The golden numbers (sometimes capitalized) are numbers assigned to each year in sequence to indicate the year’s position in a 19-year Metonic cycle. They are used in the computus (the calculation of the date of Easter) and also in the Runic calendar. The golden number of any Julian or Gregorian calendar year can be calculated by dividing the year by 19, taking the remainder, and adding 1. (In mathematics this can be expressed as (year number modulo 19) +1.) For example, 2008 divided by 19 gives 105, remainder 13. Adding 1 to the remainder gives a golden number of 14.

The term golden number was not used in classical times. Its first documented use is in the computistic poem Massa Compoti by Alexander de Villa Dei in 1200. Later, a scribe added it to tables originally composed by Abbo of Fleury in 988.

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Aside from the unforgivably bad cover art (dude really doesn’t look that bad, promise), Charlie Haden’s 1976 The Golden Number is really quite sublime.  It’s a record so nice Destination: Out! posted it twice; thus giving the whole thing away.  Which isn’t bad, as it’s been out of print for a while and Amazon quotes an import version at upwards of $35.

I was lucky to happen upon it for less than a third of that at Som Records on 14th street by Saint Ex the other day.  The sheer influx of free music from blogs and trading with friends and such tends to let certain things slip through the cracks, and besides being impressed on a cursory first listen, I slept on the D:O postings.  That was a mistake.

The conceit of the album would almost seem gimmicky if not for the players involved: four long form tracks, each a duet between Haden and Don Cherry, Archie Shepp, Hampton Hawes, and Ornette Coleman (on trumpet!), respectively.

Part of why it might have been filed away on the computer is that jazz solos, duets, and trios just sound so much better on wax.  Flat mp3s work well enough with a larger ensemble that bring it from every direction; but you need all the rich, warm colors that only delicious vinyl can deliver to get the full sense of what’s happening with so few instruments to focus on.

And when Haden is playing bass, there’s a hell of a lot going on.  Drew and Chill made the case that he was overpowered by his respective partners on first listen; but I just don’t think that’s right.  Especially on the Archie cut, you get the sense right off the bat that these cats would simply not be playing the way they are without Haden behind them.

He’s not only sympathetic and nurturing like a good jazz bassist should be; he takes the wheel like a Ron Carter.  His melodious improvisation, the hymn-like bowing, the complete conviction to Ornette’s harmolodics.  It’s kind of a treasure.

Certainly one doubts that Coleman would have tried his hand at the trumpet (is he recorded on it elsewhere?) without Haden behind him.  As D:O said, there’s a deliberate primitivism to his playing here, but it’s much more in the style of Monk than Ayler at his most primal.  He says what he says in slow, well spaced dots.  Single notes, short melodic ideas.  There’s a sense that before he blows he could have chosen to play anything, yet somehow what he does choose seems absolute.

Hearing Haden with Hawes is nutritious, too.  Their chemistry, their telepathy, not only rivals that of Haden with Coleman or Cherry (with whom he recorded some of jazz’s most celebrated, important, and to this day feared music) but maybe surpasses it.  (See also As Long As There’s Music.)  Hawes would pass soon after this recording, and I think it serves as a fitting, humble tribute.

It’s a nice slow-burner of a record.  It’s dense, but subtly so.  Quietly so.  Cherry doesn’t screech, Shepp hardly ever hollers, Hawes isn’t given to crashing McCoy-like thunderclaps.  It’s a record you really have to listen to lest it pass you by.  Even though there’s only one piano track on it, it makes me wanna pull out the solo piano section from my stack of wax — Bill Evans, Andrew Hill, Ahmad Jamal, Herbie, Monk — because it primes the mind to take in a lot of information.  It’s one that will bear repeated listening.  Probably for years to come.

Kind of perfect for a lazy, hot summer afternoon lounging aroung the apartment with a cold bottle of Negra Modelo, actually.