74 Quotes by Charlie Haden

I learned at a very young age that music teaches you about life. When you're in the midst of improvisation, there is no yesterday and no tomorrow — there is just the moment that you are in. In that beautiful moment, you experience your true insignificance to the rest of the universe. It is then, and only then, that you can experience your true significance.

I always approach music by thinking about the person I'm playing with and listening to the way they play and trying to enhance whatever is going on.

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.

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.

There’s like a special group of people that come from different parts of the planet to study with me. It’s nice. I just gave a workshop in Boston at the New England Conservatory, which was really nice.

I always told the people at Cal Arts that if they wanted me to do Jazz studies, first of all, there couldn’t be a big band within 500 miles and that I could do what I wanted to do. And they said I could.

I’ve got a collection of songs that I’ve had, I keep adding to and they’re all great American composers. I wanted to showcase American composers and I’ve done that on a lot of my records and played things by American composers that I really respect.

I just see myself as a human being that’s concerned about life.

In the midst of creating, a person is raised to another level of consciousness that doesn’t have that much to do with everyday thinking. It’s as if you could imagine life before there were words.