Charlie Haden - Liberation Music Orchestra (2015 Impulse! Back to Black 180g Vinyl LP)

Charlie Haden - Liberation Music Orchestra | Vinyl LP - 2015 Impulse! / ABC Records Back to Black Reissue (AS-9183, 180g, gatefold, pressed at Record Industry)

• Charlie Haden’s first album as a leader, a large-ensemble protest record built around songs of the Spanish Civil War, arranged and orchestrated by Carla Bley, with personnel drawn from the deepest end of the free jazz scene.
• Don Cherry, Dewey Redman, Gato Barbieri, Roswell Rudd, Mike Mantler, Paul Motian, Andrew Cyrille, Howard Johnson and Perry Robinson alongside Bley on piano and Haden on bass. Recorded over three days at Judson Hall, New York City.
• 2015 Back to Black reissue on 180g vinyl, gatefold sleeve, pressed at Record Industry in the Netherlands. Includes MP3 download voucher.

Haden had been Ornette Coleman’s bassist since the late 1950s. He’d heard songs from the Spanish Civil War and carried the idea of building something around them for years before the political upheaval of the late 1960s gave him the push he needed. The result was this album, recorded at Judson Hall in New York in the spring of 1969 and released on Impulse! in January 1970. Carla Bley arranged the material, weaving three Spanish Republican songs into a continuous twenty-one-minute suite on Side A: “El Quinto Regimiento”, “Los Cuatro Generales” and “Viva La Quince Brigada”. The arrangements don’t treat the source material as folk curiosity. They fold it into free jazz ensemble writing, with the orchestra moving between composed passages and open improvisation. “The Introduction” and “Song of the United Front” set the scene. “The Ending to the First Side” closes the suite. The whole of Side A plays as a single arc.

Side B is more varied. “Song for Chè”, Haden’s dedication to Che Guevara, runs nine and a half minutes and incorporates an excerpt from Carlos Puebla’s “Hasta Siempre”. “War Orphans” is an Ornette Coleman composition that Haden had played with Coleman in 1967. “Circus ‘68 ‘69”, another Haden original, is the freest thing on the record. “We Shall Overcome” closes it. The ensemble is one of those lineups that only existed in the late-sixties New York avant-garde. Don Cherry and Dewey Redman from Ornette’s band. Gato Barbieri and Roswell Rudd from the fire music wing. Mike Mantler from the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra. Paul Motian from the Bill Evans trio. Andrew Cyrille from Cecil Taylor’s group. Bob Northern on French horn. Howard Johnson on tuba. Perry Robinson on clarinet. Sam Brown on guitar and thumb piano. Haden would reconvene the Liberation Music Orchestra multiple times over the following decades, most notably for The Ballad of the Fallen in 1983 and Not in Our Name in 2005, but this first record remains the defining statement. Gatefold sleeve, 180g vinyl, pressed at Record Industry in the Netherlands.