Charlie Haden started his musical life singing with the Haden family group, which had its own country and western radio show, until contracting polio, which cost him his singing voice. He took up bass instead and moved to Los Angeles in 1957, where he met pianist Paul Bley, trumpeter Don Cherry, and saxophonist Ornette Coleman. He became an original member of Coleman's groundbreaking quartet in the late 1950s, moving with Coleman to New York in 1959, where the group, with Cherry and drummer Billy Higgins, played a celebrated engagement at the Five Spot and began recording a series of influential albums, including The Shape of Jazz to Come and Change of the Century.

Haden helped revolutionize the harmonic concept of bass playing in jazz, developing a style that sometimes complemented a soloist and other times moved independently, liberating bassists from a strictly accompanying role. In 1969 he formed his first band, the Liberation Music Orchestra, featuring arrangements by pianist Carla Bley, a potent, jazz-folk work with pronounced left-wing political leanings. In the late 1960s he wrote "Song for Ché" in response to the assassination of Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara; performing the piece in Portugal in 1971 with Ornette Coleman and dedicating it to liberation movements in Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, and Angola led to his arrest and questioning by Portugal's fascist government before an American cultural attaché secured his release.

Haden had a long, fruitful collaborative run with pianist Keith Jarrett through the 1960s and '70s; Jarrett's own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile. In the 1980s he formed his own band, Quartet West. He died July 11, 2014, after a prolonged illness, at age 76.

Haden's bass playing, harmonically freed from strict accompaniment by his years with Ornette Coleman's revolutionary quartet, and his explicitly political Liberation Music Orchestra project made him one of jazz's most consequential voices in fusing musical innovation with direct social commentary.