There could not be a better time for the re-emergence of Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra (LMO). A seminal figure since anchoring Ornette Coleman’s revolutionary 1950s quartet, bassist Haden fomented his own revolution on his debut album as a leader, the 1969 anti-war session Liberation Music Orchestra. The new generation of advanced improvisers assembled for the fourth LMO album, Not In Our Name, continues the group’s partnership with ingenious arranger Carla Bley.

Please note: Carla Bley will NOT be appearing with Charlie Haden

Troubling times call for Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra. A seminal figure since anchoring Ornette Coleman’s revolutionary 1950s quartet, the bassist fomented his own revolution on his debut album as a leader, the 1969 anti-war session Liberation Music Orchestra. The new generation of advanced improvisers assembled for the fourth LMO album, Not In Our Name, continues the group’s partnership with ingenious arranger Carla Bley.

Haden created the 12-piece ensemble when Richard Nixon was just starting his long strange trip as president and a half-million American soldiers were stationed in Vietnam. Working with Bley, who was just starting her career as a supremely original arranger and composer, Haden melded anti-fascist anthems from the Spanish Civil War with avant garde jazz, resulting in one of the era’s most arresting anti- war statements.

The 1983 LMO album, The Ballad of the Fallen, is a stunning statement decrying U.S. involvement in Latin America that uses songs from resistance movements in Spain, Chile, Portugal and El Salvador as the raw material for fearless jazz exploration. In 1990, the LMO celebrated the struggle against apartheid with its most optimistic album, Dreamkeeper. Haden revived the orchestra in response to the war in Iraq, but rather than lashing out with anger at policies they abhor, he and Bley respond with an elegiac set of compositions full of longing, hope and righteous defiance.

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