News & Updates — Charlie Haden

One of the greats, happy birthday to jazz bassist/composer/activist Charlie Haden. He was part of the revolutionary Ornette Coleman Quartet that took the jazz world by storm when they arrived in NYC in the late '50s. He grew up in Iowa from a professional country music family, singing with them until polio messed up his voice. After seeing Charlie Parker and Stan Kenton live in '54 he started playing jazz as a bassist. In '57 he moved to Los Angeles and started playing with Paul Bley, Art Pepper and Hampton Hawes. He was roommate for awhile with bass legend Scott...

The great tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson came out of Wayne State University, where he was classmates with Yusef Lateef, Donald Byrd and Barry Harris. After leaving the Army in '62 he went to NYC and hooked up with Kenny Dorham & Dexter Gordon and then joined Horace Silver's group, soloing on the hit "Song For My Father". He became a go-to tenor for sessions at Blue Note records (appearing with Silver, Herbie Hancock, Andrew Hill, Lee Morgan, Freddie Hubbard, Grant Green, McCoy Tyner, Larry Young and tons more), including releasing several albums on the label as a leader. In the...

Happy birthday to the harmolodic genius Ornette Coleman! His saxophone crying and unique compositional style were as groundbreaking on the avant-garde jazz front as John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor & Sunny Murray, Sun Ra and Albert Ayler were in that new freedom era that started in the late '50s and caused an avalanche of free-jazz in the '60s. In fact, it was Coleman's "double-quartet" album, Free Jazz -from '60, which gave name to a whole genre to follow. The musical revolutionary grew up poor in Fort Worth TX and learned to sight-read and started teaching himself alto sax at 14, right...