He’s been at it since he was 2, when he made his musical debut as Cowboy Charlie, yodeling on his family’s country-music radio show in Springfield, Mo. It was a steady gig, every day for 13 years, soaking up the music that would color his style for the rest of his life. And what the family didn’t play, they sought out. “When I was a kid, my mother used to take me to the only African-American church in Springfield, and we’d sneak into the back and just sit there and listen to the choir.”

Haden’s latest album, “Beyond the Missouri Sky,” proves that he’s spent his life open to all kinds of music. Currently topping Billboard’s jazz chart, this duet venture with guitarist and fellow Missourian Pat Metheny includes songs by the two musicians as well as tunes by Henry Mancini, Ennio Morricone and Roy Acuff. There’s even a spiritual, written by Haden’s son, Josh. In a set of quietly acoustic yet intense performances, Haden and Metheny weave all these styles into a beautifully coherent tapestry.

Haden fell in love with jazz and the acoustic bass as a teenager. By the time he was 19, he was in Los Angeles, getting famous in a hurry as one fourth of the Ornette Coleman quartet that scared the dickens out of audiences with its “free jazz” compositions. Since then Haden has distinguished himself as a player (voted best bass player from 1982-94 in the Downbeat critics poll), composer and bandleader. His Liberation Music Orchestra, a modem big band, refashions everything from Spanish Civil War songs to “We Shall Overcome” into jazz anthems. With his more intimate Quartet West, he re-creates the mood of L.A. in the ’40s and ’50s, salting the group’s music with recordings by the likes of Jo Stafford and Chet Baker.

Haden’s accomplishments look even more impressive when you consider the battles he’s fought. At 15, polio damaged his vocal cords and ended his singing career. He kicked heroin twice. And he’s so troubled by tinnitus (ringing in the ears) and hyperacusis (sensitivity to loud noise) that when he performs live, he has to barricade himself behind Plexiglas. But there’s never been any question of quitting. His grandparents were musicians and so are his children. For the Hadens, if you’re breathing, you play.

At the heart of all of Haden’s music is the huge, rock steady pulse of his bass. Metheny insists that there is no better timekeeper in jazz today. “But more than that,” Metheny says, “he touches a place that’s universal in the music he plays.” All his life, Haden has sought that universality. “When I was a kid, Mother Maybelle Carter [of the Carter Family] and my mother were friends,” he says. “She came over to the house a couple of times and played the guitar, and I never heard anything sound so deep and so beautiful. I was in a trance.” Listening to grown-up Cowboy Charlie play today, you know how he felt.

PUPS TO MAKE A PAPA PROUD WHEN CHARLIE Haden starts to talk about his kids, you shudder to think what he’ll sound like if he ever has grandchildren. “My kids have got great voices,” he announces with a big grin. “They sing with perfect intonation, and they’re all good song-writers.” The funny thing is, he’s right. Josh, 28, leads Spain, a band that plays with whispery, almost hypnotic intensity, getting more out of a murmur than most bands get out of a scream. Petra and Rachel, each 25 (they’re two thirds of triplets), practice a more rambunctious art with the band That Dog. Their third album, “Retreat From the Sun,” floats perfect vocal harmonies and violin solos over punk rhythms. It’s as if Stravinsky and the Shirelles jammed with Sonic Youth.

But the big project that all the Hadens keep talking about is a family album, on which they’d play the old-time country music that Charlie’s parents played on their radio show. For now, though everyone is eager to do it, they’re all too busy. This is a family, in other words, that can harmonize everything but its schedule. M.J.