Charlie Haden Quotes
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I just see myself as a human being that's concerned about life.
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People ask me how could I go from country to jazz. It's been a natural convergence for me.
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I want to take people away from the ugliness and sadness around us every day and bring beautiful, deep music to as many people as I can.
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I had to learn right away how to improvise behind Ornette, which not only meant following him from one key to another and recognizing the different keys, but modulating in a way that the keys flowed in and out of each other, and the new harmonies sounded right.
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I never heard anything so brilliant in my life as I did that first time I heard Ornette. He played like some revolutionary angel. Soon, we were rehearsing in his place, music scattered everywhere, and he was telling me to play outside the chord changes, which was exactly what I had been wanting to do. Now I had permission.
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I just try to play music from my heart and bring as much beauty as I can to as many people as I can. Just give them other alternatives, especially people who aren't exposed to creative music.
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I want people to feel what it was like in the '40s. That's when popular music in the United States was so beautiful. Frank Sinatra, the Pied Pipers, Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, Tommy Dorsey, Billie Holiday. That's when popular music had deeper values, to me. This was music that was selling millions of records.
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Bluegrass is in my blood and in my ears.
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My roots have never left me... because the very first memory I have is my mom singing and me singing with her.
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When we first started playing we did a lot of rehearsing. We used to write out everything. In fact, that's the way everybody rehearses: we play the tunes and improvise.
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My parents were on the Grand Ole Opry. They traveled all over the country singing hillbilly music. That's what they called it back then. They were friends with Roy Acuff and the Delmore Brothers and the Carter Family. And all of my brothers and sisters who were older than me started on the show, after they were big enough to hold a guitar and sing.
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I didn't play a lot of bass as a kid, but I sang it.
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There's like a special group of people that come from different parts of the planet to study with me. It's nice. I just gave a workshop in Boston at the New England Conservatory, which was really nice.
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You can't be at your full creative power if you are sedated.
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I just sit down at the piano and rattle it off.
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I used to listen to a lot of Bach on the radio, and when the basses started to sing, it made everything complete - it made it all make sense.
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I've got a collection of songs that I've had, I keep adding to and they're all great American composers. I wanted to showcase American composers and I've done that on a lot of my records and played things by American composers that I really respect.
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When you listen to a symphony orchestra, and the basses don't - there's no bass part, there's not that much depth. That's why I'm attracted to the instrument, the bass. It brings depth. It's like playing in a rainforest.
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I listened to classical music. I listened to jazz. I listened to everything. And I started becoming interested in the sounds of jazz. And I went to a concert of Jazz at the Philharmonic when we lived in Omaha, Nebraska, and I saw Charlie Parker play and Billie Holiday sing and Lester Young play, and that did it. I said, 'That's what I want to do.'
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Some tracks are with quartet and some tracks are with synthesizer.
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In L.A., I played with Joe Pass and Gabor Szabo. Mick Goodrick plays guitar in the Liberation Music Orchestra, and he's a real special player. Then I did a duet concert with Jim Hall at the 1990 Montreal Festival.
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One of the things polio does is it takes away your energy. They don't know very much about it. They should be a lot more aware of what polio is.
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One of the things my mom used to do - I don't know why she chose me, but she chose me out of her six children to take to the African-American church that was in the town that we lived in Springfield, Missouri. And we would go to the church, and we would sit in the back row, and we would listen to all of the spirituals in the hymns.
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I have a very clear picture of what I want to do and what I feel is important as far as my contribution or my appreciation and respect for this life that we're living, and to try to make it better. I can't feel that I'm making it better playing commercial music, and I never could, and I never will.