All That L.A. Jazz

The Scottsdale Center for the Arts could be a modern maximum-security facility for jazz: If you wanted to quarantine the music from the environment that produced it, you couldn’t find a better compound than this sand-colored edifice, equipped with movie theater, several floors of galleries and a music auditorium.

This early evening, bassist Charlie Haden, a jazz standard in Los Angeles since he arrived in 1956, brings his band, Quartet West, to the Arizona culture mall. Before the concert, a local newspaper columnist lectures on Haden to a roomful of subscription-ticket-buying retirees and peanut-butter-cookie-eating boomers.

“Charlie Haden has been known to play in groups that play what is known as ‘free jazz,’ ” she says. “I joke that people call it free jazz because nobody would pay to hear it! Charlie Haden may play some free jazz tonight. I want you to take a deep breath and wait. I know the whole concert will not be like that.” This from an admirer. It’s oddly touching that, on the desert frontier, there are still culture klatches straight out of the Gilded Age--and touching that free jazz can still make trouble.

But the citizens of Scottsdale needn’t worry. Almost four decades after Haden and Ornette Coleman invented a new jazz avant-garde, he has reentered its mainstream. Today he makes great music that hews to conventions he once violated with abandon. His main setting is Quartet West, a unit dedicated to the kind of music that was in the air when Haden arrived in Los Angeles some 40 years ago. Their repertoire consists primarily of orchid ballads and paeans to a simpler jazz era--one he did his part to make obsolete. Quartet West, composed of saxophonist Ernie Watts, drummer Larance Marable, pianist Alan Broadbent and Haden, was formed in 1986. The group has released five albums, including the Grammy-nominated “Haunted Heart” and “Always Say Goodbye.”

Their recent “Now Is the Hour” is their most pensive effort, its plush strings (arranged by the gossamer-minded Broadbent) signaling safe passage to the after-hours club that time forgot. The hour referred to in the title must be the vespers hour, the violet time when the evening star emerges. It was a time, as they say, when people didn’t lock their doors, and the tunes don’t either: They blend bebop and soundtrack music, torch singing and dry laments, all of it turned into something purposefully imprecise. You can see the faded calendar on the wall, but you can’t make out the date. Among a discography numbering hundreds of records, it’s probably the sweetest, most sentimental record Haden’s ever made.

In the last year alone, Haden’s curling, fibrous sound has been featured on two records that would be career-makers for most jazz musicians. Pianist Kenny Barron’s sun-dappled “Wanton Spirit,” with Haden and drummer Roy Haynes, features two lieutenants in mid-stride and one patron, Haynes, boiling it down for the ages. “Steal Away--Spirituals, Hymns and Folk Songs,” with pianist Hank Jones, is a Luminist masterpiece, bright and graceful.

Perhaps no musician has played so few notes on so many recordings (even some fans suggest that Haden records too much). He has recently recorded with guitarist Bill Frissell, harmonica player Toots Thielemans and jazz singers Abbey Lincoln and Helen Merrill, and he’ll soon be heard on an album of duets with Pat Metheny. His versatility leads radically different musicians to value his accompaniment.

“Charlie has one of the best ears in the music business,” says saxophonist Ornette Coleman. “As a bass player and also as a composer, he’s been very dedicated to quality.”

“It’s very nice to see a guy who’s up on things and rather hip, yet still has respect for the best of what American concert music has to offer,” says film composer David Raksin, one of the draftsmen of film noir. Raksin composed soundtracks for such movies as “Fallen Angel,” “Force of Evil,” “The Bad and the Beautiful” and “Laura.”

Avant-gardist and traditionalist, Haden brings to everything he plays an aesthetic that was born in his Los Angeles, a place where, when the wind blows one way, you can smell orange blossoms, and where a change in the breeze brings a whiff of sulfur. “He has a big, gorgeous sound,” says jazz critic Gary Giddins. “In the hands of a less tasteful player it could be almost corny, romantic, overstated. But Charlie plays with great control and makes the sound work with him. He always has the ability to make every solo, every performance, count. He gives off an intensity and simplicity.

“It comes directly from his period with Ornette Coleman, where he had to improvise serendipitously and melodically without knowing what the next chord was going to be. In the last 25 years, for the most part playing in a more conventional mode, the [Coleman] influence is apparent in that he doesn’t play very many notes, but they have to be the right notes. And with that big tone, they have to resonate.”

Onstage in Scottsdale, Haden’s a consummate ensemble player, but he can’t help but go his own way, too, stretching out with long, earthen solos that evoke the fearlessness and romantic individualism of free jazz, plunk in the middle of the two Charlie Parker bebop classics he plays. It’s as incongruous as a Pollock hanging on a wall of Vermeers. But Haden’s lyric sense and love of melody merge all the disparate parts.

There is an elegant autobiography resonating in his music these days, the story of a man no longer racing the sun to devour the night. Haden is returning to formative experiences, skillfully modifying their memory. He’s going back to a world of black and white, the tones of an old John Garfield feature where the hero refuses to play ball with the racketeers. Garfield is his hero, and who better for Haden to admire? Haden makes a case for the jazzman as pulp hero, a beat loner holding onto a code of ethics in the face of a scarring world.

“I tell my students at CalArts,” he says one afternoon, “you’ve got to strive to become a good human being with humility, become a giving human being. Then maybe you might become a good jazz musician. I start out with that premise.”

Haden tells the story of the man who dived into the icy Potomac River 15 years ago to save a drowning woman. A jet had crashed into Washington’s 14th Street Bridge, and a stewardess was going under; a man on his way to work saw a disaster before him and made the choice to risk everything for a person he didn’t know. “I think there are some times when we almost achieve this,” Haden says. “Making that kind of decision and not reacting. Acting! I hope sometime that I can play like that. There’s always the hope that I can be like that for the rest of my life when I put my bass down. ‘Cause when I put my bass down, I’m in trouble, man. That’s when the hard part starts. To try to be a good person.”

*

It’s pouring over the downtown concrete, the kind of rain-slicked Southern California afternoon that must have filled Raymond Chandler’s wastebasket with cliches even then. Charlie Haden and his second wife, former actress Ruth Cameron, climb into their Volvo wagon and unfold their map of the city.

Haden wasn’t born in Los Angeles, but he is a pure product of the city. It’s as if he were someone else until he got off the bus downtown one afternoon in 1956. That other Haden was a country boy, who grew up in Springfield, Mo. That Haden invented an idea of Los Angeles from matinees and got off the bus looking to make it real.

“In Springfield, I’d see serials like ‘Spy Smashers’ and ‘The Green Hornet.’ The feature would usually be Humphrey Bogart or Alan Ladd, and I used to love these movies. I was fascinated by them, and when I got to L.A., L.A. looked like these movies to me. I saw all these big buildings and all this traffic, and I said, ‘This is my home.’ ”

His father, Carl, was an itinerant Midwestern country singer who married another singer, Virginia Day. A country vocal group with echoes of the Carter Family and the Delmore Brothers, they played the Grand Ole Opry. A little later, when children arrived, they became Uncle Carl Haden and the Haden Family. Charlie was born in Shenandoah, Iowa, in 1937, a brief stopover before the family settled in Springfield. Carl began broadcasting daily radio shows from the Haden home. The house was full of country music and products from radio sponsors--Green Mountain Cough Syrup, Sparkalite Cereal, Cocoa Wheats with vitamin G. Chet Atkins and Roy Acuff performed on the shows with the family, and Charlie remembers the Carter Family visiting and Mother Maybelle singing him to sleep.

“My mom would sing to me at night, but she didn’t know that I wasn’t really sleeping,” Haden says. “I was checking everything out, you know? Then all of a sudden one day, I started humming with her, and then one day I started humming the harmony with her. This was like when I was 11/2 or something, and when I was 22 months old, that’s when they first took me to the studio and I started singing.” “Yodeling Cowboy” Charlie Haden made his musical debut with a version of “Little Sir Echo.”

Brother Jimmy was considered the black sheep of the family, drinking as a teenager, spending a few nights in jail; he also played bass on the show and was a jazz fan who owned Billie Holiday, Stan Kenton and Dizzy Gillespie records. When Jimmy was out of the house, Charlie would play his brother’s bass. When Charlie and his dad caught Charlie Parker on a swing through town, the Future Farmers of America lost a prospect.

The car rounds the corner of Alta Vista and Sunset, down the street from Hollywood High School. Charlie wants a look at where Westlake College of Modern Music once stood. At the age of 17, Charlie was offered a music scholarship to Oberlin College but instead opted for Westlake, which had a strong jazz curriculum. Today smog-colored stucco apartment buildings are on the site of the college.

“Right there,” Haden says excitedly as he hits the brakes. “[Saxophonist] Jackie McLean walked right through that door!” Across the street nearby is a patch of strip malls. Several decades ago, though, this was Tiny Naylor’s, the beloved all-night drive-in restaurant. Haden did his homework at Tiny’s, and one night at 3 a.m. he struck up a conversation with bass player Red Mitchell. When Mitchell couldn’t make a regular gig with Art Pepper’s band, he suggested that Haden fill in. Among the greatest saxophone players to come out of Los Angeles, Pepper was a charismatic catastrophe.

The car turns onto Western, near where Melrose intersects. Pointing over his shoulder as we pass a storefront on Western, Haden says in his high, silty voice, “That’s where I used to buy cough medicine with Pepper. I was just really in awe of him; I used to listen to him on Stan Kenton records when I was in high school. Then I got in with him, and I was very happy. He came to pick me up the first night, he and his wife Diane. Art said, ‘Would you do me a favor?’ I said ‘Sure Mr. Pepper!’ ‘Would you go in the drugstore with my wife and do everything she does?’ I said ‘Sure.’ So she went in to the back of the pharmacy and said, ‘I want a 16-ounce bottle of Cosanyl cough syrup.’ ”

At the time, adults could get cough syrup with codeine on the honor system; Pepper’s wife signed the pharmacist’s book, writing an address in it. Then the pharmacist asked Haden what he wanted. I’ll have what she had, he whispered. “We took the cough medicine out to the car. Art started the car, opened one of the bottles up and he downed it. I said, ‘Gee, Mr. Pepper, you must have a really bad cough.’ He just cracked up. He said, ‘Well you’re right about that, man.’ Then he says, ‘Actually Charlie, I’m trying to cool it, trying to stop using heroin, and this is how I’m doing it.’

“I said, ‘Well, can I have a swig?’

“ ‘Nooo.’ But then he said, ‘OK, I’ll let you have a little swig.’ ”

About the same time, Haden also was playing in a band with pianist Paul Bley, who remembers the bassist showing up barefoot for his tryout. “Oh yeah, he was kind of a shy guy,” says Quartet West drummer Larance Marable, who has known Haden almost since he arrived in Los Angeles. “But it didn’t take long before Charlie had a full head of steam.”

We’d already driven down Wilshire, past the Bryson Apartments, which appear in Chandler’s novels. And past where the Haig used to be, across from the Ambassador Hotel. The modified bungalow, now gone and a 12-story Sanwa Bank building in its place, was once among the busiest jazz clubs in town. It was at the Haig that Haden saw his future get thrown off the stage.

Haden had gone to the club one Monday night to hear Gerry Mulligan’s group. The place was packed; there was barely room to stand. And then a well-dressed guy carrying a white plastic saxophone squeezed his way to the front. This was how Ornette Coleman performed back then: a shy, deferential insurgent requesting to sit in.

“He starts playing, man, and it was so unbelievably great I could not believe it. Like the whole room lit up all of a sudden, like somebody turned on the lights,” Haden says. “He was playing the blues they were playing, but he was playing his own way. And almost as fast as he asked to sit in, they asked him to please stop.” Spotting a kindred spirit, Haden ran out after Coleman into the alley, but the saxophonist had already disappeared into the night.

While traveling around the country in the ‘40s and ‘50s with rhythm-and-blues bands and in tent shows, Coleman had begun asking new questions of the art of improvisation. He’d applied Romantic ideas of the protean artist to jazz, imbuing the improviser with the authority that jazz had previously doled out to composers and arrangers. Playing squealing saxophone on his back to entertain the crowd, he was also seeking an elevated stature for the jazz soloist. It was the kind of prerogative and supremacy that critics elsewhere were bestowing on Abstract Expressionist painters.

Coleman believed that musicians did not owe ultimate allegiance to the chords or key changes, or to the song or to a tempo established at the beginning of the song. Even the conventional determining characteristics of the instruments in the band suddenly seemed less demarcated in his music; his drummers sounded more melodic, his bass players were freed from having to signal chord changes. Ultimately, the music belonged to the players, and the players belonged only to one another. This was harmony on a new level--a harmony that couldn’t be mapped out but was constantly evolving over each tune and depended for its life on the musicians’ ability to listen. But it required a fresh way of hearing and new technical skills.

The Fort Worth-born Coleman toured in bands hostile to the ideas he was developing. Only in the early 1950s, when he arrived in Los Angeles, a musicians’ town without the sachems and orthodoxies of New York City, could his music take root. And only with young musicians like drummers Billy Higgins and Ed Blackwell (whom Coleman met in New Orleans) and trumpeter Don Cherry could Coleman re-imagine jazz. Chief among his collaborators was Haden.

A few days after seeing Mulligan’s group kick Coleman off the stage, Haden tracked down the young saxophonist. At the end of an all-Saturday-night jam session at which Coleman watched Haden play, the two decided to continue at Coleman’s house. “It was about 9 o’clock on Sunday morning, and when you opened the door, the sunlight hit you in the face, everybody in their go-to-church clothes up and down Washington Boulevard with their kids,” remembers Haden. “We got into Ornette’s little Studebaker and went to his room.

“There was music blocking the door; you couldn’t get the door open. Finally it opened, and the place was filled with music. Manuscripts, things he had written out all over the rug and chairs and bed and everywhere. I got my bass out, and he picked up one of the manuscripts off the rug and said, ‘Lets play this.’ I said, ‘Sure,’ but I was scared to death. He said, ‘Now I got some [chord] changes written below the melody here that I heard when I was writing the melody. You can play those changes when you play the song, but when I start to improvise, make up your own changes from what I’m playing.’ I said, ‘With pleasure.’ Man, we played all day and all night. And the next day we stopped to get a hamburger and we came back and we played some more.”

The address where Coleman solidified his ideas, where you could practically say free jazz was invented, was the Hillcrest Club. Today it’s an unmarked brown facade on Washington Boulevard, a block east of La Brea. There’s a barred front door and no historical marker. It’s so anonymous that Haden thinks he’s driven past it before he is able to identify the spot. As we park, I think of detective Lew Archer, sizing up the gone-to-seed Barcelona Hotel in Ross MacDonald’s novel, “The Far Side of the Dollar”: “It was a huge old building, Early Hollywood Byzantine, with stucco domes and minarets, and curved verandas where famous faces of the silent days had sipped their bootleg rum. Now it stood abandoned under the bluff. The bright lights of a service station across the highway showed that its white paint was flaking off and some of the windows were broken.” Just another Los Angeles landmark on its way to the next bonfire. A kid walks past, reading an auto parts catalog. A cloud of grease from a fish fry on the corner floats over the block.

The Coleman group’s stand at the Hillcrest earned Haden a reputation among Hollywood hipsters. Actors Dean Stockwell and Bobby Driscoll came to hear him, and Martin Landau advised Haden that he might do well to try acting. Coleman’s band was causing a stir that reached the East Coast. The irony was that the owner of the Hillcrest reluctantly fired the group after a few months; the music soon to be a smash in New York was driving away too many locals.

In 1959, Coleman’s band went to New York for shows at the Five Spot. Fistfights broke out at the club’s bar between free-jazz partisans and those convinced that Coleman was perpetrating a hoax. One night, Miles Davis showed up and sat in; another night, a stranger walked up to Coleman and punched him in the face. A world was ending, another was beginning. Haden was 22.

When we drive past the tiny apartment he shared with another avant-garde bassist, Scott LaFaro, in the late ‘50s--it’s a Korean church now, near the corner of Gramercy and Maplewood--Haden turns a corner and stops. “Here was where Hoppy lived,” he says quietly. “Man oh man, oh man . . . .” Hoppy was Haden’s connection. Haden had started using heroin before the New York trip. Maybe it was the influence of Charlie Parker--if Bird’s L.A. appearances in the late ‘40s weren’t commercial successes, they certainly changed the face of jazz in town. If you wanted to play like Bird, you had to be like Bird, went the thinking.

“It was the times and the environment that strung most of us out,” wrote pianist Hampton Hawes in his autobiography, “Raise Up Off Me.” “You’re on the way to the gig, you see some cats tying up, you think, all right, let me try some of that; like a kid riding his first bicycle, drinking his first cherry pop. You try it, it feels good, and there you go. And the casualty list in the ‘50s--dead, wounded and mentally deranged--started to look like the Korean War was being fought at the corner of Central and 45th.”

Haden had joined the walking wounded. He took a vacation from Coleman’s band to clean up, but an arrest cost him his cabaret card in New York City--you needed one to play anywhere alcohol was consumed. He entered a federal hospital in Fort Worth, Tex., where he played regularly with Hawes, a fellow patient. The cure didn’t take. That was 1962. That same year Haden won Down Beat’s New Star Award, but the magazine couldn’t send him his plaque; he had no address. In 1963, Haden enrolled in a Synanon program in Santa Monica and kicked heroin for the first time. For a brief period, he even became a public relations man for Synanon. In the ‘70s, Haden relapsed before kicking for good. Heroin isn’t a subject he likes to talk about.

“My creativity became much stronger and more brilliant, and I was able to develop to my potential when I was drug-free,” he says. These days a cappuccino, augmented with additional espresso, is his thing. The last time Haden was in Italy, he picked up a holy card of Innocenzo Da Berzo, the patron saint of cappuccino. And that suggests a natural ending of any tour of Haden landmarks: a late-night caffeine stand. He’s not racing the sun any longer. Tomorrow’s another show.

*

Dipping into his pocket as he sits in a Calarts coffeehouse, Haden plucks out a handful of green earplugs. Years of standing at bass man’s ground zero, the spot beside the drummer’s cymbals, have destroyed part of his hearing. Certain frequencies are killers, he says, many sounds are painfully amplified and he hears a constant ringing. It’s the kind of condition that drives people mad. “If you could hear what’s in my head,” he says, “you’d go running down the street screaming.”

Haden and his 1840 French bass don’t stand next to drummers anymore. He’s become the man in the Plexiglas booth, shielded from noise by an especially designed head-to-floor enclosure that he takes with him wherever he plays. But if he’s keeping the world’s harsher sounds out with his barricade, maybe Haden’s also keeping something inside. He’s fought and won a battle to bring a rich simplicity into the world and constructed an intricate series of troughs and siphons to draw away any threat.

There’s a unity of principal reaching across his major projects after Ornette Coleman. Huge and ambitious efforts like the Liberation Music Orchestra (three albums since 1968), which marry radical politics to radical music, and Old and New Dreams (three since 1976), his avant-garde repertory ensemble, could easily have imploded. One reason they don’t is the gravity that Haden brings to them. He’s found a common style, an elemental directness that’s easily transportable. Whatever the session, his playing says: It’s not just me that wants to rise above fears of the day.

“It almost doesn’t matter what instrument Charlie’s playing. He speaks with an honest, clear beauty,” says tenor saxophonist Joe Lovano, who played with the bassist in the ‘80s. “The music doesn’t cloud his vision. He plays right through the music.”

Haden talks in the hard bop that only exists these days in nuevo-noir flicks and James Ellroy novels. This personal style is a piece of the shell, too. He speaks in a stream of oddball jokes, the kind that breed familiarity rather than intimacy. Sometimes it seems as if jive talk and quips are the easiest means he has to communicate with the world. The problem with letting him sit alone for 15 minutes is that he’s going to come up with the one about the escaped dwarf psychic. Forty years after he left Missouri, there’s still something of the Ozark Mountains bargainer about him. From shoe salesman to PR man for Synanon to successful jazz businessman, he has the rap to get what he wants.

“He’s growing and growing, and he’s happier and he likes Charlie better,” says drummer Billy Higgins. The two have played together since the Coleman days. “His kids have grown. Something about that makes you feel very blessed. To see your children grow and just be healthy. He’s left such a great imprint of himself in them, until they ended up doing what he’s doing. That’s when you know your kids really love you, you know? Because you stand for something, and they let you know what you stand for, you dig?”

“No matter how messed up my dad was on illicit substances, he always showed his kids that he loved them more than the drug,” says Charlie’s son, Josh Haden. Josh plays bass and sings in Spain, a rising indie pop band that’s so quiet even Charlie could attend a show. “He made a point to show his kids that he could get clear because of his kids.”

“He always reminds us to just stay healthy--especially in the world we’re in now,” says Petra Haden. Petra sings and plays violin with That Dog, a group of bratty-yet-wholesome alternative rockers that includes her sister Rachel. Sister Tanya, the third of the triplets, plays cello and has also recorded with the band.

Today, Haden jokes that his kids are playing places that Quartet West couldn’t play. And where once his children would be backstage eating the pizza and chips laid out for dad’s band, now you might find him noshing in the dressing room at McCabe’s Guitar Shop after a That Dog show.

There’s talk that, when schedules permit, a new version of the Haden Family Band will emerge, with Charlie and his children perhaps playing the Delmore Brothers tunes and hillbilly hymns that he grew up with. “I can’t wait. It would make me so happy,” says Petra. “Singing with my sisters and brother and my dad would be so fun. It would be the most natural thing I could do, singing harmony with my family. That’s how I think I sound best.”

It’s a gusty day in Valencia. Back in Raymond Chandler’s time, old-money citrus crops grew here. Now the cash crop is the avant-garde. And the former farm boy, who founded the CalArts jazz studies program, arrives to teach class, entering a little behind the beat. He pushes his bass down the long hall, and at the sight of him, students waiting outside a locked classroom door snap to. Big smiles cross their faces as they anticipate a lesson from the master. You can spot the hepcat from a hundred classrooms away, just by the way he lopes from side to side in his nicely tailored tweed jacket and Armani sunglasses. He leads his bass--in its chocolate-brown leather case adorned with airplane tags--through a sea of denim and baseball caps. “Hey man,” he welcomes one student. “Greetings, Gates,” he salutes another. “Sorry I’m late; they had me hung up on the Pacific Coast Highway. How was your break?” he asks, looking at some empty chairs across the classroom. “A lot of guys didn’t come back yet. Break? They broke, Jack!”

He leans the bass against a wall, and school, Jack, is in. Haden plays the class a tape of a 1971 Portugal concert, one of the most notorious in Haden’s long career. In the middle of a big government-sponsored jazz festival, he clenched his fist and dedicated a tune “to the black people’s liberation movements in Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau and Angola.” At the time these were African colonies of Portugal; after the concert, Haden was arrested and interrogated. After the Portugal tape, Haden pulls out a cassette sent recently by a fan in Zurich. It features 120 lawyers, doctors and tradesmen massed in a Swiss citizens’ band. They were playing Haden’s lament, “Silence,” on brass instruments at a rally to protest pollution of the Rhine. There is a lesson in this, one that Haden teases out with a few misleadingly offhand lines: That right notes don’t guarantee a righteous performance any more than wrong notes equal a bad one. In the CalArts classroom, students steal longing looks at the bass still in its case.

He peeks at the clock, promises “next week, we’ll get into playing.” Then, almost as an afterthought, he begins a final rap. His back stiffens, his tossed-off words come out of nowhere. “You know, I found something out, man. You know, when you improvise, when there’s nothing stopping you and everything starts to flow? You want it to go on forever, be like that forever.

“And you can’t. It doesn’t happen all the time for anybody; I don’t think it happened all the time even for Bird. But I discovered, the more you experience it the quicker you get to it. Playing great: That’s the definition of being at one with the universe, and the music, and--everything. I just don’t want you to be discouraged when you can’t make it happen instantly. We’ve been given special ears. It doesn’t make you better than anybody else, but you’re able to hear things other people don’t.”

He quotes “The Prophet” and talks about a time when he was 19, playing Denver in a band with Paul Bley. An old pianist in town had taken Haden under his wing, giving advice and showing him around one afternoon. They drove up a mountain road, stopped the car at the snow line and got out. The local said he was too old to go any higher, but that if Haden hiked on, he’d see something really beautiful.

Earlier in the class, Haden had played a tape of a Quartet West concert, lecturing on how a great solo requires a great ending. Now, with the students’ attention focused on him, he leans back on his stool. The room is silent.

“It was like music up there,” Haden continues. “There were no human-made sounds. It was only the snow and the wind and the birds--if there were any birds up there. That was it. And it was un-be-lieve-able, you could see in all directions. I never felt so alone before in my life. And I could hear him call from below: ‘Charlieeee, cooome baaack . . . .’ And I didn’t want to come back.

“It was the same feeling you have when you want to get down on your knees and thank--whatever--for the music. So I don’t want you to become impatient. You will get there.”