Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House
April 30
I assume that most readers will know that Charlie Haden was the bassist with Ornette Coleman when the Coleman concept was first fully realised on record – This Is Our Music, Change Of The Century, etc – and that he has collaborated with Coleman a number of times in the intervening years He was on the double quartet recording Free Jazz, on Jazz Abstractions, Ornette At 12 and Empty Foxhole among other essential albums. Coleman and trumpeter Don Cherry had recorded with bassists Don Payne, Red Mitchell and Percy Heath, and with drummer Shelley Manne, and it was clear that this was very new music; but the rhythmic implications became most striking on subsequent albums with Haden and drummers Billy Higgins and Ed Blackwell. Haden had already played with Coleman at Club Hillcrest in Los Angeles.
Later Haden played with Archie Shepp and others and formed the Liberation Orchestra (a local version of which was heard at the Melbourne International Festival of Jazz, and we all wish we could have heard a Sydney version of that too). There was also Old and New Dreams with Dewey Redman, Blackwell and Haden, whose performance at the Union Theatre (now The Footbridge) at Sydney University is indelible in memory. Haden was the most important bassist in the surge of new jazz from the mid-fifties on, and he is one the great bassists in all jazz. His stated influences include Wilber Ware, Mingus and Jimmy Blanton (Duke Ellington’s revolutionary bassist in the early 1940s).
Quartet West is a project that began in the 1980s and has played intermittently since then. In the quartet we heard here New Zealand pianist Allan Broadbent and drummer Lawrence (sometimes spelled Larance) Marable (a relative of Fate Marable of riverboat fame) had been replaced by pianist Larry Goldings and drummer Rodney Green. Haden and tenor saxophonist Ernie Watts remained. Despite these changes, and after the appalling sound on the first two tunes, the unique atmosphere of Quartet West rose around us, and on such lovely melodies as Haden’s First Song a deep meditative feeling held us. In a meditation or a dream. Watts’s long cadenza at the end of this piece was both mind-boggling and profoundly musical. Such extended solo codas can go on too long, but this never outran the expressive and creative impulse behind it.
On ballads Watts’s sound and inflections can hover at the edge of the saccharine, but it is all really something else: something exotic, atmospheric and transporting. Golding’s delicacy and organic absorption of classical influences deepened the thrall in which we were held. The concert had opened with Charlie Parker’s Passport and this fast tune was sonically a mess (apparently much work had been done by the sound people, but it all changed once the sound-absorbing bodies were in the seats) but by the time we heard Parker’s Segment it all sounded remarkably good where I sat, although Haden could have been amplified a little more. Segment is my favourite from one of my favourite Parker sessions (which also produced Passport). This too is fast; fast and light and curiously detached and mysterious in Parker’s recording, and it had much of that quality as played by Quartet West. A beautiful rendering of Body And Soul was the final encore and we all rose to standingly ovate. I am forgetting Ornette Coleman’s Lonely Woman, which approached the glories of Coleman’s own performance here about a year ago.
Haden has lost some of his old power, but the superb note placement, invention and drive were still in evidence. Like Wilber Ware, Haden swings the band like crazy, while covering a wider span than bassists had in the main used hitherto, opening the dimensions of the music with an oblique single note or figure above the central drive which he had set up with hard walking and deep thrumming pedal pulses. While sounding futuristic, Haden is also funky, earthy and songful.
The Los Angeles implications of the early Quartet West albums included jazz associated with the West Coast and, on Haunted Heart samples of Hollywood soundtracks, including Jo Stafford’s sublime singing of the title song. Excerpts of Raymond Chandler’s incomparable prose ran on two of the covers, and on In Angel City a photo of Club Hillcrest in the 1950s, with American dream cars parked outside and a notice that Ornette Coleman was now playing, was reproduced. Many in the audience may not have been aware of any of this, but we were all held by a purely musical enchantment.
Sydney bassist Johnno Brown described the feeling to me afterwards in terms I cannot match. Nor can I remember them well enough or I would have pinched them for this review. As usual I ended the night with a huge gelato at the Quay. How lovely were the lights.