Jazz film (p)review: "Charlie Haden: Rambling Boy"

Originally published at MinnPost.com, Thursday, Oct. 7, 2010

In 2006, during the 6th annual Sound Unseen festival, jazz fans gathered at the Riverview Theater to see “My Name is Albert Ayler,” a documentary about the free-jazz saxophonist who played at Coltrane’s funeral. Afterward, people strolled across the street to the Riverview Wine Bar to talk about the film.

That informal gathering — Janis Lane-Ewart from KFAI, Kevin Barnes from KBEM, musicians Carei Thomas and Joe Damman, among others — planted the seed for KBEM’s REEL Jazz film series.

Succeeding Sound Unseen festivals have featured “Let’s Get Lost,” Bruce Weber’s film about Chet Baker that left many viewers stunned and speechless (turns out Baker was a terrific trumpet player but a horrible human being), and “Icons Among Us: Jazz in the Present Tense,” which spotlights jazz stars of today.

Sound Unseen usually shows at least one film about jazz. This year it’s “Charlie Haden: Rambling Boy,” a reverent documentary by Swiss-born filmmaker Reto Caduff.

Bassist (and beyond) Haden is one of jazz’s living legends. Now in his 70s, with a career spanning more than 50 years, he recently released an elegant recording with pianist Keith Jarrett, whose first trio (with drummer Paul Motian) he was part of in the 1970s. (This film brought Haden and Jarrett together for the first time in decades and prompted the new recording.)

Bassist, and beyond: Haden is also a composer, political activist, loving husband and father. The film touches on these areas as well, but it’s mostly about the music. In archival performance clips and recent interviews with other jazz greats, it tells of his country-music childhood, his early obsession with jazz, and his beginnings and maturation as an influential and respected jazz musician.

We learn of his meeting with Ornette Coleman, with whom he would revolutionize jazz, his work with Alice Coltrane, the Keith Jarrett Trio in the 1970s, his politically motivated Liberation Music Orchestra with Carla Bley, his noir-inspired Quartet West, and collaborations with artists around the world. Bruce Hornsby, Pat Metheny, Ethan Iverson, Ravi Coltrane, Joe Lovano, Jarrett and others are willing interviews, saying nice things about a man who by all accounts is a genuinely nice person.

If anything, Caduff’s film is too reverent, too warm and fuzzy. It makes no mention of Haden’s heroin addiction in the 1960s, or the fact that he suffers from tinnitus, a problem for many musicians. If you’re looking for a film about the dark side of jazz, check out “Let’s Get Lost” or “Anita O’Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer,” or Clint Eastwood’s “Bird,” about the life of Charlie Parker. But if you want to know more about Haden and his music, this well-made, nicely paced portrait — not too long, not too short, just right at 84 minutes — is a fine way to spend part of your Saturday afternoon.

 

Sound Unseen 11: “Charlie Haden: Rambling Boy,” a film by Reto Caduff. Saturday, Oct. 9, 1 p.m., The Trylon Microcinema, 3258 Minnehaha Ave. S., Minneapolis ($8). Tickets online.

Charlie Haden Family & Friends

While researching Charlie Haden for MinnPost, I learned he was about to release a country music CD, and that he had sung (and yodeled) bluegrass music as a child on his family's radio program on KMA in Shenandoah, Iowa. Rambling Boy came out on Tuesday (Sept. 23). "Great CD," he said during our interview. "Couldn't be better. My daughters, my son, my wife, Vince Gill, Elvis Costello, Roseanne Cash, Ricky Skaggs, Jerry Douglas--all these great musicians. Pictures of my family."

The CD has its own Web site, with a video about the making of the album. Check it out.

Liane Hansen interviewed Haden and his family (including son-in-law Jack Black) for NPR's Weekend Edition on Sunday, Sept. 21. It's a really nice piece and worth a listen.

The NPR site led me to an earlier interview from the Tavis Smiley Show (Nov. 11, 2004) during which Haden talked with Roy Hurst about the creation of free jazz--and why he plays with his eyes closed: "The obvious answer to that is 'to concentrate.' But I tell this funny little story: The first night we opened at the Five Spot, I was unpacking my base, and Ornette was getting his horn out, we're getting ready to play, and I looked across at where the bar was, and standing at the bar were Wilbur Ware, Charlie Mingus, Ray Brown, Percy Heath, Paul Chambers--every great bass player in New York City was looking right in my face, and I said, from that time on, I close my eyes."

Photo by Jim McGuire.

Charlie Haden: More from the interview

The great bassist Charlie Haden brings his Liberation Music Orchestra to Minneapolis tomorrow (Saturday, Sept. 27) for the first concert in the 2008-09 Northrop Jazz Season. I had the opportunity to speak with him earlier this month for MinnPost.

Not everything from the interview made it into the article. Here's more.

Haden described the latest LMO album, Not in Our Name, as "a desperate attempt to reach people with beautiful music and try...to make them realize how important it is to have reverence for life. To see the preciousness of life and to recognize the injustices of the world." (This quote does appear in the article.)

I asked him if something specific had happened in his life to make him care so much. He related the story, which has been reported elsewhere, of being rocked to sleep by his mother when he was about 2 years old. She was humming folk songs to him, and he started humming the harmony.

"I think that was my first sensitivity to music," he told me. "From then on, it was a very sensitive journey for me--everything was very delicate, sensitive, vulnerable.... When I was 4, I was screaming in my room, really loud, and my mother ran in saying 'Charlie, what is wrong?' I said, 'I don't want to die!' She said, 'Charlie, you're 4 years old, you're not going to die!' I was confronted [at that early age] with how lucky life is, that the history of the universe is inside of all of us from the beginning of time, and we have to do everything we can to make [life] as beautiful as we can for everybody....

"I saw a lot of things when I was a kid in a racist place.... I don't know why my mother chose to take me once a month to an African-American church and sit and listen to the choir. She took me out of my three brothers and two sisters. All I had to do was look around me--at the lunch counters, the one movie theater where blacks could sit in the third balcony, the one school for African-American students. There were not many places they could go.... My family were not racist. Dad liked Roosevelt and was unhappy with Truman. I was raised in a family that was very liberal. Some things attracted me right away to right injustices in the world, to be more aware."

In 1971, while on tour in Portugal with Ornette Coleman and other jazz giants (Ellington, Miles, Dexter Gordon, Dizzy, Monk), Haden was arrested for dedicating "Song for Che" (a track from the first self-titled Liberation Music Orchestra album) to liberation movements in Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea-Bissau, which were then Portuguese colonies. He was apprehended at the airport, imprisoned overnight, and interrogated by the political police. The next day, Nixon's cultural attache to Portugal came for him and he was released.

I asked him, "Do you think if you were arrested in Portugal today that a cultural attache would come for you?" He said, and I heard sadness in his voice, "Probably not."

Yet he keeps on keeping on, and his music is not, as you might expect, bitter or angry or full of despair. The title track to "Not in Our Name" is one of the sunniest, most optimistic tunes I have ever heard. It makes you want to dance and run through a field of flowers and smile at strangers.

Northrop sent out an email yesterday to ticket holders with a message from Haden: "We hope to see a new society of enlightenment and wisdom where creative thought becomes the most dominant force in all people's lives."

Two lengthy interviews with Charlie Haden are available online, one by Ethan Iverson for DownBeat (2008), the other by Amy Goodman for Democracy Now (2006). I learned a lot from both of them. Photo of Charlie Haden and Carla Bley by Thomas Dorn.