CHET BAKER
Chet
Riverside
Chet
Baker Pacific Jazz Reissues: Chet Baker & Crew and
Deep In a Dream
Walking
On Clouds: Richard Twardzik with Chet Baker in Europe, 1955
It’s clear from the new set of liner
notes to this 1959 album that Orrin Keepnews does not have
fond memories of the time he spent working with Chet Baker
on his four Riverside Records releases. “Regardless
of outward appearances, around Chet I was always aware of
that feeling of anxiety, of trying to complete my work before
something had a chance to explode” he writes. He concludes
by telling us: “I rarely saw Chet in his later years,
but I did run into him at a bar in San Francisco in the
Eighties. He looked old and dried out, but his conversation
hadn’t changed much. He was, he said, still playing
great. Actually, he had a tape with him he’d like
me to hear…I left quickly, not bothering much about
being polite.”
Nonetheless, this album of ballads, one of
four that he cut for Riverside, is really well worth hearing,
and belongs in the collection of anyone who cares about
Baker and his music at all. The song selection is very sympathetic
to Baker’s overall playing and mood, and the supporting
cast is of the highest caliber. Baker is flanked by baritone
saxophonist Pepper Adams and flautist Herbie Mann. Bill
Evans, who cut his second album as a leader, Everybody
Digs Bill Evans, only a few weeks before these sessions
with Baker, is in the piano chair. Guitarist Kenny Burrell,
bassist Paul Chambers, and alternating drummers Connie Kay
and Philly Joe Jones round out the group.
Both Adams’ baritone sax and Herbie
Mann’s flute provide good counterpoints to Baker’s
slightly melancholy trumpet sound. By now it’s a cliché
(though a true one) that Baker took his sound and much of
his overall musical stance from Miles Davis, but that’s
true of so many trumpet players to this day that one can
hardly fault Baker for it, particularly since he clearly
absorbed Davis’ lessons so well. Chet didn’t
sell any better than any of Baker’s other Riverside
releases, but it earned a modicum of critical praise, which
certainly wasn’t the case for the vocal album It
Could Happen To You or the instrumental Chet Baker
in New York.
Time has been kind to this release, though,
and that is no doubt one reason Keepnews decided to bring
it out as part of this collection. Though no love was lost
between producer and artist, it must be gratifying to have
pulled this recording out of the bag under such difficult
circumstances. And in the end it’s the music that
we’re talking about here, and the music that still
stands as something beautiful and quite apart from the life
of its creator. Listening to Baker’s slow-motion phrasing
underpinned by Bill Evans’ dreamy chords and solo,
one cannot deny that this is purely jazz, and well-played
jazz at that. It’s not innovative jazz, nor was it
particularly so in 1959, but if jazz were reduced to its
merely innovative recordings, there would be an extremely
small group of performances to discuss. What’s here,
though, in the words of Spencer Tracey, is ‘cherce’.
