Charles Edward Haden was born August 6, 1937, in Shenandoah, Iowa, into a family already on the radio: the Haden Family Band broadcast country and folk music over station KMA, and Charlie made his professional debut as a singer on the family's show at age two. He stayed a working singer in the group into his teens — yodeling, harmonizing, learning songs by ear — until bulbar polio struck at fifteen, paralyzing part of his throat and permanently weakening his voice. Unable to keep singing, he turned fully to the upright bass he'd already been fooling with, effectively rebuilding his musical identity around an instrument rather than a voice.

He moved to Los Angeles in 1957 to study composition, and instead found the city's underground jazz scene, then in ferment around pianist Paul Bley's group at the Hillcrest Club. Playing in Bley's band, Haden crossed paths with trumpeter Don Cherry and, decisively, with alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman, whose harmonically unmoored compositions were too radical for most working bassists of the era to follow. Haden could follow them, and more: rather than simply outlining Coleman's chord-less tunes, he began improvising counter-lines that moved independently of the horns, sometimes abandoning fixed harmony entirely to shadow the emotional shape of a solo instead. It was a fundamental break from the accompanist's role bass had played in jazz up to that point, and it became the technical foundation for everything Haden did afterward.

Haden, Cherry, Coleman, and drummer Billy Higgins recorded The Shape of Jazz to Come in Los Angeles in May 1959; the group then moved to New York and opened at the Five Spot Café that November, a residency that split the jazz world into believers and detractors and made the quartet's abandonment of fixed chord changes the decade's most argued-over development in the music. Change of the Century, cut the same year and released in 1960, extended the same language. Haden's tenure with Coleman was repeatedly interrupted — a heroin addiction that dated to his California years sent him in and out of the band and, at one low point, into Synanon, the Santa Monica addiction-recovery community, for treatment — but the association, and the vocabulary it gave him, defined the rest of his career even as he moved through dozens of other settings.

In 1969, with the Vietnam War and the era's liberation movements as an explicit backdrop, Haden formed the Liberation Music Orchestra, a large ensemble built around Spanish Civil War songs, orchestrated by pianist Carla Bley into a sound that fused free-jazz blowing with brass-band weight and folk melody. The self-titled debut, recorded that April with Cherry, Bley, Dewey Redman, Gato Barbieri, Roswell Rudd, and Paul Motian among others, doubled as a political statement: Haden dedicated it, in the sleeve notes, to a world without war, racism, and exploitation. He kept making the point on record — The Ballad of the Fallen (1983) drew on songs from the Spanish Civil War and revolutionary movements in El Salvador and Nicaragua — and once directly to a government: performing his composition "Song for Che" in Portugal in 1971 with Coleman's band and dedicating it onstage to independence movements in Portugal's African colonies, Haden was arrested and interrogated by agents of Portugal's fascist regime, and released only after an American cultural attaché intervened. The Liberation Music Orchestra reconvened only intermittently — roughly once a decade, around events serious enough to warrant it — through Not in Our Name (2005), an Iraq War-era Bley-arranged protest record, and Time/Life (Song for the Whales and Other Beings) (2016), an environmentally themed set finished shortly before Haden's death and released posthumously.

The 1970s and early '80s also brought Haden's deepest immersion in the ECM sound: Closeness (1976), a duo-album series pairing him one-on-one with Coleman, Keith Jarrett, Alice Coltrane, and Motian; membership in Old and New Dreams, the cooperative quartet of Coleman alumni (Cherry, Redman, Ed Blackwell) that kept playing Coleman's book without Coleman himself; and, starting with 1980's Magico, a trio with saxophonist Jan Garbarek and guitarist Egberto Gismonti that extended into Folk Songs (1981) and later reunions, exploring a spacious, folk-inflected group improvisation far from Ornette-quartet fire. That same year, on 80/81, Haden anchored a quartet led by a guitarist sixteen years his junior, Pat Metheny, alongside Jack DeJohnette, Redman, and Michael Brecker — a session guided as much by the two Missouri- and Midwest-rooted musicians' shared folk sensibility as by Coleman's harmonic freedom, and the start of a Haden-Metheny creative partnership that ran for two more decades. It resurfaced on Song X (1986), reuniting Haden with Coleman himself under Metheny's leadership for a ferocious, uncompromising free-jazz session, and again on the hushed, intimate duo record Beyond the Missouri Sky (Short Stories) (1997), which won the Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance and became one of the best-selling records either musician made.

Haden formed his second enduring band, Quartet West, in Los Angeles in the mid-1980s, with saxophonist Ernie Watts, pianist Alan Broadbent, and drummer Billy Higgins reuniting from the Coleman years. Where the Liberation Music Orchestra looked outward at politics, Quartet West looked backward at Los Angeles itself: a moody, film-noir-inflected book built from ballads, original compositions, and — on later records like Haunted Heart (1991) and American Dreams (2002) — vintage vocal samples and string arrangements evoking the city's postwar jazz and movie culture. Across the same decades Haden became one of the most widely deployed bassists in jazz, turning up as a sideman on John Scofield's Time on My Hands (1990) and Grace Under Pressure (1992), and building a substantial parallel catalog of Latin-inflected duo and small-group recordings with Cuban pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba, including Nocturne (2001), which won the Grammy for Best Latin Jazz Album, and Land of the Sun (2004), which won a second.

Late in his career Haden closed a circle back to where he'd started: Rambling Boy (2008), credited to Charlie Haden Family & Friends, reunited him with his wife, singer Ruth Cameron, and all four of his children — including triplets Petra, Tanya, and Rachel Haden — for an album of country, bluegrass, and gospel material drawn from the Haden Family Band repertoire he'd grown up singing, with guests including Elvis Costello, Vince Gill, Rosanne Cash, and Metheny. Haden received a Recording Academy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013 and was named a 2012 NEA Jazz Master, the United States' highest honor in the music. He had lived with post-polio syndrome — a late-onset return of muscle weakness in survivors of childhood polio — for decades, and its worsening in late 2010 ended his public performing, though he continued playing at home for friends and family. Charlie Haden died in Los Angeles on July 11, 2014, at age 76.

Haden's playing was built on a paradox: a bassist trained by ear on country and folk radio became the instrumentalist who most fully liberated jazz bass from strict harmonic duty, developing lines that moved with a soloist's freedom rather than a rhythm section's obligation during his years in Ornette Coleman's quartet. That same ear for plain, singable folk melody — inherited straight from the Haden Family Band — never left his playing; it surfaced as the emotional backbone of the Liberation Music Orchestra's political arrangements, the spacious folk-jazz of his ECM trio with Garbarek and Gismonti, and the deliberately unhurried, deep-toned ballad style that made him as recognizable a stylist as any saxophonist or pianist he worked with. Few bassists have moved as convincingly between free-jazz abstraction, protest music, film-noir mood pieces, and Latin balladry while sounding, in every setting, unmistakably like themselves.