From NL archives: Jazz great Haden launched from Ozarks

Charlie Haden(Photo: Simon Bell)

Bassist Charlie Haden, an Ozarks boy destined for jazz greatness, died Friday at age 76.

Haden helped change the shape of jazz more than a half-century ago as a member of Ornette Coleman's groundbreaking quartet and liberated the bass from its traditional rhythm section role, said an AP obituary.

As part of a series of stories on notable musicians from the Ozarks, then-music reporter Michael A. Brothers wrote this profile of Haden.

Here's a peek at Haden's roots from the story:

When Charlie was 4, the Haden Family moved to Springfield to perform on KWTO. At first, they sang live from their farmhouse south of town, and later from the second floor of their Route 66 truck stop and restaurant, the Seven Gables.

This story was published on Sept. 25, 2005. Here it is in its entirety:

Restless creator pursues jazz freedom

By Michael A. Brothers

In the fall of 1956, a soft-spoken teenage boy wearing round glasses and toting an upright bass boarded a Greyhound bus in Springfield bound for the bright lights of Los Angeles.

Though Charlie Haden grew up in the Midwest singing country and gospel on the radio with his family, he was drawn westward by a love of jazz. He knew if he wanted to pursue his music, the best opportunities weren't in the heartland but on the coast.

One long bus ride and 50 years later, Haden's passion for musical honesty and expressive freedom has changed the shape of jazz and the way players and listeners think about improvised music.

As the bassist in pioneering saxophonist Ornette Coleman's quartet, Haden helped usher in the era of free jazz and avant-garde music. As the leader of his Liberation Music Orchestra, he added to the genre's growing political voice. He's won three Grammys and recorded with a wide range of artists, from John Coltrane to Beck.

"I don't see music in categories anymore," says Haden, 68, from his home in Los Angeles. "I just think about it being beautiful and it having an audience."

Known for his lyrical approach and rich tone, Haden's extensive body of work has made him one of the world's most respected and honored instrumentalists.

"In the last couple of decades of the 20th century into the 21st, he's taken the bass to another level of lyricism in the music," says Bill Hartman, assistant professor of music and jazz history at Missouri State University. "His avant-garde work set the stage for that."

Though Haden was really still just a kid in his last few years in the Ozarks, longtime friend Chuck Beach says players here were greatly impressed even then by his talent, his attentive ears, and his ability to always get to "the right notes."

"I used to say he had radar ears," says Beach, a Springfield drummer who drove Haden to the bus depot that day in 1956.

From twang to swing

Haden was singing practically before he could talk. He was born in Shenandoah, Iowa, in 1937; his parents and three older siblings Carl Jr., Mary and Jimmy, performed as the Haden Family on radio station KMA. It was only natural for little Charlie to take a shine to singing, and he began his professional career at the tender age of 22 months.

"I started humming harmony with my mother when she was rocking me to sleep one day," Haden says, recounting the family lore. "She said, 'You're ready for the show.' I went on the air every day after that."

He stood on a chair to reach the microphone, often bribed with a penny or soda pop. He hummed notes when he forgot the words. He even yodeled.

Before long, he became less of a novelty and more of a contributor. The Haden kids had hundreds of songs in their repertoire, Carl Jr. says, and while they had printed lyrics in front of them during the show, there were no notes -- they memorized all the melodies and harmonies.

When Charlie was 4, the Haden Family moved to Springfield to perform on KWTO. At first, they sang live from their farmhouse south of town, and later from the second floor of their Route 66 truck stop and restaurant, the Seven Gables.

In the early '50s, the Hadens moved to Omaha to perform on TV. In the ninth grade, Charlie was floored by a Jazz at the Philharmonic concert featuring legendary saxophonists Charlie Parker and Lester Young.

"That really got me," he says.

Around the same time, a bout with polio affected Haden's throat and vocal chords, and ended his singing days. Inspired by his growing love for jazz, he picked up his older brother Jimmy's bass, and began devouring Jimmy's jazz records by popular vocalists like Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra.

With most of the kids grown by the mid-1950s, the Hadens stopped performing as a family when their TV contract expired. Charlie moved back to the Ozarks with his folks, where he had surprisingly wide exposure to jazz.

Concerts by the Stan Kenton Orchestra in Springfield got his attention, and despite his age he sometimes jammed with musicians in the clubs around Fort Leonard Wood.

Moving from country to jazz wasn't a matter of rebellion, and for Haden it wasn't even that radical a shift. He was simply following his muse.

"I just loved the music," he says. "(Jazz) is really akin to country music because they're both indigenous to the U.S. and both have beautiful harmonies and chord progressions. So it was an easy transformation."

Haden graduated from high school in 1955 and soon landed another television job, this time playing bass.

The "Ozark Jubilee" was a weekly country music show broadcast nationwide from downtown Springfield. A summer replacement show featuring country star Eddy Arnold took over the spot in mid-1956. Haden and Beach were hired to back up Arnold and his guitarist Hank Garland, an accomplished jazz improviser.

The show not only convinced Haden he could hang with the pros, but also provided the cash he needed to move out of town.

Free at last

Once in L.A., Haden enrolled in a music college, but dropped out because he was playing too many late-night gigs to make class in the morning. He was getting a much better education playing live with the likes of Hampton Hawes, Art Pepper and Dexter Gordon.

On his off nights, Haden roamed L.A.'s jazz clubs and jam sessions listening to other artists. That was how unorthodox sax man Ornette Coleman caught his ear.

Coleman played a plastic saxophone. His raw tone was rooted in the blues of his native Texas, and he eschewed the lightning-quick bebop style of improvising so popular with players at the time. Instead, Coleman seemed to be playing whatever he wanted.

Haden was impressed. The musicians on stage that night were not.

"The way he played was so brilliant," Haden says. "And then they asked him to stop playing right away because it was very foreign to bebop players."

Haden tracked Coleman down and the saxophonist invited him to his place to jam.

"We played for four or five days without stopping," Haden says. A new world began to open up for him, one he had longed for without even knowing it.

"Sometimes I wanted to leave the chord structure and improvise on the inspiration of the song and make my own chord structure," Haden says. "When I heard Ornette play, what he was doing really fascinated me. I felt like I'd finally found someone who was giving me permission to play what I wanted."

Eventually Coleman brought trumpeter Don Cherry and drummer Billy Higgins into the fold and the quartet began playing their brand of improvised "free" jazz at the Hillcrest Club. The group sent a shock wave though the jazz world. While improvisation had long been a core component of jazz, free jazz took it to the extreme -- to the chagrin of some critics and fans.

"The whole concept of jazz is freedom," explains Missouri State's Hartman. "... As the music developed, some of the proponents of the music thought, 'We ought to take this freedom as far as we can and not rely on any chord foundations or even time or rhythmic foundations.'"

But the idea was to create beautiful sounds, not a jumbled mess, and therein lay the challenge for Coleman's group.

Using the "radar ears" he had been developing all his young life, Haden closely followed Coleman's lead on melody and harmony, as did the rest of the band. In doing so, Haden took what was normally considered a supporting instrument to the music's fore.

"He didn't treat it strictly as a time instrument or a harmonic instrument," Hartman says. "He moved it as close as he could to what Ornette was doing."

In 1959, when Haden was just 21, the pioneering quartet moved to New York, took up an extended stay at the Five Spot club and began recording a series of seminal avant-garde albums, including "The Shape of Jazz to Come" and "Change of the Century."

Musicians from all over the city came to hear the new music for themselves. Some liked it, others didn't. Haden began closing his eyes to block them out while he played, a habit he still maintains.

Back in the Midwest, the band's records left Haden's friends and family stunned.

"I put it on and I couldn't believe it," his brother Carl says. "There was no melody. I couldn't follow the tune. It wasn't like the old songs we used to do. ... It sounded like they were tuning up."

Adds Beach: "It was hard for me to follow, to be honest."

Yet even if they didn't always "get" Charlie's music, the family was proud of him, Carl says. They saved every mention of him in newspapers and jazz magazines. They collected his records, even if those sometimes collected dust.

"We were always behind Charlie," says Carl, who lives in Springfield.

From the heart

Free jazz smashed conventional idioms and sparked debate, but it never became jazz's dominant force as big band and bebop had done before.

Nonetheless, Haden's career was just beginning. In addition to Coleman's group, he recorded with Coltrane, among others, and spent about a decade in pianist Keith Jarrett's group. Along the way he formed the avant-garde ensemble Liberation Music Orchestra. In 1969 the band recorded a politically conscious album in protest of the Vietnam War.

"I felt like I had to voice my concerns," Haden says.

New incarnations of the group have come together intermittently in the years since to perform and record. In fact, Haden's newest release is the LMO album "Not In Our Name," and it's meant to express misgivings about the Bush administration's policies.

Haden admits a political jazz album likely won't change the world, but says he's obligated to make music he believes in: "In the art form of jazz, it has always been a struggle to get the music out there, whether you're playing 'All the Things You Are' or 'The People United Will Never Be Defeated.'"

Haden's son Josh, who is also a musician, says his dad doesn't take his art lightly.

He says the elder Haden's approach is to "acknowledge every note as if it were your last; put the whole of your being and your appetite for life into the music that you create."

In the 1980s, Haden formed his Quartet West and began to concentrate on a more mainstream sound. But again his inspiration was atypical: the group often evokes a 1940s and '50s film noir mood, even recording songs from movie soundtracks of the time, often with lush string arrangements.

The bassist continues to explore new sounds. Several of his releases from the last few years have explored Latin jazz, and two such albums with Cuban pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba have won Grammy Awards.

Given Haden's past, some critics have said the new albums are less adventurous, but his son disagrees.

"It's just a natural progression, I think," Josh says. "This record 'Land of the Sun' (released last year) is just as adventurous as anything he's ever done. But I also wouldn't discount him staying away from the avant-garde."

Haden also has triplet daughters, Rachel, Petra and Tanya, all involved in music. Petra was a founding member of now-defunct indie-pop band That Dog, and recently joined the Decemberists on violin and vocals.

She describes her dad as a caring and sensitive person and a deeply dedicated musician. But Petra says he also taught her not to take herself too seriously; to just play and "let go."

"His approach is just to play from the heart," Petra says. "That's the biggest lesson I've learned from him."

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