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Stories   >   Charlie Haden wLiberation Music Orchestra - Time/Life makes NPR Music ' 2016 Jazz Critics Poll'

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Charlie Haden wLiberation Music Orchestra - Time/Life makes NPR Music ' 2016 Jazz Critics Poll'

Posted: December 22, 2016

Henry Threadgill Tops Our 4th Annual Survey Of Jazz Writers in The 2016 NPR Music Jazz Critics Poll

#9 is Charlie Haden Liberation Music Orchestra, 'Time/Life (Song for the Whales and Other Beings)' - The perfect album for this moment. In an interview I did with him prior to the 2000 presidential election, Haden remarked that each of his Liberation Music Orchestra albums, which then numbered three, had been recorded during Republican administrations, and "if Bush wins, I'll have to record another one." Sure enough, Not in Our Name appeared a few years later, subsequent to our invasion of Iraq and Bush's reelection. And when Time/Life started arriving in reviewers' mailboxes days after Trump's election, it was as if Haden was protesting from beyond the grave. A pair of live performances from 2011 bracket three studio tracks from after Haden's death in 2013, with his longtime collaborator Carla Bley stepping in as leader and Steve Swallow replacing him on bass. Except for remakes of Haden's "Song for the Whales" and Bley's "Silent Spring," both dating to the beginnings of the ecological movement, nothing here is as overtly political as, say, "Song for Ché," from the first LMO in 1969. But even the prettiest of ballads is delivered with such aching purpose and lyrical generosity, I swear this music could make America whole again, if enough people heard it.

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