaninov and Ravel. And Bach. He was the greatest bass player who ever lived. He heard the greatest bass lines. You won’t hear better bass lines than those that he uses in his compositions. If he had been given a bass to play, that cat would have been great at it.
Everybody hears music differently. The guy who was driving us to our gig at Yoshi’s was telling me that he doesn’t like Bartók because he doesn’t like the dissonance in the music. I responded by saying that everyone hears differently. You hear chords in a different way than the person sitting next to you. It’s like how everyone has different fingerprints. That’s just the way it is with appreciating music. The role of the bass is to make everything sound as beautiful as possible.
In watching you perform, I’m always amazed how deceptively simple your bass playing is. The other night when you were playing with Benny Carter and Eric Reed, you were playing the bass lines right on the beat and bringing out the melodies of the tunes the trio was playing.
I like playing melodies because I grew up singing melodies. That’s all I did when I was a kid. That’s inside me. That’s why when I play my bass lines or solos, they come out as strong melodies. As far as playing on the beat, I had to play that way with Benny and Eric. They’re both marvelous improvisors. Since there wasn’t a drummer in our trio, I had to play on the beat to keep everything flowing. When they improvised, they were playing behind the beat a lot, so I had to keep the time. When you play with a drummer, you can be more flexible.
Playing without a drummer brings up how you are plagued by tinnitus.
Yeah, it’s something that I’ve developed in the last 20 years. I think it’s genetic. Some people have ears that can take more punishment.
My ears are sensitive. My hearing is so acute that it’s like the volume is turned up in my head.
You’ve probably gone to rock concerts where you come home and your ears are ringing. I started developing that ringing from playing next to the cymbals on stage. I had ringing at the end of evening shows. One morning I woke up, and the ringing never went away. It keeps getting louder and louder and louder.
Other musicians in history I believe had the same thing. Beethoven had extreme ringing in his ears, and I think Schuman had such bad ringing that it put him into an insane asylum. It’s very heavy if you can’t acclimate yourself to it because there’s no cure and no way to lessen it. It’s something you have to live with. I have to take a lot of precautions. I play with earplugs, and whenever I do play with a drummer, there has to be plexiglass to separate us onstage. When I record, I have the headphones turned down low, I use earplugs and I play in an isolation booth.
Has it affected your hearing overall?
That’s the funny thing. My hearing keeps getting better. I take ear tests and I go over the limit. I subscribe to this magazine called Tinnitus Today. A lot of people have this problem. Barbra Streisand and Michael Brecker are two musicians who come to mind. But then there are people like Tony Randall. We all have to work out how best to deal with the problem.
You’ve said that during the Ronald Reagan-George Bush presidential years, the arts got wiped out in this country.
That is so true, but it was also a period of time when the music industry built up a kind of music that had a powerful volume. It kept getting louder and louder. Now you can’t go to a house for a dinner party without trying to talk over a thunderous kind of boogaloo beat. Look at the kids driving around in their cars that have the bass so loud they’re shaking from side to side. Either people have forgotten — or the younger kids may never know — what real music sounds like. Real music is supposed to sound like silence. It’s like going into a forest. You have the silence. It’s the same with composing. You have to stop and have the calm before you have music.
When Benny Carter plays, you can hear his song coming from his reed. If you amplify it 200 decibels, you can’t hear his reed. Then you have these rock groups that come out on stage with amps that look like the World Trade Center. What is that doing to the human psyche and to the human spirit? It’s destroying it.
Every morning outside my bedroom window is this mockingbird that starts singing at 4 in the morning. It does different bird warbles. It’s beautiful. That’s the way music is supposed to be. Music starts with the simplicity of a child and ends up expressing the humility of a wise man. It has to have that. Most people will never have the opportunity to be taught humility by the experience of beauty.
I was just reading about pianist Keith Jarrett, with whom you played for years. I was really struck by a comment he made about the loss of melody in music. He said that since melody was so tied into the health of the soul that our modern culture is going through a crisis of the soul because melody is no longer put on a pedestal in modern music. Is this why you decided to do the Steal Away project with Hank Jones?
In a way, yes. I’ve been wanting to do something with those hymns, spirituals and old folk songs as a way of reacquainting people in this country with how these beautiful songs come from such a depth of human spirit. We’re living in a culture where a shallowness is bred by hate, greed and racism. That has a tendency to stifle creativity and depth of spirit. These particular songs counteract all the madness in this country. The spirituals were born out of a liberation movement when African slaves struggled to be free, and the hymns came from England, Ireland and Scotland and were songs of the poor in the Appalachians and the Ozarks struggling to be something better. All these songs should be treated with respect. It seemed important to me to record these songs as a healing process, to remind people about the beautiful songs from this country.
Again, there’s a simplicity at work in these pieces. In Montreal in the summer of 1994 when you premiered these pieces, it was as if the audience was in church. Why did you keep the songs so simple?
All the tunes we played are sacred songs. Hank and I had a long talk before we performed and recorded these pieces about how we should play them. Some of the tunes lent themselves to being improvised upon, but we felt that others like “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and “Steal Away” should be played without improvisation as a way of reverence for the meaning of the tune. I had been performing “We Shall Overcome” with my Liberation Music Orchestra. We played it straight, then went into the blues. I suggested to Hank that we do the same thing and he agreed. Later when we went into the studio to record the songs for the album, it really was like we were in church. A couple of times. we even looked up and said, “Forgive us, O Lord, for that flatted 13th.”
This reminds me of your series of quartet albums, including Always Say Goodbye, which won DownBeat’s Critic’s Poll Album of the Year in 1994. Those albums play up the theme of nostalgia for old times when life was simpler.
Well, I do believe in nostalgia. I’m attracted to the notion because it helps take people away from all the madness and violence of our culture today. I see my albums as a way of returning to roots and recognizing that popular music has a deeper value. Young people today have been taken over by the media and the recording industry, but I think it’s important to broaden musical horizons. As for the nostalgia part, 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. The songs on Steal Away are about how everyone is a creative human being. Everybody means something to this universe. I think it’s good for music like this to be heard.
This is a bit of a digression, but I’m curious about your bowing. You don’t bow very often,
Once in a while when I want to evoke sounds of life. For example, I did an album with Keith Jarrett several years ago on ECM called Old and New Dreams. There was one song called “Songs of the Whales.” I bowed the whole thing, using the bow to sound like whales. But I don’t bow very often. It’s difficult to master. The great string players in jazz all started out with classical training, which is almost all arco playing. But I knew when I was younger that I wasn’t going to be a classical musician. I think there’s something inside of you that has to be attracted to either being an interpretive musician, which is the classical world, or an improvising musician, which is what I do.
One of the things I did when I went to Westlake was to hook up with this teacher, Herman Reinshagen, who had been the principal bassist under Toscanini in the New York Philharmonic. He moved to Los Angeles with his wife when he retired, so I looked him up and took seven or eight lessons with him. He was in his late seventies or early eighties. Top-name jazz bassists like Ray Brown and Charles Mingus had studied with him.
The melodies I hear when I improvise are in a pizzicato context. If I were a musician like Keith Jarrett or Wynton Marsalis who can play both jazz and classical well, I’d have to practice a lot. But I’m not inspired to do that.
So I called Herman up and went over to his house and met with him in his music room, which had beautiful basses in every corner. I brought my bass over and he asked me to play. He immediately said, “I know you’re not interested in playing classical music.” I told him that was true, but that I wanted to learn more about the instrument. So he said, “OK, I’ll play for you, and you play for me.” So I improvised and played jazz, and he’d play classical pieces for me. He wrote out different fingering techniques for me to practice. We had a ball together. He was a great teacher.
You’ve played with so many musicians and been involved with so many different musical projects throughout your life. What would you like to do in the future?
I’d love to do something with a chamber orchestra. I’ve wanted to do that ever since Keith Jarrett released Arbour Zena (1975). He wrote this piece with strings that I really loved. So I’ve thought of doing an album of adagios for chamber orchestra and solo bass violin. I’d like to work with different composers who know my music and my improvising. That’d be great.
I’d also like to do a country album with someone like Vince Gill or Chet Atkins. When I was a kid, most of the musicians I met were country singers. I was lucky to be brought up around people like the Carter Family, Chet Atkins and Roy Acuff. My dad knew them all.
Country is the other musical art form besides jazz that was born in the United States. I’d love to do a country family album with my daughters and son someday. My two daughters in the band That Dog opened a show for Johnny Cash awhile back. So I taught them the Carter Family song “Single Girl, Married Girl.” After they sang it, June Carter, Johnny’s wife, came backstage and asked Rachel and Petra, “Are you the Haden girls? Are you the daughters of Little Cowboy Charlie?”
Your children are all successful artists and they’re all stringed instrument players. Did you force them to play?
I didn’t force them into any kind of music on their way to becoming. They were surrounded by great music at home, and they sought out their own the music they felt close to. They all love jazz. My son Josh was the first person to hip me to some great rock bands like the Minutemen, Firehose, Black Flag and the Meat Puppets. He had a band called the Treacherous Jaywalkers that recorded a couple albums for the SST label. He’s got a new band called Spain that just released an album on Restless Records. He’s a gifted performer and singer. I’m real proud of him.
Josh started out on guitar and switched to bass. One day he asked me for a bass and I got him one. He asked for an electric bass. I didn’t tell him he should learn how to play an acoustic bass. I just got him an electric. You can’t try to change your kids’ ways because they’ll just rebel. They’ll tell you what inspires them, and then you have to encourage their inspiration.
My daughters also have great concepts as musicians. Rachel started playing piano, then took up the guitar, and now she too plays the electric bass. Petra is a violinist. She has perfect pitch. She left some music on my answering machine the other day. She had recorded all the parts of a Bach piece on her four-track. She played all the voices by ear. My other daughter Tanya lives in San Francisco and goes to San Francisco State where she’s studying to be an animator and painter. She also plays cello and has appeared on both the That Dog albums. I’m real proud of all my kids.
CHARLIE’S GEAR BOX 1995
Charlie’s upright bass is his pride and joy. It was made circa 1840 by the famous French instrument maker Jean-Baptiste Vuilliume. “He mostly made violins, violas and cellos,” Haden says. “He made only a few basses and I got one. It’s one of the greatest instruments I’ve ever played.”
He uses Golden Spiral gut strings for his G and D strings and Thomastik Spiro Core gut strings for his A and E strings. The Golden Spiral strings were made by Kaplan, which was sold to D’Addario, which plans to phase out the line, according to Charlie, because the company can no longer secure high-quality gut. “But they’re supposed to make special strings for me,” he adds, “because that’s all I ever use.”
Charlie also uses a Gallien-Krueger 112 MBE amplifier and a pickup made by a young Swiss bass player named Stephan Schertier. “The pickup is the first one I’ve found that amplifies the instrument without taking on a personality of its own,” Charlie says. “Instead, it takes on the personality of the instrument. That’s what you need. You want to be playing your bass and not your amplifier. Some guys spend $10,000–20,000 for a great instrument, then put on metal strings and an inferior pickup, and the bass ends up sounding like a Fender electric.”
For composing, Charlie uses his bass as well as a Baldwin piano, though, sometimes, he says, tunes come to him in unpredictable ways. “The other day I had a dream that I was in a recording studio listening to a tape of a composition I had written,” he says. “It was being played by strings, but the sound was very loud. I asked the engineer to turn up the sound and I heard the melody. At that point, I woke up and immediately wrote the melody down.”
END PART 1