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 Ca ...