Charlie Haden | News | Long Ago And Far Away

 

It was on a Sunday, on September 19, 1993 to be exact, that Charlie Haden heard Brad Mehldau for the first time. Charlie and I were walking through the halls of the Hidden Valley Resort located in the Laurel Mountains in southwest Pennsylvania. The resort was sponsoring a jazz festival and Charlie had just finished an interview after which we needed to get back to the hotel room in order to prepare for Charlie’s sound-check and concert that night. As we hurried through the hall, one could hear, from behind the closed doors of the auditorium we passed, the sounds of a concert in progress,

Now, Charlie had the biggest ears of anyone in jazz, and while we were walking and talking, Charlie came to a sudden halt and said, “Shhh!"  His eyes opened wide as he crept to the door to listen. Someone was taking a solo. He said to me, “I have to go in and listen.” We entered the auditorium and stood at the back to listen to the rest of the concert. It was Joshua Redman’s band with Joshua Redman, Brad Mehldau, Christian McBride and Brian Blade who, together, in 1994 recorded Joshua’s album Moodswing.

Once the concert was finished Charlie strode to the stage to greet the guys and to speak directly to the young pianist. It was Brad Mehldau who had taken that solo. They spoke for some time, and when Charlie came back to me, he said, “That pianist is brilliant. He is special, so unique.” Charlie would later go on to pronounce Brad one of the most important musicians of his generation because of his unique voice, his depth of knowledge of and facility on the instrument, and how he has moved the language of jazz forward.

Eventually, in 1996, Charlie found a way to bring Brad out to LA to perform with Lee Konitz and him at the Jazz Bakery. This led to a trio recording on Blue Note (1997) called Alone Together. In 2011, he and Brad recorded a live album with Lee Konitz, and Paul Motian for ECM called Live at Birdland.  Brad and Charlie remained friends from the time of their first meeting. They had a special connection. In the early days, Charlie, in a sense, mentored this young pianist in life lessons. Personally, I think he saw a bit of himself in this young brilliant player.

The two musicians, however, had never had the chance to perform on stage in duo when, in 2007, Rainer Kern, the director of the Enjoy Jazz Festival in the Heidelberg region of Germany, invited Charlie and Brad to play a duet concert at a beautiful church, the Christuskirche in Mannheim. This was a rare opportunity for the two of them to have a musical dialogue and they both eagerly agreed. Rainer had asked to record the concert but the two artists said an emphatic, “No!” I, however, had a feeling about this concert and was able to talk the two musicians into relenting as Rainer graciously agreed to let us own the tapes. For contractual reasons regarding both musicians, the recording could not be released until now. Charlie listened to the tape often and dearly wanted to release it at some point. I am forever grateful to Rainer Kern for allowing us to record and own the work. As a result we have a dazzling testament to the interaction between two genius musicians: piano and bass, their brilliance resounding through the hallowed space of an art nouveau cathedral, recorded on November 5, 2007.

I must thank, first and foremost, Charlie Haden and Brad Mehldau for their transcendent performances and the devotion they show to the music. A special thanks to Brad Mehldau for being such a wonderful partner throughout this entire project. I must thank our friend, Rainer Kern for organizing this concert, and acknowledge the Enjoy Jazz Festival team for its support. Thank-you Jean-Philippe Allard for believing in the music and agreeing to release this recording on Universal Music, France. JP has been a great friend to Charlie’s music for many years.

It took a lot more people to make this recording happen as several parties had to agree thus many thanks to the hard work our lawyers put in to bring this project to fruition: Fred Ansis of Reed Smith LLP, Paul Bezilla of Fox Rothschild LLP, Valerie Foray and Christelle D’Almeida of Universal Music, Scott Southard and Tom Korkidis of IMN, Nanette Monton of Warner Bros. Records Inc, Bob Hurwitz, Nonesuch Records. Additional thanks to our friends, Farida Bachir, Jenny Defaut, Pascal Bod and Nicolas Pflug of Universal Music, France.

One of the most important aspects of recording is mixing and mastering. Charlie and I have worked with the recording engineer ,Jay Newland, for many years and he, again, worked his magic, bringing us the full experience of this live recording despite the inherent difficulties of such a recording taking place in an echo-resounding cathedral. Thank-you, Jay, for your incredible ears and skill.  Many thanks to our mastering engineer, Mark Wilder of Battery Studios for his dedication to sound and his understanding that “Jazz is more than notes on a piece of paper.”  Many thanks to Joe D’Ambrosio for facilitating the mixing and mastering process.

I need to mention the cover art. The painting was done by a friend of Charlie’s and mine, the Dutch-American painter, Luc Leestemaker who passed away in 2012. He had a timeless poetic style that Charlie and I really loved.  Luc revered Charlie’s music, and we revered Luc’s paintings.  We also used one of his paintings for the cover of Charlie’s album Land of the Sun. It feels good that Luc and Charlie get to do a project together again.

Thank-you Emily Lau for allowing us the use of this painting for the cover.

Charlie is gone now, and this recording was made “long ago and far away”, yet the music remains immediate. The music is now.

-          Ruth Cameron Haden, Los Angeles, California, July 2018

The opener here is Charlie Parker’s classic blues line, “Au Privave”. The piano solo starts after the initial statement of the melody, but it doesn’t feel like I’m soloing. It’s as if Charlie and I are walking along a path side by side, with no one in front. The path is wide enough for that. The blues structure quickly becomes little more than a frame. Within that frame, the harmonic “ground” of the path is continuously shifting. It’s like the path itself is being laid with every step we take together. Just beyond each step, lies nothing but a precipice at the edge of wide-open space – pure potential.

It’s thrilling to play with someone who improvises like this. After all, this is the guy who did it first on his instrument. Those early seminal records of the Ornette Coleman Quartet like This is Our Music or Change of the Century were not “free” in the sense that they abandoned the principles of harmony. They often were free of a fixed harmonic schema, though, and Charlie was improvising the harmony, from the ground up.

Charlie also engaged in this open-ended harmonic improvisation within an actual tune, or a blues, as he does here, re-writing the grid as he went along. This seemed to fulfill a promise that Ornette’s music had inaugurated: there was the possibility – if your ears were big enough, and if you were a skilled enough harmonist – to bring some of the unhinged freedom into the locus of “tunes” whether they were Tin Pan Alley, movie themes, or any other material worthy and compelling.

The work that Charlie did with Ornette, with Keith Jarrett’s groups, and with Old and New Dreams, was a profound model for me as a developing player, and also for others who I came up with, trying to find our way to freedom. There were also Miles Davis’ great 1960’s Quintet, and John Coltrane’s Quartet. These two models worked on a no less great, but different, principle: The ground stayed solid. When Miles, Coltrane and other bands went into the stratosphere, Ron Carter and Jimmy Garrison held the fort down, supplying a tethering root to the music in a deeply original way.  When Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry soared, however, Charlie let the ground shift.  

It may be superfluous to say this, but whatever that word “free” meant in the context of free jazz, for me it always meant the possibility of freedom in any context. It never meant, however, “free” to scrap the foundations of harmony at will. In order to attain that “higher” kind of freedom, you had to have absorbed some fundamental aesthetic guidelines in a deep, nuanced way so you could then have your way with them. We always hear this aesthetic in Charlie’s playing, particularly in his solos. They are models par excellence in voice-leading. On his solo here on “Au Privave”, for example, no matter how free of the blues chord schema he is, there is always a beginning point, a development and a clear resolution to whatever harmony he is implying. If the resolution is suspended, there is a design – the sweet pleasure of deferred finality. Tension and resolution, the hallmarks of harmony, are always at play with Charlie, and they are the conduit for his storytelling.

One could characterize Charlie’s approach to improvising as “perpetually revolutionary.” Revolutions are supposed to be temporary and lead to some kind of new order. Charlie was not interested in a fixed status quo. He was a multi-faceted, complex musician with competing expressive urges that could seem to contradict each other. We can’t put him in a box solely as a champion of “free jazz”, although along with a few other musicians at a certain point in time, he did indeed herald a new type of playing that was free of the signposts that had existed for decades prior. On the other hand, particularly in his work with his band, Quartet West, he championed a commitment to melody and song, using traditional jazz harmony as a jumping-off point for his improvisation. The musical pay-off was different than that of his work with Ornette Coleman or Old and New Dreams, but it was all Charlie, through and through.

It’s this connection between Charlie’s more “inside” and “outside” work that I reflect on when I listen back to this recording, and to other recordings of Charlie’s like his beautiful, relatively recent, duo set with Keith Jarrett (who has shared this inside/outside creative urge with Charlie), his work with Hank Jones, with Gonzalo Rubalcalba (Charlie liked pianists; we were fortunate!) and his duo work with Pat Metheny, to name just a few. The connection is song. Quartet West heralded a celebration of the song itself most overtly in its versions of tunes like David Raksin’s “My Love and I” which Charlie and I play here. When Charlie wrote his own songs, like “First Song for Ruth” or “Silence”, they embodied his musical ideals. The song, in its miniature form, represented a distillation of emotions, a streamlined statement that actually told something very large, very wide and open. But its actual execution was not sprawling, and never ungainly.

This kind of compacted, paired-down expression, drawing largely from the loose canon of standards that has come to be known as “The American Songbook”, is a big part of Charlie’s legacy, but not its entirety. It would be easy to tie Charlie’s output together by saying that Quartet West was a foil for his free playing: They were a yin and a yang that he drew from at different points in his life. There might be some truth there.  I guess only Charlie could say, and he’s not here to tell us. (I miss him.) Following this logic, the band-leading approach that he took with Quartet West was a response to the iconic freedom of Old and New Dreams, a band in which he played what seemed anarchic in the very best sense of that word, with all of the utopia it promises. Utopian urges had already played out more overtly, politicized, starting as early as 1969, in Charlie’s ensemble, the Liberation Music Orchestra.

Yet, a simple dualism of Charlie, musical anarchist, vs. Charlie, guardian of the song-grail, would be reductive, because, as we know, in an anarchy, or even in a more prosaic, less-exciting democracy, people have freedoms, yes, but it only works if they don’t tread on the freedoms of others. And thus, actual praxis is often sloppy and very far from utopia. Charlie was not sloppy, though; he was not arbitrary, obligatory or gratuitous in his use of freedom. In fact, in knowing Charlie a bit over the years, and talking to him about music, and most of all, through playing with him, I would submit that he was not particularly interested in freedom for its own sake. He also cherished order and formal integrity in music. What he cherished most, however, was beauty. A bandied word, perhaps. Charlie didn’t like to wonk out too much about the procedural details of what he was doing, but this was something he brought up a lot when he talked about music-making: Beauty.

So he had this very respectful, often delicate and reverent approach to playing, and I think you can hear that in the music here, in this stripped-down, duo format. When Charlie plays, it’s like he’s building something, like chiseling and revealing a new David, brushing and stroking a Mona Lisa, or maybe just folding a napkin with clean lines. Whatever he was into, whether it was a blues, a standard, or a tune from Ornette, in Charlie’s realm, it always felt like a really satisfying song. A song that told a story. Some of the greatest personalities in jazz – Billie Holiday, Miles, and Lester Young come to mind – had this aspect of storytelling through the song. Charlie was also a storyteller.

When I met Charlie briefly that first time that Ruth mentions, at the festival in Pennsylvania, I was still in a self-destructive pattern using drugs.  Charlie gleaned that from our first conversation. He talked to me several times after that and helped convince me that I needed help. I have gratitude for those talks. A few years later, I was fortunate enough to get the help I needed and finally took it. I moved to Los Angeles, where I got to know Charlie better, I also got to know Ruth, and Charlie’s children, Rachel, Petra, Tanya and Josh, all wonderful people and creative lights in their own ways.

 One night, I found myself in Beverly Hills, in a conversation with Charlie and a very renowned rock star whom I had grown up worshipping as a kid. I was taking it all in, listening to both of them, star-struck. The rock great posed a rhetorical question: Would Jimi Hendrix have played the way he did without the drugs? He spoke the answer himself, “No!”  He maintained that Jimi, Janis, Brian Jones and others found some kind of dark mojo, in part through the chemicals they ingested, and it contributed to their unbridled musical expression. In fairness to this rock great, he did not endorse this kind of devil’s bargain. On the contrary, he was on that bus himself but got off just in time and lived to tell the cautionary tale. Still, he maintained that the drugs had their dark magic.

There could be something in what he said, but I would reframe it with a caveat: If the dragon doesn’t kill you first, you can learn something about yourself, and it might ultimately contribute to your further expression. We can’t say that attaching self-destructive drug abuse to creative epiphany is factually wrong. This misses the point. No one can forensically go back and see, play by play, how alcohol or heroin helped or hindered a certain musician discover something. So it’s reductive however you slice it. Things aren’t neat enough to make a rule either way. There are just as many, if not more, creative people who changed the world through their expression without all the excess.

Whatever the case, Charlie squarely countered this guy’s proclamation. Jazz had its own long list of bright stars that fell from the sky. Charlie was close to some of them coming up, was himself a survivor, and wasn’t buying it. I remember some of what he said in response: “No way, man. That’s not true. Imagine this: Imagine if Bird had gotten clean! Imagine what more he could have done! Bird, Jimi Hendrix, and all of them played great in spite of the fact that they used drugs, not because of it.”

There it was! I took that one and ran with it. It made sense to me. In my twenties, I had this thing that I could do naturally, and no matter how jacked up I was, I could get out there on stage and do that thing – even as everything else in my life was falling apart. When I finally put down the drugs, I actually started to grow and change as a musician, as a composer, as a musical thinker, all that stuff. (Not to mention, I stayed alive and became a functioning person again!) That’s how it was with Charlie, too, and he helped me realize that right then and there when he said that.

Charlie survived, and he found a way to draw on his earlier output and marry it to something that truly bloomed in his later years. I survived as well. Time continues. There are some since who have gone down early, while others have burned on until their flame cooled, and they passed with grace. I draw no maxim from any of that. It’s grace and we don’t get to choose why it’s bestowed on some, and not others. It’s a mystery that invites reverence for everyone and everything. Charlie found that grace.

www.journalistenlounge.de/jazz | www.facebook.com/jazzecho

Uwe Kerkau Promotion

Tel: 02206 – 80007

Media Promotion

Rosita Falke

Tel: 040 – 413 545 05

Musicforce
Anja Sziedat

Tel: 030 – 419 59 615

Mobil: 0177 – 611 5675