NEW YORK — After a career on modern jazz's cutting edge, bassist Charlie Haden admits being "scared" before recording his first country music album at Ricky Skaggs' Nashville studio.
But, with a little help from family and friends, Haden found he could indeed go home again to his Ozarks roots, and even garner a Grammy nomination. The 71-year-old bassist helped change the shape of jazz a half century ago as a member of Ornette Coleman's quartet.
Now he finds himself nominated for best country instrumental performance - with guitarist Pat Metheny, dobro player Jerry Douglas and pianist Bruce Hornsby - for "Is This America? (Katrina 2005)."
It's a slowly flowing ballad written by Metheny to evoke the sense of sadness and disbelief felt over the government's response to the hurricane.
It's one of the few pieces of contemporary Americana on Haden's new album "Rambling Boy" that finds him returning to songs made famous by the Carter Family, Hank Williams and other traditional country musicians.
Haden last performed these songs with his parents and siblings as the youngest member of the Haden Family band popular on the Midwest country circuit in the 1930s and 1940s.
Now he's doing them with his wife Ruth Cameron, son Josh, triplet daughters - Rachel, Petra and Tanya - and son-in-law, actor Jack Black as well as such musical luminaries as Elvis Costello, Vince Gill and Rosanne Cash.
"I've gotten three Grammys and about 15 nominations for jazz recordings ... but this record was very special because it was going back to my country roots and playing these old songs that I used to sing when I was a little kid," said Haden.
He spoke in a telephone interview from his home in Los Angeles.
"My roots have never left me ... because the very first memory I have is my mom singing and me singing with her. At different points in my life I thought about doing something like this, but I was so involved in modern music, it never seemed that it could ever really happen."
The CD includes Haden's first recorded performance - an excerpt from a 1939 Haden Family radio show on which 22-month-old Cowboy Charlie yodels on a gospel tune.
Haden feels a strong personal connection to songs like "Wildwood Flower" and "Rambling Boy," which he remembers Mother Maybelle Carter playing with her daughters in the Haden family living room in Springfield, Mo.
"We do these songs in a new way yet we don't take their tradition away from them or try to do anything hip," Haden said in an earlier interview at a New York hotel.
"We want to allow people to hear this music for the beauty that it has."
Haden speaks in a soft, raspy voice - a lingering effect from the childhood polio that weakened his vocal cords and put an end to his singing career at age 15.
He turned his attention to the bass, and got drawn to jazz after hearing Charlie Parker at a concert in Omaha, eventually heading out to Los Angeles in 1956 to study music and play jazz.
But, even as a member of Coleman's 1958-60 quartet that charted a freer course for jazz improvisation, Haden drew on the harmonies and melodies he learned playing country music.
His bass solo on "Ramblin"' from Coleman's 1960 album "Change of the Century" includes fragments from folk songs such as the fiddle tune "Old Joe Clark."
Haden, who leads such jazz groups as the noirish Quartet West and leftist Liberation Music Orchestra, sees the common link between jazz and country in that both are poor people's music related to "the struggle for independence, identity and to be recognized."
The seeds for "Rambling Boy" were planted 20 years ago when three generations of Hadens gathered in rural Missouri to celebrate his mother's 80th birthday.
Cameron, his wife and manager, suggested that everyone sing "You Are My Sunshine" and was struck by the harmonizing of the bassist's triplet daughters.
"The girls just fell into it and I think they all realized they blended so well because when you're related your voice, the timbre, seems to blend," said Cameron, who sings an Irish ballad, "Down by the Salley Gardens" on the new album.
Haden received further encouragement in 1997 when he picked up a Grammy for best instrumental jazz performance for his album with Metheny, "Beyond the Missouri Sky," that included Roy Acuff's "Precious Jewel."
Backstage, bassist Mark Fain, of Skaggs' bluegrass band, offered to help Haden do a country record in Nashville.
When Haden finally took Fain up on his offer, some of Nashville's finest musicians turned up for the January recording session.
They included Skaggs, guitarist Bryan Sutton, mandolin player Sam Bush, and vocalist Dan Tyminski, who was George Clooney's singing voice in the film "O Brother, Where Art Thou?"
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