Bassist Charlie Haden was born on August 6, 1937 in Shenandoah, Iowa. As a member of Ornette Coleman’s group Haden was one of the earliest and most successful avant-garde bass players in jazz, but he was an equally strong musician as a “straight ahead” player. It has been said that he “revolutionized the harmonic concept of bass playing in jazz.”

Charlie’s was a musical family and he was playing and singing on a daily radio show as a child with his family’s band that played country and folk music. In his teens Haden contracted polio and was forced to cease performing for a time. Around this time he heard Charlie Parker and the Stan Kenton Orchestra and began to develop an interest in jazz.

Charlie Haden moved to Los Angeles in 1957 and attended the Westlake College of Music while gigging with Hampton Hawes, Paul Bley and Art Pepper. In 1959 he recorded as an original member of the Ornette Coleman Quartet and was the bass player for their groundbreaking six-week engagement at the Five Spot in New York’s Greenwich Village. A year later, however, Haden left the group to enter rehab for his drug problem.

Haden returned to the music scene in 1963 playing with John Handy and Archie Shepp among others. In 1967 he began a long association with pianist Keith Jarrett. Upon the recommendation of New York Philharmonic conductor Leonard Bernstein, Haden received a Guggenheim Grant for composition in 1970. That same year he began a band with arranger and pianist Carla Bley called the Liberation Music Orchestra that played “political music” in a free jazz context. Their first recording focused on music from the Spanish Civil War with allusions to contemporary political situations. The group would reconvene for projects from time to time throughout the remainder of Haden’s life.

In 1986 Haden formed a more traditional jazz quartet called Quartet West that included saxophonist Ernie Watts, Alan Broadbent at the piano and drummer Billy Higgins. In the ensuing years Haden would engage in many musical projects including duet albums with guitarist Pat Metheny and pianist Hank Jones. In 2012 Charlie Haden was named an NEA Jazz Master and he received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013. Haden died from liver disease in 2014.

Here is a link to a live performance by Charlie Haden’s Quartet West:

"HELLO MY LOVELY"