Charlie Haden, Influential Jazz Bassist, Is Dead at 76 - NYTimes.com
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/12/arts/music/charlie-haden-influential-jazz-bassist-is-dead-at-76.html?emc=edit_th_20140
Un grand du jazz qui disparaît. Les nécros du NYT ne sont pas les plus fougueuses du monde, mais celle-ci rend bien l’importance de Charlie Haden : un point de repère, tant pour les free sax et trompettes des années 60 que pour la relation entre la musique et l’esprit des temps, notamment avec ses fabuleux « Liberation music orchestra ».
His jazz career crossed seven decades, with barely a moment of obscurity. He was in his early 20s in 1959, when, as a member of the Ornette Coleman Quartet, he helped set off a seismic disruption in jazz. Mr. Coleman, an alto saxophonist, had been developing a brazen, polytonal approach to improvisation — it would come to be known as free jazz — and in his band, which had no chordal instrument, Mr. Haden served as anchor and pivot. Mr. Coleman’s clarion cry, often entangled with that of the trumpeter Don Cherry, grabbed much of the attention, but Mr. Haden’s playing was just as crucial, for its feeling of unerring rightness in the face of an apparent ruckus.
The Liberation Music Orchestra, which released its debut album in 1969, was Mr. Haden’s large ensemble, and an expression of his left-leaning political ideals. The band, featuring compositions and arrangements by the pianist Carla Bley, mingled avant-garde wildness with the earnest immediacy of Latin American folk songs. Mr. Haden released each of the band’s four studio albums during Republican administrations; the most recent, in 2005, was “Not in Our Name,” a response to the war in Iraq.
