Charlie Haden & Carla Bley - The Ballad of the Fallen

Import CD

Most folks usually associate a protest song with a rock or folk piece of music that uses the song’s lyrics to focus on areas such as war, civil rights, inequality, greed and other social maladies. When you look at lists of top protest songs you find very little subject matters outside of US and western world issues, no Jazz and certainly no instrumentals. Seems like those who assemble these lists are not that familiar with Charlie Haden. Over a period of four decades Haden recorded several albums with the Liberation Music Orchestra, an ensemble he led with Carla Bley, all focusing on oppression and injustice in different areas of the world. Interestingly they were all released when Republicans held office in the USA.

Charlie Haden grew up in the Midwest and from an early age was aware of injustice that manifested itself in various forms towards blacks, poor and other minorities. Choosing the life of a jazz musician and being part of the free jazz movement of the 60s gave him a grownup exposure into racism. He was also well aware of oppression around the world, a subject matter that the 20th century provided no shortage of supply. As the Vietnam war escalated in the late 60s, he decided to form the Liberation Music Orchestra (LMO) which became one of Jazz’s most blatant political expressions. I find this activism endearing, not because of the political aspect of the message, but rather the deep humane compassion behind it. Charlie Haden once said: “I’ve always been an idealist, and I believe that inside of every human that’s born on this planet is the capacity for deep feelings. I think that these feelings are stifled or taken away by the environment, by the system that we live in. And I really believe that every human being has the universe inside of them from the beginning of time.”

Haden was not shy of voicing his views, even when faced with real danger. In 1971 he joined Ornette Coleman as part of the Newport Jazz Festival tour of Europe, a caravan of the who’s who of jazz at the time including Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Dexter Gordon, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk and others. The tour took him to Lisbon. At the time Portugal had colonies in Guinea-Bissau, Angola and Mozambique and was fighting nationalist movements in these regions using heavy military against the insurgents and suppressing basic human rights. During the concert, when introducing his composition Song for Che, written in memory of Che Guevara, Haden dedicated the song to the Black peoples’ liberation movements in these colonies. Liberal Portuguese students attending the concerts gave him a standing ovation that lasted throughout the performance of the 12-minute song. As expected, this event did not bode well with the Portuguese authorities, who arrested Haden the next day at the airport. The American embassy intervened, but not before he had to spend a day in a prison cell.

In 1982 Charlie Haden recorded the second Liberation Music Orchestra studio album, Ballad of the Fallen. As in the first album he included songs from the Spanish Civil War but this time, reflecting on the Reagan Administration activities in South America, he added songs from El Salvador, Chile, and a Portuguese song associated with the early 70s resistance movement he met a decade earlier. At the back of the album he featured a painting by a Salvadorian refugee with the following inscription: “No to US intervention. Yankee invader out of El Salvador – Our only crime is that we are poor – we are tired of so many bullets sent by Ronald Reagan.”. Well said.

https://musicaficionado.blog/2017/01/03/the-ballad-of-the-fallen-by-charlie-hadens-liberation-music-orchestra/