Haden and Watts: They Lead 4 Lives

Time was when most leading jazz musicians had a particular job, as leader or sideman with a given band. Today the more typical artist is busy shuttling between gigs with an orchestra, playing in a small group, composing or teaching--or all four.

Charlie Haden and Ernie Watts represent this current breed. They were recently at Catalina’s in Hollywood as leader and featured soloist, respectively, with the group Quartet West.

Haden, a soft-spoken bass virtuoso, is best known for his long association with Ornette Coleman’s quartet, as well as for his own 13-piece Liberation Music Orchestra, which he formed in 1969 and has recently reorganized. Watts works at times with a small R&B; fusion unit called the Meeting; he also has his own more straight-ahead jazz quartet, has played with and composed for the guitarist Lee Ritenour since 1977, and is still nominally a member of Doc Severinsen’s “Tonight Show” band.

Haden, 52, has accumulated so many credits that last July the Montreal Jazz Festival devoted eight successive nights to a series of “This Is Your Life”-style tributes; on each night, he worked with a different group drawn from his past and recent experiences. Saxophonist Joe Henderson one night, cornetist Don Cherry the next, pianist Geri Allen III and a reunion with Paul Bley, the Canadian pianist who was his colleague in a prehistoric group with Ornette Coleman in 1958. On the final night, Haden reassembled the Liberation Music Orchestra. “It was the best experience of my whole life. It was all recorded every night, so you’ll hear it soon.”

Watts’ background is no less impressive. Born in Norfolk, Va., in 1945, he spent his teen years in Wilmington, Del., before winning a Down Beat scholarship to the Berklee College of Music in Boston, where a fellow student was a young pianist from New Zealand, Alan Broadbent, currently his colleague in Quartet West.

Two years with the Buddy Rich band gave Watts all the road experience he wanted; settling in Los Angeles, he became an NBC staff musician. Between the studio scene and the night club and concert circuit, he was able to rack up credits with everyone from Quincy Jones and Rickie Lee Jones to the Rolling Stones.

“Ernie and I met,” Haden recalls, “when I heard him playing a Michel Colombier piece with an orchestra at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. He knocked me out; I went backstage and introduced myself.”

“We did a few concerts with the West Coast edition of the Liberation Orchestra,” Watts said, “then we began doing the quartet things.”

Haden hastened to add that he still has the Liberation Orchestra, known for its reflection of his aggressive political stance. The original album, indicative of the leader’s strong anti-racist and anti-fascist leanings, included songs inspired by the Spanish Civil War, using such material as “Song of the United Front” (words by Bertolt Brecht, music by Hanns Eisler), as well as Haden’s “Song for Che.”

The orchestra will play the last week of 1989 and will break-in 1990 at New York’s Village Vanguard. “We’ll be playing material from a new record that will include the African National Congress’ anthem, and a spiritual piece I wrote for Martin Luther King. There’ll also be a composition by Carla Bley set to a Langston Hughes poem, ‘The Dream Keeper.’ ”

Because of their interest in developing a positive attitude toward music, both men are deeply disturbed by the treatment jazz has been accorded in movies and television.

“I’ve done a lot of sound-track recording,” Watts said, “everything from ‘The Color Purple’ and ‘The Karate Kid’ to ‘Tootsie’ and dozens more. I did one for Dave Grusin, ‘The Fabulous Baker Boys,’ that was just released. But what I haven’t been involved in yet is a production that gives music a positive image--as opposed to ‘Round Midnight’ and ‘Bird.’ Why can’t someone make a film about Louis Armstrong or Duke Ellington, something that will be uplifting and help to a better understanding?”

Coincidentally, there may be just such a film if a conversation between Charlie Haden and the Canadian film maker Brigitte Berman leads to the expected consequences.

“She is the woman who produced two marvelous documentaries about Bix Beiderbecke and Artie Shaw,” Haden said. “When she heard about this great tribute they did for me in Montreal, she showed me the Bix and Shaw films, and I was greatly impressed; as a result, we’re planning to do a film together. It won’t be a documentary and it won’t be a feature film--look for something completely new and different.”

The stories about Watts and Haden seem to lead to an important and gratifying conclusion: Here are two musicians who, despite the temptations of the commercial marketplace, are now doing exactly what they want, leading lives that are rich with fulfillment.