Jazz great Charlie Haden's radical roots and Mississippi connections

 

(Charlie Haden, 2007. Photo by Geert Vandepoele in Gent, Belgium)

OXFORD, Miss. – I dragged my two young children to Memphis that night back in March 1997 with a promise: “Someday you’ll thank me.”

We went to see one of jazz’s great bassists, Charlie Haden, and his Quartet West. Rachel and Michael had never heard of him and had no interest in jazz, but going they were. Daddy insisted.

French berets, dark glasses, goatees, and black outfits were everywhere among the crowd at the University of Memphis concert hall. After high school and university jazz bands warmed things up, Haden and his group—tenor sax man Ernie Watts, pianist Alan Broadbent, and drummer Larance Marable—walked onto the stage.

“Dad, he’s so normal looking,” 14-year-old Rachel said.

That’s my gal. With just a few words, she went straight to the heart of the matter with Charlie Haden. With his short-cropped hair, thick glasses, clean-shaven, cornfed, Iowa-and-Missouri-bred looks, Haden hardly seemed the revolutionary who helped change jazz forever or the political radical whose “Song for Ché” honoring Che Guevara and liberation movements in Angola and Mozambique got him tossed in a Portuguese jail.

Haden, who died at 76 in July from post-polio syndrome, was what writer David A. Graham described as “the least likely revolutionary” in sax great Ornette Coleman’s quartet when they threw a bomb into the bebop establishment with their album The Shape of Jazz to Come in 1959. After all, Haden had started out as little “Cowboy Charlie” with the country music-crooning Haden Family on radio back in the 1940s.

Yet it was Haden’s bass lines that held Coleman’s wild and soaring “free jazz” together and then guided it into the stratosphere. “His firm grounding in the roots seems to have been what enabled him to be such an effective radical,” Graham wrote in his tribute in The Atlantic.

It’s the bass that provides the bottom, the foundation, on which jazz and other roots music stand. A long tradition of great bassists have made jazz what it is. It includes Charles Mingus, who bridged the worlds of big band and bebop, and Vicksburg. Miss., native Milt Hinton, often called the “dean of jazz bass players.” With what record producer Jean-Philippe Allard has called his “huge, deep, dark tone, his perfect intonation and his melodic invention,” Haden is another giant in that tradition.

Haden’s devotion to roots is evident in one of his most evocative albums, Steal Away, with another Vicksburg native, jazz pianist Hank Jones. The duet offer a collection of ageless gospel and spiritual tunes that date back to pre-Civil War times and come out of African American as well as both white and black Protestant traditions.  Legend has it that the title tune was written by Nat Turner, best known for leading a bloody rebellion against slavery in Virginia. Haden also contributed his own “Spiritual”, a tribute to Mississippi civil rights leader Medgar Evers and fellow martyrs Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.

Haden teamed up with another Mississippian, Jackson native jazz and blues singer Cassandra Wilson, later in his career on Sophisticated Ladies, a collection of torch songs from the 1940s and 1950s. Haden so badly wanted Wilson to do Johnny Mercer’s “My Love and I” for the album that he sang the tune to her on the phone to convince her.

Haden felt a life-long connection to the poor, the marginalized, and their struggles. Polio nearly cost him his voice as a teenager and precipitated his switch from vocals to bass. He saw jazz, like country, as the music of poor people fighting to make their way. His leftist politics were like his music, bold, revolutionary even, but always with an eye on roots, the basics.

The rich body of work he left behind ranged from his renditions of Spanish Civil War songs in his Liberation Music Orchestra album in 1970 to the ultimate film noir soundtrack that is his classic Haunted Heart in 1992. The latter was part of a trilogy devoted to Haden’s longtime home city, Los Angeles, and the noir world there that writer Raymond Chandler captured so well in his novels.

   

On that night in 1997, Haden’s quartet played at least four tunes from Haunted Heart, my favorite of all his records. I remember he would let out a “Whoop!” after a good solo by a fellow musician. It was the same whoop you hear on “Lonely Woman” back in 1959 with Ornette Coleman. On the day after I heard the news of his death, my wife Suzanne and I flew to Los Angeles to visit Rachel, a social worker there. She took us to Vibrato, one of the city’s best jazz clubs, a perfect place to drink a silent toast to one cool cat whose cornfed looks belied the revolutionary fire that was behind them.

(This tribute to Charlie Haden appeared in the Aug. 13-19, 2014, edition of the Jackson Free Press in Jackson, Miss.)

Kellogg Co. workers in Memphis finally back at work--no thanks to Kellogg or CEO John Bryant

 

(To the right, locked-out Kellogg Co. workers in Memphis protesting outside the plant last February. Robert McGowen is on the left.)

Robert McGowen holds no bitter feelings about the 10 months he stood on the highway outside the Kellogg Co. plant in Memphis protesting the company’s lockout of him and 225 other workers because of a disagreement over a union contract.

The 23-year-veteran Kellogg Co. worker is just glad to be back at work. “We cranked it (the plant) up,” McGowen told Labor South. “We are running good cereal. Everybody’s getting along. The supervisors are glad to get us back. Some of us are fourth generation. I am second generation. It is like our kitchen. We can run it better than anyone else.”

The workers are back no thanks to Kellogg Co. CEO and president John Bryant, whose leadership of the company since 2011 has treated the generations-stretching loyalty of workers like McGowan with contempt.

Thanks go to U.S. District Judge Samuel “Hardy” Mays and his recent ruling that the National Labor Relations Board was essentially correct in seeking an injunction against the Battle Creek, Mich.-based cereal maker for serious violations of federal labor law. The company locked out the workers last October when their union, the Bakery, Confectionary, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers, refused to agree to contract concessions that would cut wages and allow the hiring of new “casual” workers at lower pay. Mays ordered the company to allow the workers to report back to work Monday, August 11. With the order, workers resume getting wages, health insurance and other benefits, which they lost during the long lockout.

Administrative Law Judge Ira Sandron followed Mays’ order a week later with a separate ruling against the NLRB complaint. Kellogg Co. leaders responded by saying they would reconsider plans to bring back the workers.

McGowen said Mays’ ruling ultimately carries more weight than Sandron’s ruling, and he and most of the other workers are indeed back at their jobs. Still, the Memphis Commercial Appeal this week profiled one 38-year-veteran Kellogg worker, Glen Mason, who told the newspaper “I can’t work for that company anymore. I’ve never seen the company stoop so low as it has done this past year.”

An estimated 60 percent of Kellogg workers in Memphis are like Mason: African American. Those workers have filed a claim of racial discrimination against the company with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

McGowen said supervisors at the plant welcomed him and other workers back this week “with a `glad your back’ (and) handshaking. … The supervisors were in turmoil (during the lockout). The supervisors didn’t have anything to do with it.”

Kellogg is a profitable company, reporting an increase in revenue from $14.2 billion in 2012 to $14.8 billion in 2013, plus a profit margin of 24 percent for the quarter ending Dec. 31, 2013. CEO Bryant’s salary is roughly $6.6 million a year.

During the 10-month lockout, workers protested along the roadside outside the plant, often in rain, snow and both cold and hot weather. They went without pay, health insurance, or any assurance that the lockout would ever end. They received widespread support from the community and beyond—although Memphis Mayor A.C. Wharton was noticeably quiet during the fray.  Political and religious leaders in the city called for a full-scale national boycott of Kellogg products. Organizations such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Congress on Racial Equality, and Black Congressional Caucus all expressed their support for the locked-out workers. An online petition on their behalf gained thousands of signatures.

McGowen said he’ll never again be able to drive by the protest site outside the plant without thinking about the lockout. “I was on that highway for 10 months. I drove back Monday, drove by that spot. It was all cleaned up, but I’ll never forget it.”

Labor activist Han Dongfang on the rise of Chinese workers, plus a Kellogg-Memphis update and soon-to-come tribute to jazz great Charlie Haden

 

(Han Dongfang at the Washington, D.C., panel)

WASHINGTON, D.C. - A democratic election by workers at a factory in Guangzhou to select trade union leaders and a promise by the Chinese government to provide better vocation training for migrant workers bring a new perspective to recent comments by Hong Kong-based labor activist Han Dongfang at a panel discussion here. Labor South covered the event.

Han, founder and executive director of the China Labour Bulletin in Hong Kong, said at the one-day “Chinese Labor Movement: Which Way Forward?” panel discussion sponsored by the Albert Shanker Institute that Chinese workers are increasingly asserting their rights and that the Chinese government is responding. He called on workers and activists to push for a “peaceful transfer” that could eventually transform China’s Communist Party into a social democratic party that recognizes and protects worker rights.

“Chinese workers are fighting back,” Han said. “They are no longer the victim. They don’t need sympathy. That makes you feel weak. … If you are afraid of the dark, and the dark knows this, it will be aggressive.”

Han served on the June panel with Human Rights in China Executive Director Sharon Hom and columnist and The American Prospect editor Harold Meyerson.

A correspondent with Radio Free Asia and arguably the most prominent activist for labor rights in China, Han served 22 months in a Chinese prison for his role in founding the Beijing Autonomous Workers Federation at the time of the crackdown at Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989. After contracting tuberlosis in prison, he was released and spent a year in treatment in the United States. He lost most of a lung as a result and was banned from returning to China and expelled to Hong Kong.

Despite his imprisonment by the Chinese government, Han sees potential for significant change and the promise for more worker freedom in the country. “I’m very politically incorrect,” he said. “I leave the door open for the Communist Party to walk out of its past.”

A “peaceful transfer” would mean that workers “pay less in human life and blood.”

Han pointed to several recent campaigns in China that have proven workers' growing clout. These include a strike by 40,000 workers at Yue Yuen Industrial, global supplier of Adidas, Nike and other shoe brands, in April as well as protests and strikes by workers at the Chinese operations of WalMart, IBM and Pepsi. “Walmart had to bow its head and recognize the union,” Han said.

In Guangzhou in southern China last month workers at the Japanese-owned Sumida electronics factory participated in a groundbreaking democratic election to select union leaders, an important first step toward a true grassroots union. Furthermore, officials at a government State Council executive meeting promised better vocation training and other improved conditions for the nation’s 270 million rural migrants who moved to urban areas to find work.

Han pointed to subtle changes in the language used by the Communist Party at its congresses in recent years that have opened the way to a “collective wage negotiation system.” The government is striving for legitimacy with workers, Han said. The government-sanctioned All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), which essentially operates like a company union, “does not know how to collective bargain,” Han said, but it could learn if it became independent from “management control.”

The brightest promise on the horizon is the workers themselves, he said. “Younger workers don’t remember Tiananmen Square or Mao, and they don’t have the fear. … I do think the term democracy can be a part of the future of the Communist Party.”

The others on the panel offered a more cautious view.

“It’s important to put labor rights within the context of human rights,” Sharon Hom said. “Fear doesn’t work any more. The unions are the core in protecting the workers.” Still, she said, “there are major disincentives to give up power. … The corruption is so widespread.”

In a later article for Talking Union, Meyerson said the Communist Party won’t relinquish power easily. “The truism remains true: Power seldom yields without a struggle,” Meyerson wrote, “If the transformation Han seeks ever arrives, it likely will be more wrenching and bloody than the gradualist one he sketched.”

In an interview with Labor South at his Hong Kong office in June 2013, China Labour Bulletin Communications Director Geoffrey Crothall said the Chinese government certainly wants foreign investment and the nation’s economy to continue to grow. At the same time, however, “the government realizes the workers’ demands are perfectly legitimate.”

(To the right, Geoffrey Crothall in the Hong Kong offices of China Labour Bulletin)

Labor South asked both Han and Crothall whether workers’ victories for better wages and conditions in China could eventually lead to a major exodus of foreign-owned companies there.  Both said that the huge industrial infrastructure already in place in China, the growing domestic market there, and simple size of the workforce make this unlikely.

(To the right, Han Dongfang and Labor South writer/editor Joe Atkins)

“A lot of these businesses discover that as soon as you try to relocate to Bangladesh or Cambodia on the basis of cheap labor, that labor is not going to stay cheap very long,” Crothall said.

Ultimately, Crothall said, “if wages in China are going up, that is good for workers in America, good for workers in Europe. That levels the playing field. It also means workers in China are much are more able and likely to buy products made in the United States.”

And back here in the U.S. South, a judge orders Kellogg to bring back Memphis workers

A U.S. District judge this week issued an order to the Kellogg Co. to allow more than 200 workers at its Memphis plant to go back to work and to negotiate contract issues with the Bakery, Confectionary, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers union.

The order from U.S. District Judge Samuel “Hardy” Mays came after a formal complaint from the National Labor Relations Board that the Battle Creek, Mich.-based cereal giant was in serious violation of federal labor law when it locked out 226 Memphis workers last October because of a union contract dispute.

The union opposed company plans to cut wages and benefits as well as hire new “casual” workers at lower pay. The locked-out workers have picketed outside the plant through snow and rain and summer heat since last October.

In another development, union workers in Memphis have filed a claim of racial discrimination in the lockout with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in Memphis. The locked-out workers are predominantly African American.

The workers’ picketing won widespread support from the local community and as far away as the Congressional Black Caucus in Washington, D.C.

And an upcoming tribute to jazz great Charlie Haden …

Expect soon a Labor South tribute to jazz great Charlie Haden, who died at 76 last month. The bassist, one of this writer's favorite musicians, helped change jazz forever when he and the rest of the Ornette Coleman’s quartet recorded The Shape of Jazz to Come in 1959. Haden was also revolutionary in his politics and once was thrown in a Portuguese jail for his provocative music, leftist politics, and support of liberation movements in Angola and Mozambique.