Very sad to hear the news that the great bassist Charlie Haden passed away today at the age of 76. \u00a0He had an enormous impact on me as a musician, but unfortunately I only got to see him live once, at Birdland in NYC with his Quartet West, and this was right at the onset of his post-polio syndrome. \u00a0He had to walk off the stage in the middle of\u00a0the second song, and the band continued without him, though\u00a0he eventually managed to muster up the strength to return for one more tune, an absolutely gorgeous rendition of “Blue and Green.” \u00a0This remains one of my most treasured musical memories; you\u00a0could see the pain in every note he played, but\u00a0if you closed your eyes all you heard was the beauty and emotional weight that\u00a0defined Haden’s\u00a0music\u00a0for his entire life. \u00a0For those few minutes, he played his heart out, and then, spent, he left the stage for good.<\/p>\n
I will hopefully be able to write much more about his music at a later date, but for now I will just say this: I’ve often found that when I’m not too comfortable with the chord changes of a tune, or I don’t have much to say solo-wise, my go-to crutch is to cover this up by playing a lot of notes. \u00a0One of my bass teachers caught on to this right away, and for two years whenever I would start doing this during\u00a0a lesson, he would stop me and say, “Start over, and this time think more like Charlie Haden.” \u00a0He never explicitly stated what this meant, but I came to interpret it\u00a0as slowing things down (not tempo-wise, but idea-wise), removing all the extraneous notes, and simply seeking out my own melody within the music. \u00a0I’ve tried to follow this mantra ever since, and\u00a0the fact that it continues to be such a difficult ideal to achieve speaks volumes about Haden’s genius.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Very sad to hear the news that the great bassist Charlie Haden passed away today at the age of 76. \u00a0He had an enormous impact on me as a musician, …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/charliedougherty.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/charliedougherty.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/charliedougherty.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/charliedougherty.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/charliedougherty.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/charliedougherty.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36,"href":"http:\/\/charliedougherty.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35\/revisions\/36"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/charliedougherty.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/charliedougherty.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/charliedougherty.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}