Charlie Haden made his singing debut at age two on his family’s country radio show in Shenandoah, Iowa. At 15, bulbar polio attacked his brain stem and destroyed his singing voice. This deep dive traces how he rebuilt that voice out of wood and wire, drawn to the double bass by the interwoven counterpoint of Bach, saving money as house bassist on the Ozark Jubilee, turning down a full scholarship to Oberlin, and arriving in Los Angeles in 1957, where he roomed with Scott LaFaro and joined Ornette Coleman for The Shape of Jazz to Come.

The episode explains how a folk musician’s ear for listening let him turn the bass into a dance partner for Coleman’s free jazz, then follows his 1960 exit over drug addiction, rehabilitation at Synanon in 1963, and a new family in New York. It covers the 1969 founding of the Liberation Music Orchestra with Carla Bley, his 1971 detention by Portugal’s secret police after dedicating a song to anti-colonial fighters, an FBI interview back home, founding the jazz program at CalArts in 1982, tinnitus so severe he played behind plexiglass, and the full-circle bluegrass album Rambling Boy with his wife, children, and son-in-law Jack Black before his death in 2014 at 76.

• Why bulbar polio specifically targets the muscles for swallowing, speaking, and singing
• How oral-tradition folk music trained him to react in real time to Ornette Coleman’s off-roading
• Using major-key anthems crashing into minor-key laments as sonic protest without lyrics
• The 19th century French double bass he refused to risk on international tours
• A teaching philosophy built on humility and playing entirely in the present moment