Word: haden
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...