With his 80th birthday approaching, renowned jazz bass player Kevin Haines decided to make one final album, a duo with longtime collaborator Dixon Nacey. Joanna Wane watched the creative sparks fly.
Guitar is for the head, Suzi Quatro once said. Drums are for the chest. “But bass gets you in the groin.” I didn’t ask Kevin Haines’ opinion about that. Not that he would have been offended, but she was probably talking about the bass guitar and it’s the double bass Haines has been hooked on since the 1950s when he noticed one in the corner of the music room at Pukekohe High, picked it up and somehow just knew how to play.
At 15, he was gigging at dance halls in a band alongside his brother. Charlie Bird, Eartha Kitt, Nat Adderley, Cal Collins, Georgie Fame … over the decades Haines has played with all of them, despite never touring outside New Zealand. In the 60s, he was on the TV music show C’mon, then Happen Inn in the 70s, although the advent of disco was a “dark period” in his life when he temporarily gave up music altogether.
A notoriously hard taskmaster when his sons, saxophonist Nathan Haines and film/TV composer Joel Haines, were learning their craft, he’s still self-disciplined and incredibly focused, playing dozens of bookings each year. Even off duty, he’s always immaculately dressed.
Next year, he’ll turn 80, and while his fingers are stiffening with arthritis, his musicianship is as sharp and expressive as ever. One of the original tracks he’s written for his new album, Conversations — his final album to close out an extraordinary career — is the most wistful, evocative piece of music you could wish to hear.
All true musicians feel like their instrument is an extension of their body — Suzi Q was right about that one. Haines and his current bass, a beauty made from spruce with an ebony fingerboard, have been together for 30 years. Like a tree that’s been shaped by the prevailing wind, he has a permanent stoop from a lifetime of folding himself into its curves. The other day, wife Elaine saw him walking along in his suit and tie, with one shoulder hunched up, and could have sworn he was holding his bass. “He’s just moulded into that shape.”
Haines never experienced that kind of synergy with the clarinet, which he struggled with for a couple of years before picking up that double bass back in high school. Now, it’s like a second heartbeat vibrating through his body. “It’s right there, that’s the lovely thing,” he says. “You’re sort of wrapped around the bass, so playing it really is wonderful. I don’t know, I can’t get that same feeling when I play bass guitar. It’s just a lump of wood with strings.”
Dixon Nacey, the other half of the duo on Conversations, laughs at that. He was as destined to play the guitar as Haines was to play bass; his parents named him after jazz musician Willie Dixon and blues guitarist Robert Johnson (Johnson is Nacey’s middle name), although “Lightnin” Hopkins is the guy who really inspired him. “It’s what brings me the most joy and peace, outside of family,” says Nacey, who’s one of the headline performers in He Kete Waiata on the closing night of the Auckland Arts Festival in March. “It gives me hope. It gives me solace. It’s a friend, except when it’s not. When I think about what [playing the guitar] means to me, it feels the most like home.”
It’s a strange thing, destiny. The first time they met was almost 20 years ago when Haines’ son Nathan booked the two of them for a gig with him on Waiheke. Events conspired to delay his arrival, so Haines and Nacey went on without him. The rapport was instant. “I immediately thought, ‘Where the hell has this guy been all my life?’” says Haines. Nacey felt the same way. “I was like, ‘Man, where did you get that time?’ I was just enamoured.”
Since then, they’ve played regularly as a trio with drummer Ron Samson, recording three albums, Open to Suggestions, Oxide and Cross Now (they worked on the latter every Wednesday for a year before recording it at Roundhead Studios). The new album, Conversations, is their first collection as a duo and has been almost two years in the making. They’d already sorted half the tracks, a mix of original and rearranged standards, when Auckland went into lockdown again last year, putting the project on hold.
The pair are collaborators in the purest sense of the word. In April, when they went back into rehearsal, Canvas sat in on a session where they worked on two new compositions they’d never played together before. Instead of scoring each other’s parts, it’s a process of mutual trust where they improvise freely within the chord sequence — a skeleton, Haines calls it — and no two performances are exactly the same.
“That’s when the piece comes to life,” says Nacey, 47, who’s sitting in socks at his music stand. The rehearsal space is Haines’ living room and it’s a shoes-off policy at the front door. “Because this isn’t lyrical music, the emotions come from within the harmony and the melody and how things interact musically, so to connect to that is another thing altogether. When you’re playing complex music like this and you’re improvising, that’s a massive risk and a massive challenge. There’s this kind of magic that happens when you’re really in the moment; it becomes a deeper conversation of two souls. That’s definitely the kind of connection I feel with Kevin.”
Wearing his signature cheesecutter cap, eyes closed in release to the rhythm, Nacey’s fluid groove on guitar looks almost effortless compared to Haines’ grunt work on bass. It’s a hugely physical instrument to play, a wrestle more than a caress. You can see it in the way he throws his shoulders and sets his jaw, and in the meaty muscles of his lead right hand (jazz bassists typically pluck the strings rather than using a bow). But there’s elegance in it, too.
“I’ll do the duh-gungs,” says Nacey, recording takes on his iPad while Haines, old school, rests his music sheet on the side of the bass to scribble notes. “We’ll do that sneaky little D-flat falling back into the C… it’ll go melody, then guitar, then low note, and then you hit the B on the chord…. That was beautiful, Kev. Wicked.”
Haines: “It really needs that drop way back down, doesn’t it?”
Nacey: “Yeah, but it’s nice though. It didn’t just fall off the cliff, it kind of parked gently and rolled to a stop.”
Haines’ parents were farming people until they moved into Pukekohe township, after his Dad started working for the railways. On Saturday nights, all the locals would gather at their house and his mother played piano. “It’s fascinating because I thought, ‘That’s me. I want to do that.’ I would have been 7 or 8. About the same age as Zoot.”
Zoot is Nathan’s son and already showing prodigious talent on the drums. In 2020, three generations of the family appeared on stage at Auckland’s Hopetoun Alpha in Songs With My Father, a concert showcasing Nathan and Kevin, with a guest appearance by Joel and a brief cameo by Zoot. It was the first time Nathan had played with his brother and father since 2005.
There’s a part in neurologist Oliver Sacks’ book, Musicophilia, where one of his patients tells Sacks he has music playing in his head all the time. Asked to explain, he replies, “Haven’t you got that as well?”
When he read that, Haines related to it instantly. Elaine is driven mad by him sometimes, because that’s what he’s listening to instead of her. “It’s just continual, really. So it’s a bit of a blessing and it’s a bit of a curse because you can’t stop it. It’s just there,” he says. “And you know what? Zoot’s got the same thing. I said to him the other day, ‘Why don’t you answer me?’ And he said, ‘Because I’ve got music going on in my head.’” Haines can hear colours, too. “I don’t get it with all notes, but I know definitely D-flat is purple.”
In late May, he and Nacey hold one last rehearsal. Recording sessions are booked for early June at the Kenneth Myers Centre, the same central-city studio where the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation used to record Happen Inn and C’mon. It’s now part of the Auckland University School of Music, where both Haines and Nacey have taught jazz (Elizabeth Stokes from The Beths is a former student).
I’m starting to recognise the tunes by now — the Miles Davis classic Blue in Green from his 1959 album Kind of Blue; Cole Porter’s All of You, Haines’ beautiful ballad Have You Ever Had an Answer to the Question — although in many ways their versions sound very different from the originals. The notes they’re playing haven’t changed since that first rehearsal, but each track has been kneaded to take a stronger feel and form. “It’s knowing when to stop,” says Haines. “Too much arranging can strangle it.”
Cold air affects the sound of the bass so there’s a heater plugged in for Haines when he arrives at the recording studio. Dividers have been placed to isolate the two musicians, who are surrounded by multiple microphones. Later, the tracks will be spliced together to create what engineer John Kim describes as the perfect sound sculpture. The double bass is one of the more challenging instruments to record because of its low frequency, he says, sitting barefoot at his mixing console, which overlooks the studio floor.
Recording is an intense experience, striving for perfection with every note. “You think about it lasting forever,” says Haines. “But if you hold it too tight, you forget the joy of the music you have when you’re just mucking around.” There are still months of post-production work to follow but when he listens to that first raw version, he hears Nacey play something so beautifully that tears well up in his eyes.
On the album cover, there’s a beautiful black and white photograph Haines shot at an Auckland park of two young boys standing ankle-deep in a stream. It’s not only his friendship with Nacey that’s captured by that image.
One of the original compositions on Conversations is a piece called PB, which Nacey wrote for composer and pianist Phil Broadhurst, who died of cancer in 2020. Haines used to play regularly with Broadhurst at the London Bar, and in the final months of his life, the three men would meet for lunch every Wednesday.
On a gorgeous spring evening last month, Broadhurst’s widow Julie Mason — a noted singer and pianist on Auckland’s jazz scene — opened her home for the first in a series of monthly boutique concerts, the Saturday Stars Sessions, in his memory. Haines and Nacey headlined the bill with the first public performance of their new album, surrounded by flickering candlelight.
For Mason, hearing them play PB was a special moment. “It was lovely,” she says. “And I’m glad someone has written something for PhiI. I haven’t been able to. I know Dixon and Kevin felt he was in the room that night.”
Nacey thinks Haines has produced some of his best playing on Conversations and says his energy is infectious. To him, the album reflects their special bond and deep love of music. Over coffee one day, Haines had told me about jazz pianist Eubie Blake, who kept playing and recording until his death, a few days after his 96th birthday. Not a bad way to sign off. And now, with all the hard work done, Haines isn’t sure this will be his final album, after all. “Funnily enough, I don’t feel quite that way now because I’ve done so much practice,” he says. “Maybe I could squeeze out another one.”
- Conversations, by Kevin Haines and Dixon Nacey, is being released on all the major online streaming platforms, including Spotify, iTunes and Apple Music.