Best quotes by Charlie Haden on Music

Checkout quotes by Charlie Haden on Music

• ‟ I never heard anything so brilliant in my life as I did that first time I heard Ornette. He played like some revolutionary angel. Soon, we were rehearsing in his place, music scattered everywhere, and he was telling me to play outside the chord changes, which was exactly what I had been wanting to do. Now I had permission.

  - Charlie Haden
  

• ‟ I want to take people away from the ugliness and sadness around us every day and bring beautiful, deep music to as many people as I can.

  - Charlie Haden
  

• ‟ My family influenced me very deeply because my dad came from a musical background, from the hillbilly music part of it, and all that music came over from Scotland and Ireland and England in to the Appalachian Mountains and Ozark Mountains, where I was raised.

  - Charlie Haden
  

• ‟ Hoover's Music Store in Springfield, Missouri - I would listen to records there for hours.

  - Charlie Haden
  

• ‟ I want them to come away with discovering the music inside them. And not thinking about themselves as jazz musicians, but thinking about themselves as good human beings, striving to be a great person and maybe they'll become a great musician.

  - Charlie Haden
  

• ‟ I just try to play music from my heart and bring as much beauty as I can to as many people as I can. Just give them other alternatives, especially people who aren't exposed to creative music.

  - Charlie Haden
  

• ‟ It used to be that creative music was most of the music that you heard back in the '30s and '40s, and now it's like 3 percent. So, its kind of a struggle getttin' it out there.

  - Charlie Haden
  

• ‟ I have music inside me and I'm very lucky to be able to play music and that's the way that I try to do it.

  - Charlie Haden
  

• ‟ The bass, no matter what kind of music you're playing, it just enhances the sound and makes everything sound more beautiful and full. When the bass stops, the bottom kind of drops out of everything.

  - Charlie Haden
  

• ‟ I have a very clear picture of what I want to do and what I feel is important as far as my contribution or my appreciation and respect for this life that we're living, and to try to make it better. I can't feel that I'm making it better playing commercial music, and I never could, and I never will.

  - Charlie Haden
  

• ‟ My parents were on the Grand Ole Opry. They traveled all over the country singing hillbilly music. That's what they called it back then. They were friends with Roy Acuff and the Delmore Brothers and the Carter Family. And all of my brothers and sisters who were older than me started on the show, after they were big enough to hold a guitar and sing.

  - Charlie Haden
  

• ‟ I listened to classical music. I listened to jazz. I listened to everything. And I started becoming interested in the sounds of jazz. And I went to a concert of Jazz at the Philharmonic when we lived in Omaha, Nebraska, and I saw Charlie Parker play and Billie Holiday sing and Lester Young play, and that did it. I said, 'That's what I want to do.'

  - Charlie Haden
  

• ‟ I want to expand jazz; I don't want to keep the audience limited. I want to reach people who have never come to a jazz concert before. One way to do that is by making records that have a lot of different kinds of music on them.

  - Charlie Haden
  

• ‟ My dad was a great guy; my mother was wonderful. I was very lucky to be around music from the time I woke up until I went to bed.

  - Charlie Haden
  

• ‟ I came from being a singer going into jazz. And that's one of the things that polio did for me is it took away my ability to sing with a range because it paralyzed my vocal chords, so that was when I started playing. But I hear the music as if I were singing even when I am playing.

  - Charlie Haden
  

• ‟ I want people to feel what it was like in the '40s. That's when popular music in the United States was so beautiful. Frank Sinatra, the Pied Pipers, Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, Tommy Dorsey, Billie Holiday. That's when popular music had deeper values, to me. This was music that was selling millions of records.

  - Charlie Haden
  

• ‟ In L.A., I played with Joe Pass and Gabor Szabo. Mick Goodrick plays guitar in the Liberation Music Orchestra, and he's a real special player. Then I did a duet concert with Jim Hall at the 1990 Montreal Festival.

  - Charlie Haden
  

• ‟ I'm always searching. It's the reason I'm here. It's not really about music: it's about searching for meaning.

  - Charlie Haden
  

• ‟ I wanted to do 'Oh Shenandoah' because that's the town I was born in - as a tribute to my mom and dad for giving me all this music. I don't really sing this as a singer, because I'm not a singer. But I wanted to do it for them.

  - Charlie Haden
  

• ‟ There's enough dismemberment going on in the world without writing music about it.

  - Charlie Haden