Top 33 Charlie Haden Quotes

I want people to feel what it was like in the ’40s. That’s when popular music in the United States was so beautiful. Frank Sinatra, the Pied Pipers, Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, Tommy Dorsey, Billie Holiday. That’s when popular music had deeper values, to me. This was music that was selling millions of records.

My roots have never left me… because the very first memory I have is my mom singing and me singing with her.

I want to expand jazz; I don’t want to keep the audience limited. I want to reach people who have never come to a jazz concert before. One way to do that is by making records that have a lot of different kinds of music on them.

My family influenced me very deeply because my dad came from a musical background, from the hillbilly music part of it, and all that music came over from Scotland and Ireland and England in to the Appalachian Mountains and Ozark Mountains, where I was raised.

My dad was a great guy; my mother was wonderful. I was very lucky to be around music from the time I woke up until I went to bed.

I wish I could’ve been friends with Charlie Parker and played with him. That’s my period. I feel real close to the ’40s – and actually, I was born in ’37, so I was a kid singing on the radio in the ’40s. But I always dreamed of going to big cities.

There’s enough dismemberment going on in the world without writing music about it.

I came from being a singer going into jazz. And that’s one of the things that polio did for me is it took away my ability to sing with a range because it paralyzed my vocal chords, so that was when I started playing. But I hear the music as if I were singing even when I am playing.

We’re here to bring beauty to the world and make a difference in this planet. That’s what art forms are about.

You can’t be at your full creative power if you are sedated.

As long as there are musicians who have a passion for spontaneity, for creating something that’s never been before, the art form of jazz will flourish.

I always felt that I was born in the wrong era. I wanted to be friends with John Garfield, for instance.

Hoover’s Music Store in Springfield, Missouri – I would listen to records there for hours.

The bass, no matter what kind of music you’re playing, it just enhances the sound and makes everything sound more beautiful and full. When the bass stops, the bottom kind of drops out of everything.

I want to take people away from the ugliness and sadness around us every day and bring beautiful, deep music to as many people as I can.

I grew up around guitar players.

It used to be that creative music was most of the music that you heard back in the ’30s and ’40s, and now it’s like 3 percent. So, its kind of a struggle getttin’ it out there.

I can write a song about my hero Che Guevara and call it ‘Song for Che.’

James Cotton is a real blues guy, and he played with Muddy Waters, and it surprised me that they would want me to make a record with them, that he called me to do this record. I’d never done anything like that before. But I love blues, so I was very happy.

In L.A., I played with Joe Pass and Gabor Szabo. Mick Goodrick plays guitar in the Liberation Music Orchestra, and he’s a real special player. Then I did a duet concert with Jim Hall at the 1990 Montreal Festival.

I want them to come away with discovering the music inside them. And not thinking about themselves as jazz musicians, but thinking about themselves as good human beings, striving to be a great person and maybe they’ll become a great musician.

I have music inside me and I’m very lucky to be able to play music and that’s the way that I try to do it.

I wanted to do ‘Oh Shenandoah’ because that’s the town I was born in – as a tribute to my mom and dad for giving me all this music. I don’t really sing this as a singer, because I’m not a singer. But I wanted to do it for them.

I’ve got a collection of songs that I’ve had, I keep adding to and they’re all great American composers. I wanted to showcase American composers and I’ve done that on a lot of my records and played things by American composers that I really respect.

When I was four, we moved to a farm outside Springfield, Missouri. We had a radio show from that farmhouse. My dad always wanted a farm. We used to go out and milk the cows every morning and then do a radio show with a remote control from our living room. We’d start by singing ‘Keep On The Sunny Side.’

Some tracks are with quartet and some tracks are with synthesizer.

When you listen to a symphony orchestra, and the basses don’t – there’s no bass part, there’s not that much depth. That’s why I’m attracted to the instrument, the bass. It brings depth. It’s like playing in a rainforest.

I just sit down at the piano and rattle it off.

That’s what I tell my students at California Institute of the Arts where I taught for 27 years. I taught them if you strive to be a good person, maybe you might become a great jazz musician.

I just see myself as a human being that’s concerned about life.

Mostly I play with records. I play with my friend Bill Evans.

That’s the thing about musicians: The priority is to create something new that’s never been before. And you put your life on the line every time that you play.

I didn’t play a lot of bass as a kid, but I sang it.