TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/101292/1012440.000

Text File | 1993-04-08 | 5.7 KB | 122 lines

                                                                                MUSIC, Page 81

Experimental Time Trip


In his magical new album, jazz bassist and composer Charlie
Haden evokes the film-noir mood of vintage Los Angeles in a
musical-dream autobiography

By JAY COCKS


    Charlie Haden plays bass with his eyes closed. He has his
own story about that, and it's pretty good.

    It's November 1959, and Haden has just pulled into New
York City. He's keeping fast company, part of a jazz quartet
that also includes drummer Billy Higgins, trumpeter Don Cherry
and Ornette Coleman, who is exploring the outside edge of the
stratosphere with his alto sax. They are opening at the Five
Spot, the Manhattan mecca for cutting-edge jazz. It is one of
those debut dates that are more like a trial by fire: chops will
be checked out, irrevocable judgments passed. Slipping the cover
off his bass, Haden, who is 22, looks up at the bar and sees
Charles Mingus. Percy Heath. Ray Brown. And more: "Every great
bass player, staring right in my face. From that moment on, I
closed my eyes."

    And heard, it might be added, the sound of applause that
has hardly faded from that night to this day. Over the past
three decades, Haden has been one of the most restless, gifted,
intrepid players in all of jazz. You can figure that from the
stats: he has played, by his own count, on more than 400 albums,
and last August scored as Down Beat magazine's best acoustic
bass player. Or you can hear it for yourself: Haunted Heart, a
new album with his Quartet West, shows Haden, now 55, at his
lyrical peak. It is a kind of musical-dream autobiography, part
funky and part rhapsodic, that evokes the style of his early Los
Angeles days as well as the mythic mood of vintage L.A., the
film-noir city. Chinatown. Chandlertown.

    Haden, who fantasizes as readily about hanging out with
John Garfield as he does about getting down with Charlie
Parker, says, "I wanted to pass along the feeling of standing
in Philip Marlowe's office looking out at the neon lights
blinking off and on in the night." Haunted Heart's 12 pieces
range from new compositions by Haden and pianist Alan Broadbent
to reworkings of standards by Parker, Bud Powell and Glenn
Miller to -- most surprisingly and, perhaps, most inventively
-- three period vocals by Billie Holiday, Jeri Southern and Jo
Stafford, copied straight from Haden's 5,000-volume record
collection. The songs flow seamlessly out of Quartet West's
instrumental excursions, and the effect is closer to magic than
nostalgia, like climbing into a Studebaker convertible that
rolls out of the fog, letting it take you away again for a ride
into the mist.

    Haden has a distinctive style, lyric and elemental in
equal proportions, that is ideally suited to this kind of
experimental time tripping. "He has a big, warm, rich tone, and
his approach is very traditional," says Rob Gibson, director of
Jazz at Lincoln Center, for which one of Haden's groups, the
Liberation Music Orchestra, will perform in 1993. "It's almost
country sounding, but it's really swinging."

    Country music, in fact -- not the typical jazzman's hard
knocks in the asphalt jungle -- carried Haden into jazz. Born
in Iowa, he grew up in Missouri, where his family had a daily
radio show, Uncle Carl Haden and the Haden Family. Cowboy
Charlie, as he came to be billed, made his debut at two; at four
he was singing all the harmony parts and cutting loose with a
mean yodel. Some nights, he remembers, "Mother Maybelle Carter
used to rock me to sleep."

    But he passed quickly from dreaming in the arms of the
reigning regent of country music to jazzier reveries. When he
was 15, his father took him to a concert in Omaha that featured
Lester Young and Parker, and then and there, he says, "it was
pretty much decided inside my soul that jazz was what I was
going to do. It was like having the music born inside you."

    He took up bass because "it made the fullness of music
happen." He'd play along with Charlie Parker records, and came
to love the instrument so much "that when the bass stopped
playing, the bottom fell out of the music." He sold shoes and
played country bass to get a stake that would send him to Los
Angeles to study jazz at a conservatory. He dropped out after
a single semester. By then he was jamming with Art Pepper and
Dexter Gordon. When he met up with Coleman at a club in
Hollywood, he was primed for takeoff. "The traditional way of
improvising in jazz is on the chord structure," he says. "But
sometimes I would want to improvise on the inspiration, the
feeling rather than the chords. And that's what Ornette was
doing."

    Haden, who still plays with Coleman occasionally,
continues to have a wide compass for inspiration. His music,
especially the Liberation Music Orchestra material, can turn
toughly political; he was once arrested in Portugal for
dedicating one of his songs to black liberation movements in
Africa. He has founded a department of jazz studies at the
California Institute of Arts in Los Angeles, where he lives with
his second wife Ruth Cameron. He has four children; all are
musicians who have in their father a man who has already left
a profound mark on contemporary jazz.

    With Charlie Haden, jazz is always contemporary --
relentlessly, implacably -- even when, as on Haunted Heart, he's
taking a look back. "It's not about the past, because
improvisation is really about being in the moment," he explains.
"I'm talking about the past inspiring the present. That's what's
so special about jazz. It teaches you to appreciate the moment
you're in now." And with Haden's bass playing under it, every
moment is a wonder.