A crafty showman in his slow-talking, peace-preaching, touchy-feely way, US double-bassist Charlie Haden brought Meltdown 2009 to a down-home closedown.

Following the jagged, enigmatic “post-jazz” piano trio The Bad Plus was not an ideal situation but Haden soon restored soulful order with his carefully chosen12-piece concert band. It had three Americans — tenor-saxman Tony Malaby, trumpeter Mike Rodriguez and drummer Matt Wilson — in key positions, with the charismatic but alarmingly skeletal Carla Bley conducting her arrangements from the piano.

All the other chairs were filled by London’s finest. Guitarist John Parricelli and saxmen Jason Yarde and Shabaka Hutchings rose particularly well to the occasion but everyone, including local hero Andy Grappy on tuba, tackled such anthemic pieces as Going Home, We Shall Overcome, Amazing Grace and Skies of America with suitable feeling, personality and skill.

Robert Wyatt also joined the party, contributing two songs in Spanish, Tale of the Tornado and Song for Che, with trumpet obbligatos for the latter. HIs vocals had a conversational, Paolo Conte-like character.

Playing as ever behind perspex screens, Haden recalled that his big-band career dated back to 1968 and had outlived various presidencies. “Our first album came out under Nixon,” he noted, “the second under Reagan and the next two under Bush and his son.” This was too much for one listener, who suddenly yelled: “Don’t make any more!”

Finally it was time for Ornette Coleman to make his faltering way onstage and clasp Haden, one of his earliest colleagues, in a reunion embrace. Some had feared disaster when the RFH’s quirky jazz supremo New Yorker Glenn Max announced Coleman as this year’s Meltdown curator, but the founder of free-form jazz did surprisingly well. He made sensible choices — Bobby McFerrin, for one, was a huge success — and proved personally popular.

Young audiences may not understand Ornette’s “harmolodics” theories (who does?) but everyone was prepared to show respect for a frail, elderly and uncompromising survivor of half a century in the cut-throat music business.