Charlie Haden: We originated our show from our farmhouse. After everybody milked cows and fed the chickens and everything, we went on the air at about 6 in the morning.
[radio show clip]
CH: We were on the station, KWTO, which stands for "Keep Watching The Ozarks.”
[radio show clip]
CH: And my dad was friends with the Delmore Brothers and the Carters and Jimmy Rodgers and Roy Acuff, and Mother Maybelle used to come over and stay at our house when they were in town.
NS: Mother Maybelle Carter.
CH: Yeah, Mother Maybelle Carter, and June and Helen, who played accordion and Anita who played the bass. I was nine years old, and she was fifteen, and I was in love with her because she played the bass, and she is also good looking.
NS: You weren't playing the bass then were you?
CH: No, I was not.
NS: You were singing still, pretty much.
CH: I was singing, yeah.
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NS: Growing up in this environment, what did country music do for you as a person who later becomes a renowned jazz bassist? What does country music give you?
CH: Country music gave me a thorough background in harmony and melody and voicing and intonation. I was so lucky to be able to be a part of my dad and mom and my brothers and sisters singing because they were all really good singers, and because they were related, they blended really well–their voices blended really well.
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NS: How is it that you made the transition from country vocalist to an instrumentalist jazz bassist?
CH: I was listening to jazz. I listened to everything. That was when radio was big, and there was no television. I always loved the bass because the bass made everything sound deeper. And then, you know, I heard a concert of jazz at the Philharmonic with Charlie Parker and Lester Young and Ray Brown. Billie Holiday, I think, was singing.
NS: It must have been overwhelming to hear that.
CH: It was. Especially, you know, I didn't really know who they were, but as soon as Charlie Parker started playing, I guess my whole life changed. I heard the melodies and the harmonies that he was playing, and I said, "That's what I want to do.”
[Music]
CH: But then, when I was fifteen–this was during the polio epidemic–I developed bulbar polio, which paralyzed the left side of my face and my throat and my vocal chords. And I don't have the range in my singing voice.
NS: It seems to me that as time passed you started singing with your bass. What gets you out to Los Angeles from Missouri?
CH: There weren't very many jazz musicians where I lived. I played a lot with recordings. I got on a Greyhound bus and went to L.A. I started working right away a lot in different clubs.
NS: At what point did you meet Ornette Coleman and what were your impressions of him in hearing him and seeing him?
CH: I was on a night off on a Monday night from the Hilcrest Club where I was playing with Paul Bley, and I went over to a club called The Haig where Gerry Mulligan was playing. And this alto player came in and asked if he could sit in. As soon as he started to play the whole room lit up for me. I never heard anything like that in my life. As soon as he started to play, they asked him to stop.
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CH: The next night on the gig, the drummer Lenny McBrowne said that he knew him, his name was Ornette Coleman. He introduced us, and Ornette invited me over to his place, and we played for days on end. He asked me to join his quartet with Don Cherry and Billy Higgins, and we made a recording called The Shape of Jazz to Come, and then we made another one called the Change of the Century.
To hear the full program, tune in Saturdays at 5 and Sundays at 6 on WWNO, or listen at americanroutes.org.