You’ve worked hard on cleaning up your walking lines. No repeated notes, good voice leading, a chromatic approach in the right spot. Then you put on a Charlie Haden record and he breaks those rules, and it just sounds perfect. If you’re looking up Charlie Haden bass lines and trying to figure out how he gets that sound, you’re asking the right question.
Charlie Haden is my favorite jazz bass player of all time, and he’s my personal favorite sound. I tried for years to imitate it, and that’s where my own sound came from. So let’s look at both halves: what he plays, and how he gets it out of the instrument.
His jazz comes from folk, country and Americana
Charlie Haden was very in touch with old folk music. As a kid he performed as Little Cowboy Charlie, which makes a lot of sense once you hear him. His sound isn’t just a jazz sound. It’s rooted in folk and bluegrass and Americana music, which I love.
My favorite thing about him, and something I try to do in my own musical journey, is the way he takes other kinds of music and blends them with jazz. He takes that Americana sound, that folk sound, and blends it with walking bass. I talk a lot about how much of the evolution of jazz comes from its integration with other styles of music, and Charlie Haden exemplified that like no other.
Nothing Personal: a jazz line that repeats notes for bars
Listen to “Nothing Personal” from Michael Brecker’s first album, Michael Brecker. It’s an all-star cast: Pat Metheny, Kenny Kirkland, Jack DeJohnette and of course Charlie Haden. The bass line is hard to hear because Haden plays everything in the low register, but it’s completely different from every other jazz bass line in this style. This isn’t what a jazz bass line usually sounds like.
The tune is a double blues. Everything’s multiplied by two, so you get eight bars of the one chord, four bars of the four chord, then four bars of the one chord. And Haden isn’t really playing the changes, because the changes didn’t really matter with the way he played. He’s playing accompaniment. He’s playing a feeling, almost a deep, low feeling, with that incredible sound. It almost doesn’t matter what the notes are.
He’s also repeating notes like crazy. I tell my students not to repeat notes in their bass lines, and here he is repeating notes all the time. I think it’s 14 bars in a row in this line. And the feel is just outstanding. That feel, that sound, it’s all so beautiful. I break down the line, plus two more, in 3 Charlie Haden Bass Lines.
Jasmine and One Finger Snap: how little he plays
The two-feel is very important to jazz bass players, and Haden’s approach to it is as unique as his approach to playing in four. On Jasmine, his duo album with Keith Jarrett, he plays four whole notes for the first four bars. That’s it. That’s not even a two-feel. It’s more like a one-feel.
Think about that. Keith Jarrett is arguably the greatest musician ever, in my opinion at least. If you got the chance to play with him, you’d probably be so excited that you’d overplay. I don’t want to say Haden is underplaying, because what he plays is absolutely perfect, but it’s phenomenal how little he plays. That comes from country music too. If you’ve ever listened to real country music, the bass player’s playing whole notes, or a subtle embellishment on each root and nothing else. Jarrett was really in touch with that kind of music as well. What sets this apart from, say, a Red Garland and Paul Chambers duo, which is also amazing, is that Haden and Jarrett were in touch with all different kinds of music.
I don’t want to be one of those people who says it’s not what you play, it’s how you play it, because that’s not true.
Here’s what the saying should be. It’s what you play, and also how you play it.
Cole Davis
Haden was a master at phrasing everything, melodies and bass lines alike. If I play four whole notes on “Body and Soul” with no phrasing, that’s boring. Phrase them, and it’s kind of beautiful. In the right context, it can be magical.
Then there’s “One Finger Snap,” the Herbie Hancock tune, played by Kenny Barron, Charlie Haden and Roy Haynes on Wanton Spirit, one of my favorite jazz albums. Compared to Ron Carter’s line on the original, Haden’s line is insanely simple. If a student of mine played it, I’d say, hmm, maybe you can come up with something a little hipper. When Charlie Haden plays it, it sounds like there’s literally nothing hipper. You don’t miss the chromatic notes. You don’t miss the voice leading. He’s bringing that sensibility from country and Americana into jazz, and it just sounds perfect.
Every time I listen to him, I’m inspired to play simpler, clearer, more intentional bass lines. And by clearer, I don’t mean more in the changes. His lines weren’t always totally in the changes. The intention was clear, and the emotion was clear.
How to get a sound like Charlie Haden’s
Getting a great sound on the upright is easier than you think. You just have to pay special attention to the right hand. Most of the time I angle my hand almost at 90 degrees to the fingerboard, play with two fingers on the meat of the fingers, and pull the string. My thumb stays connected to the fingerboard the whole time. Most of the time, Haden played with two fingers like this, and that’s where I got it from.
The other way is one finger, turned sideways, pulling with the side of the finger instead of the meat. That gives you a punchier sound with an attack on the front end of each note. A lot of people like that sound. I love bass players who have it, but for me it’s not really my thing.
The hand is only part of it. You have to sound like someone before you can sound like yourself. My rule is to find three players whose sound I like more than anyone else’s, listen to them all the time, and copy their sound. It’ll happen naturally if you listen to them and play along, even on a different bass with different strings and different hands. Playing along with Charlie Haden really helped me.
It also taught me to separate what I like from who I am. Christian McBride is one of my favorite bass players of all time, and I tried to sound like him for many years. It never sounded right, because that’s just not me. When I try to sound like Charlie Haden, it sounds more like myself. And you find that out by imitating.
Then there’s the practice. When I got to graduate school, I was embarrassed of my sound. I felt the bass players in my year had a much better sound than I did. So instead of thinking about chops or harmony, I started taking everything as slow as possible and playing long, slow, controlled notes, and my sound got much better. I walk through all of this in The Sound of Charlie Haden, which opens with his line on “Turnaround” with Jim Hall. Here’s the exercise, step by step.
- Open strings first. Play each open string four times, making sure every note is nice, even and consistent. It sounds like a joke, but it isn’t. I used to do this for 45 minutes a day.
- Then your scales. Play them the same way, four notes for each note, slowly and deliberately.
- Draw the sound out. Think about opening up the instrument. You’re meditating on each note, which is why it’s four notes and not one. Over time the length of your notes will increase.
- Don’t sweat a sour note. If you play a note out of tune, that’s fine. You’re working on getting each note consistent.
Pick your three players today and start playing along with them tonight. If you want to keep working on your groove, take a look at The Essential Groove with Russell Hall.
