A SMALL MEDITATION ON VINYL AND LOSS

I began my downsizing yesterday by unloading some vinyl to my friend, the guitarist Andy Wiersma, at Harold Moore's. Among the records was Elliott Carter's Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Cello and Harpsichord with the intellectual Nonesuch cover. I used to go to sleep listening to it in college, and sometimes stare at the artwork while under the influence.

There were the early 70s ECM records which played on the turntable which sat on the amp which sat on one speaker on the floor of the closet, as I wrote my McGill masters thesis in the tiny flat on Avenue Lorne I shared with Theresa. I wrote poems based on the tunes I was hearing: one of the joys of my later life was meeting Eberhard Weber and Jan Garbarek, and sharing some of those poems with them.

These were records I'd brought with me, from Montreal back to Connecticut, and then to Britain when I moved to London in 1977. There was also some Ives, from the same time, and some lovely Savoy jazz collections I'd picked up early in my stay in this country. It's a cliche to call it the background music of a life; it was part of the foreground of my life, a palpable part of it.

I wasn't a fanatic, nor an anorak. Oddly, I learned this week that one of my teammates on the freshman football team at Wesleyan, Skip Wood, had passed away. I still have the first Earth Opera album which I bought from Skip, who had the biggest record collection I'd ever seen, probably in 1969. I know this because the sleeve boasts the words 'Skip Wood Record' and a control number, written in large letters with a magic marker. It saddens me to think that record too will be sold off soon; my only link to Skip will be gone.

I felt a great sense of loss, of time that will never be recovered, and the pressures of change brought on by circumstance, not time. Even though I don't have a turntable, and haven't listened to the vinyl in years, when I sorted through them, taking them from the wine carton in the attic, holding them and reading the liner notes, I felt a warmth emanating from them. I could hear and see the passage of more than four decades of time. And while I still listen to the same music on CD, I don't feel that warmth. I don't hold the cases and feel as if they're alive the way record albums were. Listening to a CD is more like a business transaction than a communing ritual. The feel and look and sound of those records was the first thing I thought of when I woke this morning. I felt a great sense of loss. Goodbye old friends.

CHARLIE HADEN: AN APPRECIATION AT BOTTOM

Appropriately enough, Charlie Haden was born in Shenandoah. This was in Iowa; the name is the same as one of the greatest traditional American songs. He began singing professionally when he was two, country music, on the radio with the Haden Family Band. Polio turned him into a bass player, when it damaged his vocal chords. He followed his older brother on the upright bass, but he was more taken with classical music, especially Bach, and with jazz. When he was 20 he headed out to Los Angeles to study and to seek out Hampton Hawes. He played with Hawes, and Paul Bley, and Art Pepper, before he wound up in his first great band, the Ornette Coleman quartet, with Don Cherry and Billy Higgins, who were busy inventing 'free jazz'

It makes sense, because Coleman was from Texas, with a heavy blues influence, and he could hear the country roots in Haden's bass. There's a lot of modern jazz, particularly involving Bill Frisell, that sounds like what jazz would be had it come out of country rather than the blues, and there's a lot of that underlying Coleman's relentless improvisations. With Coleman, Haden pushed the bass out front.

He left Coleman to enter Synanon, which if you're not of a certain age won't mean anything to you, to kick his drug habit. When he came out he got busy as a sideman for everyone from John Handy to Bobby Timmons, Pee Wee Russell to Red Allen. Then he joined Keith Jarrett's 'American Quartet', Jarrett fresh from Charles Lloyd, along with Dewey Redman and Paul Motian. There's a lot of Coleman and Coltrane there, as there was when he began recording with Old And New Dreams: Cherry, Redman, and drummer Ed Blackwell.

That's probably where I came in, working my way back to Ornette. I was gone from Montreal by the time of the Liberation Music Orchestra, Haden and Carla Bley's always evolving big band—Montreal always seemed to have a special place for him. The 'Liberation' part wasn't taken lightly; Haden had been detained in Portugal when he performed his 'Song For Che' there, and he was quizzed by the FBI after he returned stateside. By the time I left Montreal for London I was firmly embedded in the ECM jazz world—Jarrett's European Quartet and Gary Burton led me to Jan Garbarek and Eberhard Weber as well as Old And New Dreams. But it wasn't until the mid-80s, when I was again living on my own, that Charlie Haden really made an impact on me.

I caught up with his albums with Garbarek and Egberto Gismondi. I was immensely taken by Quartet West; with the great and versatile sax man Ernie Watts, alongside Alan Broadbent and Larance Marable; by then I was also immersed in film noir and Haunted Heart, their first album, touched a nerve. It's an amazing record, not just for its original compositions, but for the songs sung by Jo Stafford, Jeri Southern, and Billie Holliday. Stafford's 'Haunted Heart' is so, well, haunted, that I ran out and got one of her collections, only to discover it was the arrangement and the quartet that set her voice free; it's its time it was buried under a lava flow of sickly sweet charts, apparently by her husband.

Haden had a wonderful partnership with Pat Metheny, which began with 80/81, with Michael Brecker and Jack DeJohnette alongside Dewey Redman, and the 1986 record Song X, a re-working of and homage to Ornette Coleman which confounded those who found Metheny too glib. They culminated in the 1996 classic Beyond The Missouri Sky; two Midwestern boys playing the most lovely duets imaginable. Go back to 'Shenandoah', whose subtitle is 'Across The Wide Missouri'. I've played the disc almost to death; it played a huge part in winning my second ex, and it played an even bigger part in helping me through the pain of the breakup a decade later.

What's amazing in the two decades from the early 90s is the range of music Haden was playing. Folk songs and spirituals with Hank Jones; Latin music with Gonzago Rubalcaba; with pianists John Taylor and Kenny Barron; with Ginger Baker (a great trio with Bill Frisell); with the Italian guitarist Antonio Forcioni, a disc which my late father-in-law gave me, and which I treasure. In 2008 he made another country record with a new version of the Haden family; his wife Ruth Cameron (listen to the lovely 'Waltz For Ruth' on Missouri Sky, or live in 2009 here) including his son-in-law Jack Black.

I've been listening to a lot of Haden lately. Not the daytime Haden, the trios with Gery Allen and Paul Motian, or Joe Henderson and Al Foster. But the nighttime Haden. There's a 2012 two-disc set called Magico: Carta de Amor; a live recording of that band with Garbarek and Gismonti. There's Live At Birdland (2011) with Lee Konitz, Motian, and pianist Brad Mehldau. Most of all there's Jasmine (2010), duets with Keith Jarrett. By this time Haden was suffering from post-polio syndrome; Jarrett of course had suffered Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and come back a somewhat gentler player. Haden also suffered from tinnitus; he attributed it to the loudness of those early groups, and I've no doubt the polio left his ears more vulnerable; the quiet of his late work seems a just response to that. It suited the two of them, and their versions of standards resonate. They made a sequel, called Last Dance, which came out this year and topped Billboard's 'traditional' jazz chart.

I look back on what I've just written and it seems like a list—and a fairly incomplete list at that. I thought to myself, that doesn't do Charlie Haden justice, and then I realised that yes, it did. Because in a sense, I grew up in jazz with Charlie Haden. Everything from the freest of free modern jazz to the softest of ballads, as if to belie the jokes we used to make about ECM standing for European Chamber Music, or Exceedingly Caucasian Music, as much to belie the blackness of the post-bop era. I started flipping through my discs, and finding Haden on some where I'd forgotten he played. I wished I had the vinyl, those records that played on the turntable that sat on top of one speaker on the floor of the one closet in my tiny Montreal flat. I know tonight I will play a Charlie Haden disc as I lie in bed and wait for my mind to find its space in the night, and the melody of his bass will show my pulse the way to go.

RICHARD WILLIAMS' BLUE MOMENT

Richard Williams has written an admirable history of the classic Miles Davis album Kind Of Blue, but what he is trying to do in this book is much more than that, in those efforts he is only partly successful. There is no doubt that the Davis sextet with both John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderly on saxes is one of the high points of 20th century music--and if it isn't the album right at the apex it probably signals the beginning of a period of frenzied change in musical energy, in New York, that may culminate with Coltrane at the Village Vanguard. That's food for another argument.

Williams tells the story of the record with precision and understanding. The use of both Wynton Kelly and Bill Evans on piano, and the racial undercurrents behind that. He may give somewhat short shift to Adderly's album Somethin' Else, with Miles, which is very much a precursor to Kind Of Blue and, as you might expect from Cannon, somewhat more engaging, but overall Williams is a very sympathetic portrayer of the people involved, he has a balanced and empathetic view of Davis, and he is accurate and telling in his analysis of the record itself.

What is harder to is to make the case for it as the most influential, even of Davis' own records. At least three times in his career, Davis changed the course of jazz, with Birth Of The Cool, Kind Of Blue, and Bitches Brew. Since Birth more or less led to Kind Of Blue, and since the revolution Bitches Brew sparked more or less fizzled out, to be replaced by a sort of return of hard-bop, you'd think it makes sense, until you consider In A Silent Way, which even Williams concedes may be Davis' greatest work. But this is head-of-a-pin kind of quibbling.

More important is whether Williams makes the case for the centrality of Kind Of Blue to his 'Blue Moment', whether there is an era which it can be said to encapsulate. He makes the case in one way; certainly the record reflects and sets the mood music for a certain sense of the 'hip' character of the late 50s, the Hugh Hefner ideal which would bleed into the Rat Pack kind of JFK glamour of the early 60s. Whether this fits in with Fellini or Antonioni I'm not so sure. In musical terms, however, Williams makes the case well, especially the influence of what you might call the Impressionist composers, Debussy, Ravel, Faure. You could argue this sort of jazz carried on those experiments, where modern classical music moved in another direction which was then carried on by free jazz. In the jazz world, George Russell and Gil Evans' influence is pervasive, and Williams makes the case so well you wonder whether some of the music he cites is obviously influenced by Russell far more than Miles himself. Trying to distill an era into one record is difficult, but with a few limitations, most notably the narrow range of influence jazz had even then, when it was at its creative peak, Williams does a fine job.

As a sidebar, while I was listening to Kind Of Blue, I re-read the original liner notes, written by Bill Evans. This struck me as a kind of condescension by Columbia; there is a piece to be written about the underlying tone of the (admittedly loving) commentaries written by white jazz writers about black jazz musicians in that era, but the choice of the one white musician (and Davis--and Adderly's--bands were almost always integrated) to actually explain the music seems a device to give it a certain 'respectability'.

Williams' other task it to trace the influence of Kind Of Blue, and here he is less successful. This is partly because it's hard to see it as the, or even a, main factor in the rise of rock bands like The Velvet Underground or King Crimson, and partly because those bands are in a large dead-in you might label 'art-rock', which Davis-influence or no, shows no organic flow from his music. That I'm no fan of the sub-genre may influence me somewhat here. Williams is better on the modern composers, like Terry Riley, but again, modern classical music followed a different path, before maybe ending up in a similar place--Kind Of Blue doesn't constitute a prime, direct source. Even ECM, whose music does bear a lot of direct connection to the record, started with a lot of musicians trying to be Russell, or Coltrane, or Bitches Brew Davis, before settling into that KOB groove (and of course Keith Jarrett, ECM's biggest seller, came through Davis' BB band, after Charles Lloyd's.

It's an engaging read: Williams writes well enough to avoid the Anorak Syndrome which infects so much jazz (and music) writing, and it's refreshing to see him trying to make the links between the various types of music he loves. That he almost manages to do that, convincingly, makes this book a success.

The Blue Moment by Richard Williams Faber £14.99 ISBN 9780571245062