Charlie Haden

Charlie Haden
a.k.a. Charles Edward Haden

DREAM ON
Charlie Haden Brings It All Back Home with American Dreams
Charlie Haden's roots in Americana go way back. As a child in Missouri he sang old-time music with the Haden family band on radio. By the time he came to fame as a groundbreaking bassist with free-jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman in the late 1950s, Haden had already absorbed a host of musical influences, intimations of which can be heard on his own acclaimed recordings as a leader. On American Dreams, Haden is joined by saxophonist Michael Brecker, pianist Brad Mehldau, and drummer Brian Blade in a diverse program of tunes that range from "America the Beautiful" to Keith Jarrett and Pat Metheny originals -- even "It Might Be You," the theme song from Tootsie. Ted Panken spoke with Haden about the love of American music that links it all together for the celebrated instrumentalist/bandleader/composer.

B&N.com: How did American Dreams come together as a project?

CH: This one had to do with going to New York right after September 11th with my band, Nocturne, and seeing the devastation that happened. After living in New York for 20 years and feeling it's still my second home, I wanted to try to musically convey my feelings about what's going on, and what should be going on, and what could have been going on, and what I hoped would go on. A couple of times during the recording, I actually stopped everything and talked to Brad and Brian, and told them what this was all about. Brad is from Connecticut, and Brian is from Shreveport, and they know about the different experiences in this country. This is really a retrospective of a lot of different things in my life and of growing up, as is every record that I make, really.

B&N.com: You've spoken of your albums being a composite reflection on your varied experiences since you were very young, and I know you've been involved in songs since you were a toddler.

CH: Yes. I was 22 months old when I sang my first song on the radio, and I had a Social Security card. My Social Security card number is really low, and I was the youngest person in the area, probably in the state, to have a Social Security number.

B&N.com: And you might have turned out to be a singer, I gather, had you not contracted polio.

CH: Yes. I was singing up until the time I got polio, when I was 15. It paralyzed my vocal chords and my throat. I got over it, but it still affected the range of my voice, and I never sang again.

B&N.com: How do you feel that having been a singer affected what you became as an instrumentalist?

CH: It impacted it a lot, because it instilled inside of me a sense of melody and the importance of beautiful melodies, and also harmonies, and using your ear to hear the harmonies and melodies. I didn't sing until we made this record, The Art of the Song, and they talked me into singing a song on that. But that was just to commemorate what my parents gave to me when I was a kid. Because it was my early musical training, singing everything by ear and learning all these great songs. So that had a big impact on my life, musically and creatively in every way. Especially being in the Midwest, and hearing that music. Country music is no different from the music that Charles Ives depicts when he writes a piece that's about the Midwest or America. The same way with Copland. It really tells you this country is very special. I think that's what this album is about: the specialness of the United States and how people who are born here or who come here are very innovative people. It's an innovative country, and there are art forms that are born here that could never have come from any other place because of the diversity and the inventiveness and the innovativeness of the people here.

B&N.com: There's been an arc in the recorded documentation of your career from very radical music to a very consonant conception and songlike conception. It does seem to be something you've moved toward as you've gotten older.

CH: If you listen to all of the things that I did with Ornette, you will hear a deep sense of melody. So that's really what it's all about, is a deep sense of melody. And it's not consonant or dissonant; it is about melody. Whether it's playing with Geri Allen or with Kenny Barron or with Ornette or Lee Konitz, it's about melody. And it's not growing toward something as I get older. It's just growing and getting deeper into melody and deeper into beauty. We were playing beautiful melodies and beautiful chord structures that we were creating as we went along with Ornette. This was like symphonic music. Most people didn't hear it then, but that's what we were doing. And that's why we were having so much fun. We were creating symphonies and concertos and études. That's what I want to do, to get closer and closer to bringing people to music that's almost classical, in a sense, as the way all music should be, and to show them the majesty of beauty, and to show them how important beauty is right now, in terms of where we are right now. If people had paid more attention to beauty, we wouldn't be where we are now. I'm talking about the trouble that we're in now.

B&N.com: Do you believe that your ability to weave melodies into the fabric of almost any performance is a distinct gift? Who were some of the bassists you looked toward when you were developing your conception of how to play?

CH: Well, I really don't think of myself as a bassist. I think of myself as a musician. I can sit down at the piano and work out the melodies I'm hearing in my head just like I do on the bass. That's why I tell my students at Cal Arts, "Don't think of yourself as a jazz musician and don't think of the instrument you're playing." Because if you're playing a tenor and you think about yourself as a jazz musician, then you'll start thinking about, "I want to play like Michael Brecker or I want to play like Coltrane," and you won't discover your own music. So my sense inside me is just musical. I appreciate great bass players. But I got my sense of the importance of the depth in my consciousness from listening to Charlie Parker and Art Tatum and Django Reinhardt just as much as I did from Jimmy Blanton and Wilbur Ware. That's the important thing. I always listened to musicians who have the deepest sounds of anybody, like Coleman Hawkins, that play their instrument as if they were playing the bass! [laughs] That's the whole magic of this art form, that the individual sound comes through the instrument and into the listener. Thank goodness there are musicians who are born every once in a while who keep adding to this vocabulary and making it more and more beautiful, and discovering more and more beautiful melodies and music and ways to play it. I hope it just keeps going on and on.

September, 2002