A Dreamy Exploration of Latin Ballad Traditions

Bassist Charlie Haden is no stranger to the extended family of Spanish and Portuguese culture. Over the last three-plus decades, he has ventured into collaborations with musicians from Argentina, Cuba, Portugal and Brazil, has written tunes with a Spanish flavor and has drawn on songs from the Spanish Civil War for the repertoire of his Liberation Music Orchestra.

So it seems natural that Haden gets something of a hero’s welcome when in Spain, as he was in late July at the annual jazz festival here in this Basque city.

“My attraction to Spanish music goes back a long way,” he tells journalists at a news conference, with understatement. The feeling is mutual.

At this respected and venerable festival (now in its 36th year), Haden was appearing twice, in different settings, musically and atmospherically. One night, he performed a rare duet concert with guitarist Pat Metheny, with whom he recorded “Beyond the Missouri Sky” in 1997. They played acoustically, with hypnotically soft dynamics, in Pritzker Prize-winning Spanish architect Rafael Moneo’s still new concert hall. The following night, Haden appeared with his long-standing Los Angeles-based group, Quartet West, performing its lush, romantic brand of jazz in an outdoor plaza flanked by vintage cathedrals.

But Haden’s most recent project returns him to his affinity for Latin culture. His latest album for the Verve label, “Nocturne,” is an unabashedly lyrical collection of boleros from Cuba and Mexico, as well as two originals, prominently featuring Cuban-emigre pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba. (They perform in a quintet setting tonight through Wednesday at the Knitting Factory in Hollywood.)

In his hotel suite here, Haden reflected on his ongoing history with Cuba, and with Rubalcaba. Even sitting in his bathrobe and nursing a cold over cafe con leche , Haden was eager to talk, to spread his message, as always. Haden first met the pianist in 1986, while visiting Cuba with his Liberation Music Orchestra. Dazzled on first hearing, Haden wound up playing with Rubalcaba in Havana’s noted Egrem Studios.

Because of travel restrictions, Haden couldn’t bring Rubalcaba to the U.S., but he invited him to the Montreal Jazz Festival in 1989. For years afterward, the pair discussed doing a duet recording of ballads. But when Rubalcaba sent him a collection of boleros , Haden was smitten, and his concept abruptly shifted.

“The more I thought about this record,” Haden recalled, “the more I thought that it shouldn’t be American ballads. I thought that the exposure of Latin American music in the United States has been primarily up-tempo things, like Tito Puente, which is great, but people don’t get a chance to hear these beautiful ballad standards that come from ... Latin America.”

Rubalcaba also savors the idea of exposing a musical tradition.

“When people think about or talk about Latin music, they think about dance music,” the pianist said in a later phone conversation from his home outside Miami. (Travel restrictions for Cuban artists eased in the early ‘90s and some artists have been allowed to reside in the U.S.) “They cannot believe that there were composers doing deep music with great harmony and melody and great texts.”

When they convened last August to record the album in Miami, the setting had expanded. Haden invited Cuban violinist Federico Britos Ruiz, whom he had met in a Los Angeles studio. Rubalcaba brought along the unusually subtle drummer Ignacio Berroa, a regular in the pianist’s trio.

Guests include saxophonists David Sanchez and Joe Lovano, and Metheny added guitar on one track. The end result is softly moving, resolutely impressive. (Britos Ruiz, Berroa and Sanchez round out the quintet at the Knitting Factory.)

Haden relates that “when we started corresponding about [the album] and choosing songs, [Rubalcaba] told me, ‘Charlie, I just want you to know that I wouldn’t make this record with anybody but you.’ That just touched me. I’ve done so many different recordings from different countries, and I always feel like the [outsider].”

For his part, in the bass role, Haden stuck to what he knew best, which wasn’t the traditional Cuban bass vocabulary. Haden recalls telling Rubalcaba, “‘Look, man, I’m not Cachao,”’ referring to the legendary Cuban bassist Israel “Cachao” Lopez. “‘I don’t pretend to be, and I don’t want to be. I make all different kinds of records, and whoever I make the records with, I just listen to them and I play the way I play.’ [Rubalcaba] said, ‘That’s the way you should do it on this.”’

But for Rubalcaba, despite the liberties taken with bolero tradition, the project is deep in the blood.

“It’s a little bit nostalgic,” he said, “because it reminds me of when I was a kid. I was listening to that music on the radio and in my house and in live performances. I remember all the great singers in Cuba, and my father playing that music. To me, [recording the album] was like making a tribute to those people.”

One of Cuba’s most prized jazz exports, and one with a proud, abiding interest in his musical heritage, Rubalcaba has mixed feelings about the new popularity of Cuban music after the Buena Vista Social Club phenomenon. He laments that the current public obsession with vintage Cuban music is imbalanced.

“The people [should] learn what happened with the innovations in the ‘70s and the ‘80s, but everybody’s focused on that music from the ‘40s and the ‘50s. I hope that these other generations, including me, don’t have to wait for 40 more years to be part of the knowledge of the world. But at the same time,” he adds, “it’s great for those musicians to at least have the opportunity at the end of their life to demonstrate their talent and creativity. I hope also that this is not only a fashion.”

Part of what makes “Nocturne” such a successful collaboration is its alignment of musical sensibilities. Rubalcaba, now 38 and with a varied and thriving career of his own, is a virtuoso capable of filling solos with restless, technically gymnastic energy. Haden, conversely, is a musician who says a lot with a little, who makes spaces and subdued emotionality count.

On “Nocturne,” they meet halfway, with Rubalcaba in an especially languid and melodic mood. In the so-far few live experiences with the “Nocturne” band, a similar effect of collective sensitivity takes over. At a stint at Yoshi’s in Oakland in June, Haden says, Rubalcaba’s restraint had the effect of a “contagious inspiration. Everyone was inspired to play with the same serene intensity.

“That’s usually where I always try to take it, no matter who I’m playing with. My philosophy in musical sound has always been to play as quietly as you can feel, because if you feel quiet, you will play in a way where you’re going to get everybody’s attention and they’re going to see the importance of [the music].”

Over the decades, Haden, 64, has been widely lauded, considered a poetic minimalist as a player, and a broad-minded conceptualist as a leader. But his own relationship with the world of jazz--even with the word itself--is changing.

“I don’t even really think I’m a jazz musician anymore,” Haden offers. “I’ve been feeling that way for the last 10 years. Jazz, to me, is being stifled in its vision and approach to future audiences by the very people who surround it--in jazz radio and journalism [for instance]. They’re making it a narrow, encapsulated art form that just a few people have to do with. They don’t really care if it gets out to anybody else. But I do.”

To Haden, the jazz scene tends to marginalize its own culture, whereas he’s seeking to venture beyond genre constraints.

“If you go back and listen to all the records I’ve made,” Haden says, “they’re not really about jazz. They’re about beautiful music. Everybody asks me, ‘How can you play with Ornette Coleman and then play with Quartet West?’ I say, ‘Tell me what the difference is.’ If you listen to Ornette’s melodies, they are so beautiful. They were like that when we were playing when we were 19 years old. People just weren’t getting it, because we weren’t coming from bebop.”

It could be said that jazz has been just one of the ingredients in many of his varied projects. This same message has been disseminated in the classrooms at Cal Arts, where Haden has taught for almost 20 years.

“I tell my students, ‘Once you walk into this room, you’re no longer a jazz musician. You’re a musician. Because if you see yourself as a jazz musician, you’re going to find the way you play by listening to Coltrane and Miles and whoever else influences you, and it’s going to prevent you from really finding your own music. And maybe your music doesn’t have a category.”’

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Charlie Haden and “The Nocturne Project,” Knitting Factory, 7021 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood, tonight through Wednesday, 8 and 10 p.m. $25; $50 for special reserved table. (323) 463-0204.