Experimental Time Trip

By JAY COCKS

Charlie Haden plays bass with his eyes closed. He has his own story about that, and it's pretty good.

It's 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 Charles Mingus. Percy Heath. Ray Brown. And more: "Every great bass player, staring right in my face. From that moment on, I closed my eyes."

And 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 of musical-dream autobiography, part funky and part rhapsodic, that evokes the style of his early Los Angeles days as well as the mythic mood of vintage L.A., the film- noir city. Chinatown. Chandlertown.

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 record collection. The songs flow seamlessly out of Quartet West's instrumental excursions, and the effect is closer to magic than nostalgia, like climbing into a Studebaker convertible that rolls out of the fog, letting it take you away again for a ride into the mist.

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."

But he passed quickly from dreaming in the arms of the reigning regent of country music to jazzier reveries. When he was 15, his father took him to a concert in Omaha that featured Lester Young and Parker, and then and there, he says, "it was pretty much decided inside my soul that jazz was what I was going to do. It was like having the music born inside you."

He took up bass because "it made the fullness of music happen." He'd play along with Charlie Parker records, and came to love the instrument so much "that when the bass stopped playing, the bottom fell out of the music." He sold shoes and played country bass to get a stake that would send him to Los Angeles to study jazz at a conservatory. He dropped out after a single - semester. By then he was jamming with Art Pepper and Dexter Gordon. When he met up with Coleman at a club in Hollywood, he was primed for takeoff. "The traditional way of improvising in jazz is on the chord structure," he says. "But sometimes I would want to improvise on the inspiration, the feeling rather than the chords. And that's what Ornette was doing."

Haden, who still plays with Coleman occasionally, continues to have a wide compass for inspiration. His music, especially the Liberation Music Orchestra material, can turn toughly political; he was once arrested in Portugal for dedicating one of his songs to black liberation movements in Africa. He has founded a department of jazz studies at the California Institute of Arts in Los Angeles, where he lives with his second wife Ruth Cameron. He has four children; all are musicians who have in their father a man who has already left a profound mark on contemporary jazz.

With Charlie Haden, jazz is always contemporary -- relentlessly, implacably -- even when, as on Haunted Heart, he's taking a look back. "It's not about the past, because improvisation is really about being in the moment," he explains. "I'm talking about the past inspiring the present. That's what's so special about jazz. It teaches you to appreciate the moment you're in now." And with Haden's bass playing under it, every moment is a wonder.