Charlie Haden is one of the most hypnotically inventive bassists in contemporary jazz. Maturing in Ornette Coleman's revolutionary quartet of the early Sixties, he revealed early (in pieces like "Lonely Woman") highly-developed improvisational abilities and a bent for strange, moving harmonies. Now he has formed his own group for the purpose of presenting his fiercely humanistic musical polemics to the world. The results are not the most innovative sides to emerge from the new jazz, but certainly among the most earthy and impassioned.
Too many of this decade's jazz pathfinders are so intent upon cutting across all barriers to break on through to the other side that they've forgotten
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to play with their
hearts as well as their fingers, minds and nervous systems. This record, with its recurrent mournful Spanish sonorities and sudden interludes of pure piercing song, should do much to balance the situation. The songs are all anthems of various revolutions past and present; they range from Bertolt Brecht's "Song of the United Front" to "Los Quatros Generales" (a fiery Andalusian folk-anthem from the Spanish Civil War) to Ornette Coleman's starkly beautiful "War Orphans." Whatever one may think of the vaguely-defined politics and somewhat labored New-Leftist atmosphere of the undertaking, the music all speaks for itself as a raw multi-voiced cry for the ever-distant prize of true freedom.
The musicians include some of the new jazz' most eloquent and innovative voices: Don Cherry, Mike Mantler, Roswell Rudd, and Gato Barbieri, who plays searingly pure tenor saxophone that I have heard in some times, as pregnant with consuming love and painfully articulate suffering as Charles Mingus' best work. But all involved comport themselves with singleminded discipline and that impassioned restraint whose subtlety and control makes a musical soul-baring that much more touching and convincing. Like Pharoah Sanders' Karma, this record suggests a new maturity in the camps of the jazz avant-garde, a weathered internalization of all reckless experiments which allows the artists to submit the revelations encountered out on all those limbs to clearly-defined and relatively directed musical purposes. Thus, the relatively familiar and unadventurous framework of brooding flamenco, rather than being a hackneyed musical straitjacket stifling woolly ramblers, proves a firm foundation for exalted, heartswelling statements by turns lyrical and dissonant.
Haden's bass work is especially superb, throbbing and droning with a restless yet understated intensity expressing perfectly the pulsebeat of lives like those in the Spanish Resistance, lived in eternal fear and the fiercely nurtured strength of brave dreams. The arrangements by Carla Bley are miracles of dynamics, rising and falling in volume and velocity and the awe-inspiring balance of collective ensembles improvising freely through swellings and contractions of individual voices enteri
