Touching Bass

NEW YORK —  On a typical night, the crowd never really pipes down at the Blue Note, where tourists from around the world converge six nights a week to see the biggest names in jazz.

But on this evening, the audience is practically holding its breath, the waitresses have stopped serving drinks, and the blenders have fallen silent, along with the cash register, the phones and anything else that might shatter the mood.

A hush has fallen over the room, perhaps the ultimate compliment to a musician whose art is as soft-spoken and spiritual as any in jazz.

But is this any way to celebrate a birthday?

To veteran Los Angeles bassist-bandleader Charlie Haden, who’s marking his 65th birthday with two weeks of performances at the Greenwich Village landmark, it’s the greatest gift he could imagine.

“It’s very rare to be in a jazz club and have people listen,” Haden tells the crowd after a sublimely understated duo set Wednesday night with Cuban pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba. “It means that we are thankful that people like you are in the world, because if there were more like you, there would be much more beauty in this world.”

In truth, however, the capacity crowd simply has responded in kind to the music that Haden is playing, an introspective form of jazz improvisation that emphasizes exquisitely singing lines over mere virtuosity, warmly radiant timbres over sturm und drang.

What the audience doesn’t realize is that playing the bass has become a physically painful experience for Haden, who early in 2001 was attacked by a Rottweiler in his Los Angeles neighborhood and sustained nerve damage to his left hand. A year and a half of physical therapy has helped restore Haden’s technique, and doctors say that Haden eventually will have a full recovery.

“But it still hurts like crazy,” says Haden between sets at the Blue Note, where he’s in residence through Sunday, playing a series of duet dates with Rubalcaba, Paul Bley, Brad Mehldau and other kindred spirits.

Yet Haden plays through the pain, producing precisely the humanistic brand of music-making that has been his hallmark for more than four decades, even as he has stayed at the forefront of oft-controversial developments in jazz. Whether forging a new approach to jazz improvisation with Ornette Coleman in the late 1950s or exploring world music influences on his “Folk Songs” album in the ‘70s or reveling in Hollywood film noir on “Haunted Heart” in the ‘90s, his deeply burnished tone and soaring lyricism have been unmistakable.

“As I look back on my career, I can’t say that I had any great plan, except to make melody,” says Haden. “But I also had to make new music, no matter what the cost. And believe me, there have been costs, there have been sacrifices.”

And there has been resistance, right from the start, when Haden arrived in L.A. from his family’s home in the rural Midwest in the mid-1950s. Having encountered Coleman playing his white plastic alto saxophone in an L.A. club, Haden sought him out and quickly was rehearsing with the jazz visionary in Coleman’s “one-room shack of an apartment,” recalls the bassist.

“I never heard anything so brilliant in my life as I did that first time I heard Ornette,” says Haden. “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.”

Moreover, Haden was uniquely equipped to grasp Coleman’s radical new theory of improvising on the contours of a melody rather than on the preordained chord changes that drove music from the bebop era and before. Haden, after all, had grown up singing and playing country music on the radio with his family, their repertoire featuring down-home sounds of the kind recently popularized by the film “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” It was through these daily sessions that Haden first learned to craft melodic lines in creative ways, on the spot.

Though Coleman’s revolutionary late ‘50s quartet--with Haden, drummer Billy Higgins and trumpeter Don Cherry--was verbally and even physically assaulted by naysayers, in retrospect it’s inarguable that this ensemble helped usher in a new era of “free jazz.”

Those early days briefly came alive again at the Blue Note on Tuesday night, when Haden played duets with pianist Bley, who in the late 1950s famously recorded at L.A.’s Hillcrest Club with the Coleman quartet.

The splashes of dissonance and free-ranging musical dialogue between Bley and Haden this time around seemed almost nostalgic, the music that once launched fistfights having been incorporated into the lexicon of modern jazz long ago. Nevertheless, the easy give-and-take between Bley and Haden proved difficult to resist.

“Whenever I play with Charlie, it feels like family, and maybe that comes across in the music,” Bley says after the show. “Even back when I first met him, in the ‘50s, he was an amazing player, because he already had perfect time.”

The range of artists whose music Haden has ennobled is remarkably wide, from the radical late-period recordings of John Coltrane to the extended keyboard ruminations of Keith Jarrett, from the genre-defying saxophone solos of Archie Shepp to the emotionally charged South American music of reedist Gato Barbieri.

Along the way, Haden has explored antiwar political commentary through his Liberation Music Orchestra of the 1970s as well as the moody ambience of vintage Hollywood movies and Raymond Chandler novels with his Quartet West of the ‘80s and ‘90s. Haden also founded the jazz studies program at California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, where he still teaches.

It would take a month or more to survey all the avenues that Haden has traveled, but he touched on one of the most recent by partnering with pianist Rubalcaba, whose work was transformed by their collaboration on Haden’s “Nocturne.” The album won a Grammy this year in the Latin jazz category and is nominated in the same category in the upcoming Latin Grammys. Though listeners typically think of Rubalcaba as a super-virtuoso armed with a titanic technique, his duets with Haden sounded practically transparent, the pianist playing long, silken lines and utterly spare textures.

“When I am playing with Charlie, I come to a place that I can get to only with him,” Rubalcaba says between sets. “Something happens between us, something spontaneous that I don’t find with anyone else. But I guess maybe everybody who plays with Charlie thinks the same thing.”

Haden apparently holds Rubalcaba in comparably high regard, which is why, at set’s end, he invites the pianist to play a solo.

So Rubalcaba sits down at the keyboard and begins an unusually lush and mysterious version of “Happy, Birthday,” with some members of the audience quietly singing along.

Once the last chord is played, Haden and Rubalcaba embrace on stage, summing up the kind of affection and admiration that fills the room.

“So I’m 65,” Haden says after the show in his dressing room, as friends crowd inside to congratulate him on the milestone, which occurred on Aug. 6. “I feel like I’m very young,” he adds and, indeed, looks as if he’s pushing 50, at most.

“I’m happy, I’m healthy, I’m making music with my friends, I’m finding new sounds. Actually, I feel like I’m just beginning.”

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Howard Reich is jazz critic at the Chicago Tribune, a Tribune company.