74 Quotes by 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.

That's what I tell my students at California Institute of the Arts where I taught for 27 years. I taught them if you strive to be a good person, maybe you might become a great jazz musician.

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.

I grew up around guitar players.

When I was four, we moved to a farm outside Springfield, Missouri. We had a radio show from that farmhouse. My dad always wanted a farm. We used to go out and milk the cows every morning and then do a radio show with a remote control from our living room. We'd start by singing 'Keep On The Sunny Side.'

One of the things polio does is it takes away your energy. They don't know very much about it. They should be a lot more aware of what polio is.

Mostly I play with records. I play with my friend Bill Evans.

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.

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