Freaky Friday — Charlie Haden Sounds Like A Rain Forest

Welcome to the DFH Freaky Friday weekly music series Because Team DFH operates more or less like a herd of cats, we’re here at roughly 9PM Eastern, every week. So take off your shoes, plop down on that beanbag chair over there, let your hair down, and get some groovy on.

It was my fifteenth birthday, and my parents knew I was a budding jazz fan.  They got me a wondrous thing: a six-lp set billed as The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz.  And it was great.  I started at the beginning and worked my way Scott Joplin and Robert Johnson, through Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Roy Eldridge, Billie Holiday...it was incredible.

And after taking a breath I listened to Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Thelonious Monk (one entire lp side!), Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, Cecil Taylor...

And the last side had three pieces by Ornette Coleman and one by John Coltrane.

I put it on the player.  Here's what I heard:

Ornette Coleman's Quartet plays "Lonely Woman"

It started with a melancholic strumming, a giant bass sitar, cushioned in cymbal shimmer.  What the hell?

I'd never heard anything so lovely.

And that, dear ones, was my introduction to Charlie Haden's bass playing.

The early Ornette Coleman Quartet, circa 1961.

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The first few paragraphs of Charlie Haden's bio, from his website:

Time Magazine has hailed jazz legend Charlie Haden as “one of the most restless, gifted, and intrepid players in all of jazz.” Haden’s career which has spanned more than fifty years has encompassed such genres as free jazz, Portuguese fado and vintage country such as his recent cd Rambling Boy (Decca) not to mention a consistently revolving roster of sidemen and bandleaders that reads like a list from some imaginary jazz hall of fame.

As an original member of the ground-breaking Ornette Coleman Quartet that turned the jazz world on its head the late 1950’s, Haden revolutionized the harmonic concept of bass playing in jazz. “His ability to create serendipitous harmonies by improvising melodic responses to Coleman’s free-form solos (rather than sticking to predetermined harmonies) was both radical and mesmerizing. His virtuosity lies…in an incredible ability to make the double bass ‘sound out’. Haden cultivates the instrument’s gravity as no one else in jazz. He is a master of simplicity which is one of the most difficult things to achieve.” (Author Joachim Berendt in The Jazz Book) Haden played a vital role in this revolutionary new approach, evolving a way of playing that sometimes complemented the soloist and sometimes moved independently. In this respect, as did bassists Jimmy Blanton and Charles Mingus, Haden helped liberate the bassist from a strictly accompanying role to becoming a more direct participant in group improvisation.

And just as important as his historic role in the evolution of jazz bass playing is his sound.  No bass player anywhere has as big a sound as Charlie Haden, and his presence on a recording is always unmistakable (and a guarantee of quality — the man has, as far as I can tell, never played on a bad record).