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Jazz: The Ballad of the Fallen by Charlie Haden and the Liberation Music Orchestra

CHRIS SEARLE reviews the music and life of a fallen jazz legend

The Ballad of the Fallen

Charlie Haden and the
Liberation Music Orchestra

(Emanem)

 

“Don’t ask me who I am/ Or if you knew me/The dreams that I had/Will grow even though I’m no longer here.”

These words are from a poem found in the clothes of a student who was killed when the US-backed national guard of El Salvador attacked a demonstration against their country’s tyrannical government at the University of San Salvador in 1982.

They are set down in the sleeve notes of an album by the Liberation Music Orchestra led by bassist Charlie Haden and pianist Carla Bley, The Ballad of the Fallen, released in 1983.

Haden died in July 2014 after literally a lifetime in music.

On his album Rambling Boy there is a recording of the Haden Family country band of Shenandoah, Iowa, made in 1939 during their weekly radio show, with two-year-old Charlie as a featured singer. 

For the first decade-and-a-half of his life he played constantly with his parents and siblings.

“Then,” he wrote, “when I went to a concert of jazz at the Philharmonic in Omaha, Nebraska, and heard Charlie Parker play, my life changed forever and I knew I had to play jazz.”

After he left school, he moved to Los Angeles, where in 1957 he met an alto saxophonist from Fort Worth, Texas — Ornette Coleman — and became the bassist in his quartet, which sparked huge perturbations across the jazz world.

Always a political radical, at the Cascais Jazz Festival of 1971 just outside Lisbon while on tour with Coleman, he dedicated his tune Song For Che to the liberation fighters of the then Portuguese colonies of Mozambique, Angola and Guinea-Bissau, in the very face of the Portuguese fascist government and to huge applause, and was later arrested at Lisbon airport.

In 1969 with the brilliant arranging skills of Carla Bley, he convened the Liberation Music Orchestra for their first album, playing music from all over the struggling world in support of freedom movements.

Haden was a committed internationalist who made dozens of albums with many powerful musicians from all over the world. 

His devotion to freedom for all peoples was characterised in the hugely resonating sound of his booming acoustic bass, sounding as if he had attached strings inside the hollowed trunk of a giant redwood tree.

He was also an unashamed romantic with a love of the American Songbook tradition, attested by the deeply beautiful records that he made with his Los Angeles-based Quartet West.

But back to the The Ballad of the Fallen, one of he and Bley’s prime achievements. It begins with a Catalan anthem from the Spanish civil war, Els Segadors, with the dramatic vibrato of Haden’s bass, then segues into the Salvadorian folk song and album title tune and the elegiac guitar of Mick Goodrick.

A scintillating pocket trumpet solo from Don Cherry, Ornette’s brass partner in the original quartet, rings out from another Spanish civil war song, Si Me Quieres Escribir, and Gary Valente’s gruff trombone peals form Grandola Vila Morena, the song played over the radio as a signal to revolt in the 1974 Portuguese revolution.

The Chilean resistance song The People United Will Never be Defeated follows, then comes Silence, with Haden’s eloquent sleeve note: “This song was written with the thought that there are infinite possibilities for humankind contained within the brilliance of the universe.”

Bley’s stark piano and Haden’s naked bass exchange a compelling commotion all through Carla’s tune, Too Late.

Haden wrote powerful tributes to liberation heroes like Che, Sandino or, as here, La Pasionaria, dedicated to Dolores Ibarruri, who as Haden wrote, “inspired the Spanish Republic against fascism with the slogan No Pasaran!

It includes stirring sounds by tenorists Dewey Redman and the native American Jim Pepper, and a palpitating solo by Haden’s bass.

Robert Wyatt, who last played with Haden at the Royal Festival Hall in June 2009 and sang Song for Che alongside him in the Liberation Music Orchestra, said of him: “He has been an enormous influence on me. He expressed the true feeling of the people’s heart beating through his bass in a string of perfect notes for 50 years.

“He was a real folk musician. He picked up the people’s anthems of hope with Carla, and conveyed as a witness their love of freedom, using his jazz knowledge to make their songs new again and organic as if they were the most natural sound in the world.”

Long live Charlie Haden’s deep sound of the Earth and its people.

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