Jazz Masters: Chet Baker

Album: The Best of Chet Baker Sings
Artist(s) Chet Baker, Vocals, Trumpet; Russ Freeman. Piano; Carson Smith, Jimmy Bond, Joe Mondragon, Bass; Shelly Manne, Bob Neel, Peter Littman, Lawrence Marable, Drums
Label: Blue Note
Recorded: 1953-1958 (Monaural)
Release Date: August 29, 1989

Jazz trumpeter/singer Chet Baker, like so many of his contemporaries, was never given awards for being a paragon of moral virtue, nor was he ever considered a threat to replace Frank Sinatra as a singer of love ballads, but as a jazz trumpet player/vocalist, he became the ambassador for modern West Coast jazz to mainstream music audiences all over the world, and as such, he was without peer.

Baker didn't suddenly burst onto the jazz scene out of nowhere, as some suggest. In 1950, while a member of the U.S. Sixth Army  Band, he began sitting in with local pros around San Francisco jazz clubs like Bop City and the Blackhawk. Upon his discharge in 1951 he gigged with locals as well as a few notables such as Cal Tjader, Stan Getz and Vido Musso before auditioning for Charlie Parker, where he won a spot in Bird's quartet. The Charlie Parker Quartet, which also featured pianist extraordinaire, Russ Freeman, opened at the Tiffany Club in Los Angeles on May 29, 1952.

Even with his movie-star good looks (at a time and place when good looks counted for almost everything) and even with a band as presigious as Charlie Parker's, he was still toiling in relative  anonymity when his big break came. As a member of the Gerry Mulligan Quartet, the group with which he began his prolific recording career, his professional life as a new star in jazz really began. He helped make jazz history in 1952 when, with Mulligan's pianoless quartet, he cut the classic version of My Funny Valentine, a recording which, many critics will argue, was responsible for this Rogers and Hart Broadway creation becoming a jazz standard. For a sound clip, click (The Gerry Mulligan Quartet with Chet Baker, Carson Smith and Chico Hamilton: Recorded live in 1952 on the Fantasy label at the Blackhawk in San Francisco)  Then click on 'My Funny Valentine'.

A hopeless drug addict for most of his adult life, Chet Baker's biography reads like something lifted out of a gothic morality play. It was a bizarre life of wanton self destruction, filled with heroin, cocaine, booze, back-alley street brawls, drug deals gone sour, arrests, scandals and other degradations, but interrupted, mercifully, by periods of musical brilliance. It ended sadly but, some would say inevitably on May 13, 1988, at the very time he had reached the peak of his playing ability, when he fell out of an Amsterdam hotel's second story window.

Chesney Henry 'Chet' Baker left a voluminous legacy of recorded music in quantities seldom, if ever, seen for jazz musicians before or since. His discography is comprised of well over 50 albums under his own leadership and countless others as sideman or even as 'anonymous'. He was especially busy toward the latter part of his troubled life, some would say, in order to support his voracious drug habit..

This album, as the title suggests, is about Chet Baker's singing. Someone once said that if Mel Torme had married Blossom Dearie and produced a child, that child's name would be Chet Baker.

His was an understated voice quality variously described as 'haunting' - 'weak' - 'effeminate' - 'pure' - 'simple - 'fragile' - 'delicate' - 'sensitive' - 'unique' - and it was certainly all those things, and probably more; but love him or hate him, he was still able to leave his indelible mark on jazz history as one of the top four or five male jazz singers of the '60s, '70s and '80s'  For an incisive and comprehensive critique of most of Baker's recorded body of work as a trumpet player (his first calling)  by jazz critic Bob Oakley of Jazz Journal International, click here.

Baker had a unique gift for being able to reduce a love song to its barest essentials, whether singing it or playing it and the parallels between the two are obvious. 'My phrasing as a singer has been influenced a lot by my playing. If I hadn't been a trumpet player, I don't know if I would have arrived at singing that way. I probably wouldn't have. I don't know whether I'm a trumpet player who sings or a singer who plays the trumpet. I love to do both.' [Chet Baker quoted on the liner notes]

There is though, at least one distinct departure from this parallel. Unlike his penchant for staying, for the most part, in the middle registers when playing trumpet, his range is broader and he seems to be quite comfortable at the upper ends of the scale in his singing.

A master of pitch with the keenest sense of tone, he could nail a note right smack dab on - every time - perfectly and precisely, never having to start higher or lower before sliding into it. Even though, contrary to rumors, he could and did read music, he preferred playing and singing by ear. One playing colleague recalled how amazed he was that Baker, without the benefit of a chart, and even though he may not have ever played a song before, could uncannily anticipate and recognize all the chord changes.

He was always at his best when swinging softly, as evidenced by Kern's  But Not For Me, track 2 or the whimsical Loesser- McHugh tune, Let's Get Lost, track 12. Most critics would probably agree that his voice, beguiling though it may have been, lacked the stentorian timbre that some consider necessary for the consistent and convincing selling of a slow ballad, a shortcoming that was far less noticeable in up-tempo tunes; eg, Track 1, The Thrill Is Gone, or track 10,  I Get Along Without You, and even though they'll try to make that argument over and over again... still...his wistful, at times, fragile - even androgynous, 'about to fall apart' - ballad delivery was not entirely without its devastating effect on the opposite sex. (Whichever that happened to be) Not by a long-shot:

'Have you ever heard someone who couldn't sing, but did something to you emotionally?' [Ornette Coleman quoted on the liner notes]

These twenty tracks provide an ideal showcase for Baker's early work as a vocalist - a period ranging from 1953 with his first recording session and his first song, I Fall In Love Too Easily, track 8, through Like Someone In Love in 1956. His main-man piano accompanist, Russ Freeman, provides an essential element to the album's overall appeal.

One of my personal favorites on this album, inexplicably, is the 1920 Jerome Kern - Buddy DeSylva  song, Look For The Silver Lining. For its simple, unpretentious clarity, I suppose.This tune has been done instrumentally by such jazz luminaries as Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond and it's even been sung by Susannah McCorckle, but never with the same emotional pull and passion as Chet Baker's version. As Will Friedwald opines on the album's liner notes, '....that's 'cause the source of his inspiration in singing isn't to work the crowd, to win popularity or to rest his embrouchure; Chet Baker sings out of love for the songs.' It certainly does appear that way.

There are, of course, a couple of let-downs, not the least of which, I'm sad to say, is the group's rendition of the old stand-by, I've Never Been In Love Before. I can't remember how Frank Loesser originally wrote this for Guys And Dolls, but what I do know is that it works so much better at up-tempo rather than in the slow, muzak-ian pace as done here.

There are many delightful moments on this disc. From the rarely played up-tempo verse and  stop-tempo interludes on But Not For Me to the swinging, driving bass of Jimmy Bond and the outstanding drum-cymbal work of Peter Littman on That Old Feeling and - maybe the biggest surprise of all - My Buddy. Check out Baker's Harmon mute technique, which, in my opinion, in every way, is compararble to the mute-happy Miles Davis.

This album is a rare treasure  of oldies and goodies with lots of examples of what straight-ahead jazz singing has been all about this past half-century and, for my money, still is.

L.A.

Track Listing:
1) The Thrill Is Gone (Brown/Henderson) 2:46
2) But Not For Me (G. Gershwin/I.Gershwin) 3:00
3) Time After Time ( Styne/Cahn) 2:44
4) I Get Along Without You Very Well (Carmichael) 2:56
5) There Will Never Be Another You (Warren/Gordon) 2:56
6) Look For The Silver Lining (DeSylva/Kern) 2:36
7) My Funny Valentine (Rogers/Hart) 2:15   
8) I Fall In Love Too Easily (Styne/Cahn) 3:18
9) Daybreak (Grofe/Adamson) 2:38
10) Just Friends (Klenner/Lewis)  2:40
11) I Remember You (Mercer/Schertzinger) 3:12
12) Let's Get Lost (Loesser/McHugh) 3:41
13) Long Ago And Far Away (I. Gershwin/Kern) 3:55
14) You Don't Know What Love Is (Raye/DePaul) 4:48
15) That Old Feeling (Brown/Fain) 2:59
16) It's Always You (Van Heusen/Burke) 3:31
17) I've Never Been In Love Before (Loesser) 4:23
18) My Buddy (Kahn/Donaldson)  3:16
19) Like Someone In Love(Burke/VanHeusen) 2:23
20) My Ideal(Chase/Whiting-Robin)  4:19

Click on album cover image in side-bar for mp3 sound clips.

Comments

[greg hester]

Great article on Chet. I ran across him in Germany in the late 70's. He was with an all German band. He took every solo and each one was played with extreme emotion. He came to play. Back stage he could barely talk. I shook his hand and it was limp. Years earlier I was scheduled to back him up in Los Gatos at the Cats Restaurant. I think it was around 1976. The week before the gig he played a small job south of San Jose. He borrowed a horn and hawked it after the gig. the owner or the horn punched him out and he lost a couple of teeth. He cancelled out of the one time I was to play with him. Greg Hester

[Lisa]

I think "I've Never been in Love Before" is a gem. I love his slow motion, behind the beat rendition. His trumpet solo is sad and sweet. I find it almost heart breaking. I was really surprised to hear you voice disappointment in this tune. It is my favorite one on the album (oops, CD)