A Rain Forest: Charlie Haden (1937-2014)

Here is Charlie Haden talking about his somewhat Jungian philosophy of improvisation.

Charlie Haden, an influential jazz bassist and band leader whose eclectic career spanned seven decades, and ranged from the most avant-garde music to the most traditional, died in Los Angeles on July 11 at age 76.  He had been suffering from post-polio syndrome, a disease affecting people who had polio as children, which causes muscle weakness and pain and left him unable to play.  His last appearance was at the Healdsburg (Cal.) Jazz Festival in June, 2013.

Charles Edward Haden was born in Shenandoah, Iowa on August 6, 1937. His family played country music on the radio and barnstormed throughout the Midwest as the Haden Family Band. He first performed at the age of 2, singing and yodeling as Cowboy Charlie. He was forced to give up singing at 15, when he contracted polio, which affected his facial and throat muscles. He took up the bass, and was the house bassist on Ozark Jubilee, a Springfield, MO, TV show. He retained a lifelong interest in country music and in 2008, he released Ramblin' Boy, a country CD featuring his wife, Ruth Cameron, his son, Josh, his triplet daughters, Petra, Rachel and Tanya, his son-in-law, actor Jack Black, and several guest stars. (I only recommended it for country music fans.)

In 1851, Charlie Haden saw Charlie Parker perform with Jazz at the Philharmonic and was inspired to take up jazz. He moved to Los Angeles, where he studied at Westlake College of Music, and played with Art Pepper, Hampton Hawes, and Paul Bley. In 1959, he joined the Ornette Coleman Quartet, consisting of Coleman, alto sax; Don Cherry, trumpet; Haden and Ed Blackwell, drums. Coleman favored a polytonal approach to improvisation known as free jazz, not bound by chords or structure. While Coleman is a revered jazz elder statesman today, his music was controversial at the time. Here, Haden explains why Coleman's approach appealed to him.

The Ornette Coleman Quartet plays “Lonely Woman,” in which Haden plays a bass melody under Coleman's solo, and “Ramblin',” with a Haden solo that quotes from country music.

Haden left the Coleman Quartet due to drug addiction and enrolled at Synanon in 1963. He rejoined Coleman from 1967 to the early '70s, and at occasional reunions thereafter. From 1967 to 1976, he performed with keyboardist Keith Jarrett's American Quartet, which also included Dewey Redman on tenor sax and Paul Motian on drums. He was also a member of Old and New Dreams, a collective consisting of former Coleman sidemen Cherry, Redman and Blackwell.

Charlie Haden's discography lists a total of 46 CDs as leader, and 132 as a sideman, including 15 with Coleman and 19 with Jarrett. In 1969, he formed the Liberation Music Orchestra with pianist Carla Bley, and released an album on Impulse. He explains:

I established it from my concerns about what was going on in the world because of the Nixon administration and the war in Vietnam, and I started thinking about, “I've gotta do something about this.”. . . And maybe I could do something where I can play some political songs from the Spanish Civil War. I can write a song about my hero Che Guevara and call it “Song for Che.” I can write a piece about the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968, where people were, you known, beaten on the street and jailed.

Three other LMO albums were released in 1982, 1990 and 2005. (One of the unintended effects of Republican occupation of the White House was a new LMO CD.) The most recent, Not in Our Name, protested our illegal invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. 

In 1971, while playing with Ornette Coleman in Portugal, then a fascist dictatorship, he dedicated “Song for Che” from the stage to anti-colonial revolutionaries in Mozambique and Angola. He was arrested at the airport and jailed for several hours.

Demonstrating his more traditional side, Charlie Haden was interested in films noir, and in movie themes and other pop songs from the late '40s and early '50s. In 1987, he formed Quartet West with Ernie Watts, tenor sax; Alan Broadbent, piano; and Larence Marable, drums. Their collaboration produced seven CDs containing songs of the period and originals written in the same style.

In 1982, he founded the CalArts jazz program and began teaching. He won three Grammy awards, one for Under the Missouri Sky with guitarist Pat Metheny, and two Latin jazz awards for Nocturne and Land of the Sun, with Cuban pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba. 

He was recognized as a Jazz Master by the National Endowment of the Arts in 2012, elected to the Down Beat Hall of Fame in 2013, and received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, also in 2013. His most recent CD, released last month, is a collaboration with Keith Jarrett, Last Dance, recorded in 2007. A recording with the late guitarist Jim Hall is scheduled for release this Fall. There will no doubt be others.

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The 61st Annual Downbeat Critics Poll

Jim Hall (1930-2013)

Video of the Week #62

Here's the Jimmy Giuffre Three playing "The Train and the River" over the opening credits of Jazz on a Summer's Day, a documentary film of the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival. Giuffre plays both tenor sax and clarinet, along with Bob Brookmeyer, trombone and Jim Hall, guitar, who is barely visible.

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Jim Hall (1930-2013)

CD Review: Wayne Shorter, Without a Net

Recommended

Wayne Shorter is one of jazz's acknowledged masters as a tenor and soprano saxophone player and as a composer. His recordings with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, the Miles Davis' second great Quintet, Weather Report, and several of his nine previous Blue Note albums belong in every jazz fan's collection. He is 79 and is obviously in terrific shape. Anything he does is worthy of our attention and respect. On the other hand:

• This is his fourth CD all or part of which features his current quartet of pianist Danilo Perez, bassist John Patitucci and drummer Brian Blade. I have liked each one slightly less.
  
  
• My three favorites on this CD are “Orbits,” “Plaza Real,” and “S. S. Golden Mean,” all remakes of songs he has previously recorded. (The latter is the same tune as “Adventures Aboard the Golden Mean,” from his Beyond the Sound Barrier CD.)

These observations could mean that it requires repeated listening for Shorter's music to be appreciated. But maybe not.

This is his first album in slightly over seven years. The songs were recorded live, although with one exception the dates and locations of the performances are not identified. Like Joe Lovano's Us Five, Shorter and his group are exploring “free” (relatively unstructured) jazz. Hence, the risk-taking metaphor in the title of the album. (Half the album's titles make direct or indirect reference to flying.) Of course, if you're up there without a net, you have to be very sure that everything is under control.

A lot of this music could be described as bombastic. Both Perez and Patitucci play their acoustic instruments in a very percussive style much of the time, and Blade frequently punctuates the music with loud explosions. Most importantly, several of Shorter's solos are climaxed by a series of exclamations. Since he plays the soprano sax most of the time, they could alternately be described as squeals, shrieks or screams. Five of the nine cuts had solos on which I thought he was overblowing. It's great that Shorter has this much energy, but I found the album difficult to listen to straight through. To be fair, however, the solos which I found to be most over the top were the very ones that received the most enthusiastic audience responses.

This CD contains only one new and beautiful melody of the type we typically associate with Shorter. The centerpiece of the CD is a 23-minute semi-classical composition, “Pegasus.” The melody is calmly and beautifully stated by a five-piece woodwind quintet, with Shorter sometimes joining them on soprano. But as the piece progresses, both the tempo and the volume increase, and there's a great deal of sturm und drang before they return to the opening theme.

There's a lot to like about this album. “A Starry Night” starts out as a series of instrumental sound effects suggested by the title, until things start building to another crescendo. The final two pieces, "Zero Gravity to the 10th Power" and "(The Notes) Unidentified Flying Objects," with composition credit given to the entire band, are prototypical examples of collective improvisation.

The only standard on the album, “Flying Down to Rio,” is a disappointment. The opening few choruses, while surprisingly slow, promise some relief from the general atmosphere of stress. But at almost 13 minutes, it ultimately turns out to be the most chaotic piece on the CD.

Wayne Shorter has earned the right to take these risks, and I fully expect to come to appreciate some of these performances more with time. Shorter fans will want to hear what he has to say. But if I were drawing up a list of great Shorter CDs, this one would not be near the top.

As part of the promotion for Without a Net, Blue Note Records released a six-part interview—total length, about an hour—of Wayne Shorter conducted by Joe Lovano. I found his stories about Miles Davis, Charlie Parker and other great jazz musicians to be fascinating. It's also interesting to listen to these two bright men attempting to talk about their music. The two of them are on a very similar journey. But it's not easy to talk about jazz. Here's Part 1. You can follow the links to the other five parts.

Tracks: Orbits; Starry Night; S. S. Golden Mean; Plaza Real; Myrrh; Pegasus; Flying Down to Rio; Zero Gravity to the 10^th Power; (The Notes) Unidentified Flying Objects. (77 min.)

Personnel: Wayne Shorter, soprano and tenor saxophones; Danilo Perez, piano; John Patitucci, bass; Brian Blade, drums; The Imani Winds, bassoon, clarinet, flute, French horn and oboe (1 cut).

CD Review: Joe Lovano/Us Five, Cross Culture

Highly recommended.

At an age, 60, when most musicians are repeating themselves, Joe Lovano is not content to rest with his previous achievements. Five years ago, he formed Us Five, an attempt at collective improvisation. In the liner notes, Lovano describes their goal as “to collectively create music within the music.” In addition to Lovano on tenor and soprano sax, the group consists of James Weidman, piano, Esperanza Spalding, bass, and dual drummers Otis Brown III and Francisco Mela. Their first CD, Folk Art, was released in 2009. It was followed in 2011 by Bird Songs, an attempt to reconceptualize 11 songs written by or associated with Charlie Parker.

Two characteristics seem to describe Folk Art and their current release:

• Much of the music is “free,” in the sense of unstructured, without a repeated melody, and sometimes lacking a consistent tempo. Some of the music is similar to Ornette Coleman's harmolodics, a style whose exact meaning is somewhat obscure. (One track on Folk Art is entitled “Ettenro.”)
• As the title of this CD implies, both the melodies and rhythm of some of the songs can be described as international. This is abetted by Lovano's suitcase full of offbeat woodwinds as well as some nontraditional percussion instruments. Much of the music has a Middle Eastern or African sound.

Most record companies release samples from new CDs on You Tube, focusing on tracks that are immediately accessible to a broad audience. For this CD, they have released “Star-Crossed Lovers,” which is unrepresentative in two ways. First, it was written by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, and is the only track on the CD not composed by Lovano. It certainly shows that Lovano still has a way with a beautiful ballad. Secondly, it is one of only two songs on the CD that can be described as traditional, mainstream jazz. The other is an up tempo track, “Royal Roost,” named for a Harlem bebop night club of the late '40s.

Since Esperanza Spalding's career has taken off, she is now only a part-time member of the group. She appears on four tracks, and it is she who solos on “Star-Crossed Lovers.” On the other numbers, she is replaced by Peter Slavov. However, what most separates this CD from their previous work is the participation of African guitarist Lionel Loueke on six tracks. I particularly like the title track, where Lovano and Loueke weave in and out at a relaxed tempo. The most African song is “Drum Chant,” an extended duet by the two drummers, with Loueke picking time in the background. Lovano joins them midway on his mezzo soprano sax, followed by a brief Loueke solo before the drummers bring it to a satisfying conclusion.

Us Five play music that requires repeated listening, and my attitude toward some of the more abstract tunes has changed over time as I get a better sense of where Lovano is going. Right now, my least favorite tracks are two completely out of tempo tunes (“Myths and Legends” and “Journey Within”) with the drummers rolling up a storm in the background. The opener, “Blessings in May,” is to my ear the most Ornetteish tune. “PM,” the longest track, starts with Lovano on tenor at a rapid tempo over a bed of cymbals. It takes a while to find its groove, but Weidman, Loueke and two tempo changes add a lot of interest.

If you're not familiar with Us Five, you might want to start with Bird Songs, which has more familiar tunes. Since Folk Art and Cross Culture are more experimental, you may not care for all the results. However, you have to admire Lovano's willingness to take risks. The CD is quite satisfying overall, and gets better with repetition.

Tracks: Blessings in May; Myths and Legends; Cross Culture; In a Spin; Star-Crossed Lovers; Journey Within; Drum Chant; Golden Horn; Royal Roost; Modern Man; PM. (62 min.)

Personnel: Joe Lovano, tenor and soprano saxophone, autochrome, taragato, percussion; James Weidman, piano; Lionel Loueke, guitar (6 tracks); Peter Slavov, bass (6 tracks); Esperanza Spalding, bass (4 tracks); Otis Brown III, Francisco Mela, drums and percussion.