Iconic jazz bassist Charlie Haden dies aged 76

0pt; line-height: 150%; font-family: Arial; color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">Charlie Haden – one of the finest double bassists in jazz who could say more with a few finely chosen notes than many lesser musicians try and say with a hundred – has died aged 76 on Thursday 11 July. The news was announced by his record label ECM, who confirmed that his wife, the singer Ruth Cameron, and his four children were at his side when he died at home in Los Angeles after a prolonged period of illness.

Born in Shenandoah, Iowa, on 6 August 1937, Haden began his life in music almost immediately, singing on his parents’ country & western radio show at the tender age of 22 months. Having started playing bass in his early teens, he contracted a form of polio that affected his face and throat and prevented him from singing by age 14, thus encouraging his love of jazz and desire to play bass professionally. In 1957, he left America’s heartland for Los Angeles, where he met and played with such legends as Art Pepper, Hampton Hawes, and Dexter Gordon.

Haden played a hugely important role in the development of free jazz, alongside saxophonist Ornette Coleman, particularly for his pioneering exploration of ‘harmolodics’ – a system of improvising where the soloist dictates the harmony. This partnership was developed when Haden and his quartet moved to New York in 1959 and began recording with Coleman, Haden describing how they developed the concept: “At first when we were playing and improvising, we kind of followed the pattern of the song, sometimes. Then, when we got to New York, Ornette wasn’t playing on the song patterns, like the bridge and the interlude and stuff like that. He would just play. And that’s when I started just following him and playing the chord changes that he was playing: on-the-spot new chord structures made up according to how he felt at any given moment.” This avant-jazz ensemble also included trumpeter Don Cherry and drummer Billy Higgins and recorded the seminal Shape Of Jazz To Come.  In addition to his influential work with Coleman, Haden also collaborated with a number of adventurous jazz giants, including John Coltrane, Archie Shepp, Keith Jarrett, and Pat Metheny.

In 1969, Haden joined forces with pianist/composer Carla Bley, founding the Liberation Music Orchestra. The group’s self-titled debut is a milestone of modern music, blending experimental big band jazz with the folk songs of the Spanish Civil War to create a powerfully original work of musical/political activism. After two further recordings he reconvened the Liberation Music Orchestra in 2005, with largely new members, for the album Not In Our Name. This recording dealt primarily with the contemporary political situation in the United States.

 An acoustic bassist of extraordinary gifts, Haden’s talents as a musician have been in constant demand by his fellow artists. As a result, he collaborated with a genuinely stunning array of musicians including Hank Jones, Don Cherry, Dewey Redman, Paul Motian, Jack DeJohnette, Michael Brecker, Kenny Barron, and Pat Metheny with whom Haden shared a 1997 Best Jazz Instrumental Individual/Small Group Grammy Award for their album, Beyond the Missouri Sky.

Haden’s love of world music saw him teaming with a variety of diverse international players, including Brazilian guitarist Egberto Gismonti, Argentinean bandoneon master Dino Saluzzi, and Portuguese guitar giant Carlos Paredes. In addition, Haden explored diverse streams of American popular music with both his acclaimed Quartet West, as well as on such collections as 2002’s inventive alliance with Michael Brecker, American Dreams.

Haden was invited to establish the jazz studies program at California Institute of the Arts in 1982, has earned countless honours from around the globe, including the Los Angeles Jazz Society prize for Jazz Educator of the Year, three Grammy Awards (alongside a multitude of nominations), myriad DownBeat readers and critics poll winners, a Guggenheim fellowship, four NEA grants for composition, France’s Grand Prix Du Disque Award, Japan’s SWING Journal Gold, Silver and Bronze awards. As well as the Montreal Jazz Festival’s Miles Davis Award for a lifetime of contributing to improvised music.

The genesis of his 2008 release, Rambling Boy, began in the late 1980s when Haden and his wife Cameron visited his grandmother in Missouri to celebrate her 80^th birthday, as Haden explained: “Ruth got all of us to sing together and before you knew it, the kids were all singing harmony with my brothers and sisters and they all blended so well. It was just such a natural event and it felt so good and sounded so good that I knew in my heart that one day we’d all sing together.” Charlie Haden Family & Friends: Rambling Boy brought his personal history full circle bringing together a new generation of the Haden Family – a legendary Midwest music institution in the 1930s and 1940s.

2010 saw the release of the ECM recording Jasmine, Keith Jarrett's first recorded collaboration in decades other than with his standards trio, and reunites him with the great bassist Charlie Haden, a close partner until the mid-1970s. Intimate, spontaneous and warm, this album of love songs recorded at Jarrett's home, has affinities, in its unaffected directness, with his many of the works of both artists. A second instalment from these sessions, Last Dance, has also just been released on ECM.

Founded in the mid-1980s by Haden, Quartet West was to become recognised as one of the most elegant and coherent small-groups in contemporary jazz. Together with Ernie Watts on tenor saxophone, Alan Broadbent on piano and Larance Marable on drums, Haden resuscitated and modernised a typically Californian way of playing the "jazz game", one made of softness, sophistication and sensual clarity. The quartets six recordings – Quartet West (1987), In Angel City (1988), Haunted Heart (1992), Always say Goodbye (1994), Now Is the Hour (1996) and The Art Of Song (1999) – can all be read as autobiographical, melancholy plunges into the intimate recesses of the bassist's imagination: as many chapters of some dreamlike auto-fiction that multiplies the connexions and relations between Californian jazz of the immediate post-war period, and Hollywood during the same era, which was marked notably by the deadly sophistication of the great noir films.

The most recent release by Quartet West Sophisticated Ladies saw the group with a new drummer Rodney Green, alongside a strong cast of contemporary female vocalists including Cassandra Wilson, Diana Krall, Melody Gardot, Norah Jones, Renee Fleming and Charlie’s wife, Ruth Cameron.

Charlie Haden is survived by his wife of 30 years, Ruth Cameron, as well as his children Josh Haden, Tanya Haden, Rachel Haden and Petra Haden.