Charlie Haden was sitting in his car one night, listening to the news. Vietnam's neighbour Cambodia was being bombed by the US air force on the orders of President Richard Nixon.
Haden felt powerless as an individual- but as a musician he was convinced he could register dissent, and maybe make a difference. He rang his friend and musical collaborator, composer Carla Bley, and said: "Let's do an album about the tragedy of what this administration is doing in the world."
The result was the Liberation Music Orchestra, which made one of the most powerful jazz-driven musical statements of the early 1970s with its self-titled album. The band was a volatile, expensive one, and many members were leaders in their own right, making it difficult to keep it on the road.
But in the past 35 years, the LMO has returned whenever the rallying call was loud. It re-formed in 1982, when Ronald Reagan invaded El Salvador, to record the album Ballad of the Fallen. It came back in 1989, during George Bush Sr's time, for a rousing We Shall Overcome at the Montreal jazz festival, and to record the album Dream keeper.
And on August 2 the LMO performs at the Edinburgh festival - the first time Haden and Bley have shared a live performance in 20 years. Haden has long felt angry at what he sees as the Republicans' theft of the election four years ago, and the situation in Iraq has brought that anger to the boil.
Haden has said he always believed in "an America worthy of the dreams of Martin Luther King Jr, and the majesty of the Statue of Liberty." A bespectacled, mild-looking man in his 60s, with chronic bronchitis that worsens on tour, he exudes a firm sense of purpose, disagreeing with the suggestion that, in the end, music is just music: "I wouldn't have done this over all these years if I hadn't believed it made a difference.
In recent years in America, it's become very difficult for people critical of the government to express their feelings. Providing some kind of focus for that to happen is power, in its way.
"People have often come up to us after Liberation Music Orchestra gigs and said this music has helped give them confidence to say what they really feel. The material we use draws on a long tradition of people doing that, all over the world."
By background and artistic disposition, Haden is no fan of Republican politics. His father had close friends in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade that fought in the Spanish civil war; as a double-bassist, Haden participated in black Texan saxophonist Ornette Coleman's 1950s revolutions in jazz form.
These two influences came together when he heard of the Cambodian bombings. His father had a collection of socialist and anarchist songs of the Spanish civil war, music he and Bley had already considered adapting for a jazz project. The pair turned to this in 1969, examining the Spanish songs and creating arrangements for a full jazz band.
The resulting album featured a suite of 1930s anarchist songs vividly interpreted by the eloquent trumpet of Don Cherry and the hot winds of Argentinian Gato Barbieri's tenor sax.
Haden also contributed the brooding Song for Che, a powerful double-bass anthem, plus Ornette Coleman's War Orphans. The sleeve showed the personnel lined up against a brick wall, staring uncompromisingly at the camera from under a banner.
The album won the Grand Prix Charles Cros in France (a Grammy equivalent), Swing Journal's Gold Disc award in Japan, and critics' accolades everywhere. - Dawn/The Guardian News Service.
