Chet Baker

The real comeback record. After the lost decade, the beating that cost him his teeth, the years pumping gas, Creed Taylor put Baker in Van Gelder's studio with the CTI house band and bet that the voice and the trumpet still worked. They did. The embouchure had been painfully rebuilt, the sound was more fragile than the Riverside years, and that fragility turned out to be the point: every phrase on this record sounds like it costs something, and the material, starting with the Rodgers and Hart title song, leans into exactly that quality.

The band is pure mid-1970s CTI: Bob James on electric piano, Ron Carter on bass, Steve Gadd or Jack DeJohnette on drums, Hubert Laws floating overhead, Don Sebesky doing the charts. It could have smothered him in studio gloss. Mostly it doesn't. The arrangements stay out of the way, and the guest spots from Paul Desmond on "Autumn Leaves" and "Tangerine" are the album's quiet masterstroke: two of the softest voices in jazz, circling the melody like they'd been playing together for decades. "Autumn Leaves" became one of the most loved tracks of Baker's entire catalog, and it earns the affection.

It's not the Riverside peak, and the electric piano dates it to its decade. But as the record that proved Chet Baker still existed, and that the second half of the story would be worth hearing, it's indispensable. The comeback starts here.

No drums, no piano. Just trumpet, Doug Raney's guitar, and Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen's bass, recorded in Copenhagen for the Danish SteepleChase label during the years Baker made Europe his home. The instrumentation is the whole review in miniature: by 1979 Baker wanted settings where nothing pushed and nothing covered, and this trio gives him the most exposed platform of his late career. Every note he plays sits in open air.

It works because the other two musicians are ideal. Raney, son of Jimmy Raney and barely into his twenties, plays with the harmonic patience of someone twice his age, and NHØP was simply the most complete bassist in Europe, able to walk, counterpoint, and solo at a level that makes a drummer feel redundant. The eight-minute "I Waited for You" sets the temperature, and Baker sings on two tracks, including the Ray Noble title song, in the threadbare late voice that splits listeners cleanly into two camps. I'm in the camp that finds it devastating.

AllMusic's Yanow called this the perfect setting for late-period Baker, and the Penguin Guide ranks it among the best of the European years. Within the enormous and uneven late discography, this is one of the safe harbors: an unhurried, completely honest hour of music. Start the SteepleChase period here.

A working quartet date with a twist: every composition is by the pianist. Duke Jordan, Charlie Parker's old pianist and by then a fellow expatriate in Copenhagen, brought seven of his own tunes to the session, including the title track, the one he wrote for the French film Les Liaisons Dangereuses back in 1959. Playing an all-Jordan book pushes Baker off the standards repertoire he could navigate asleep, and the effort is audible in the best way. He has to listen, and late Baker listening hard is a beautiful thing.

Jordan's tunes are deceptive: simple singable themes over changes with real corners in them. "Sultry Eve" and "Glad I Met Pat" are the keepers, melodies that sound like standards you somehow never heard. Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen anchors his second album in this list without breaking a sweat, and Norman Fearrington keeps the drums soft-shoed and supportive. The whole record runs at a glow rather than a boil, which is exactly where this band belongs.

Not a landmark, just a deeply satisfying session from the European years, and the Jordan songbook angle makes it more distinctive than most of the era's quartet dates. If The Touch of Your Lips is the late-period ballad statement, this is the late-period working-band statement. Both reward the time.

Eleven months before the end, and instead of a sad document of decline, the Tokyo concert turns out to be the best recorded evidence that the old man could still do all of it. The Japanese audience, the same one that lifted Art Pepper a decade earlier, gives Baker the absolute attention his music always needed, and he responds with a two-hour set that has both of the things people claimed late Baker couldn't deliver at once: the painfully eloquent ballads and real, hard, fast trumpet playing.

The working band of Harold Danko, Hein Van Der Geyn, and John Engels had the road miles to follow him anywhere. "Stella by Starlight" opens at ten minutes and earns all of them. Elvis Costello's "Almost Blue," the song Costello wrote under Baker's spell in the first place, comes home here in its definitive version. The fourteen-minute "My Funny Valentine" closes the first half, the song he'd been singing for thirty-four years, now sounding like a man reading his own letters from a great distance. Then the second set opens with Miles's "Four" taken at a clip that should not have been possible with that embouchure, that health, that year.

Originally issued in Japan as two separate albums, Memories and Four, and later collected as a double set, this is the essential late Baker record, full stop. If the story of the comeback years needs a closing argument, Tokyo is it: not a survivor coasting on myth, but a great musician playing great music right up against the edge of his life.