Chet Baker

Recorded in Chicago on a single date in February 1958, this meeting of the two most lyrical voices in cool jazz has the slightly detached quality of a summit that was arranged rather than naturally arrived at. Both Getz and Baker sound as good as they were, and the combination of tenor saxophone and trumpet creates a tonal palette that is genuinely beautiful: Getz's warm, large sound and Baker's lighter, more focused trumpet occupy adjacent registers and complement each other throughout.

The Chicago rhythm section of Jodie Christian, Victor Sproles, and Marshall Thompson is competent and willing but not of the same caliber as either musician's usual associates. This shapes the recording in ways that are more audible than they should be: the soloists play as well as ever, but the rhythmic foundation is slightly less secure than the best Baker and Getz records, and the difference affects how freely the two principals play. They work around it professionally, but you can hear them working.

An essential record for fans of either musician, a fine record for everyone else, and slightly below the peak recordings of both. The world did not get enough recordings of these two playing together, and this one documents what that combination was capable of even under less than ideal circumstances.

Five years after the first Sings album and Baker had refined the approach to the point where every deliberate quality about it had been absorbed and the music sounds unconsidered, natural, simply what the voice does when it meets a song it understands. The title track is one of his finest performances: a song about the way love arrives without warning, sung by a musician who understands the feeling from the inside and transmits it without commentary.

The selection of material shows real intelligence about what suits his particular strengths: songs that carry emotional weight without requiring dramatic delivery, lyrics that reward the kind of quiet attention Baker gives them, chord structures that let Freeman's harmony breathe around the vocal. Every track on this record was chosen correctly, and the performances fulfill the choices without exception.

One of the two or three essential Baker vocal records, along with the original Sings. If you are trying to understand what the fuss was about and are starting here, the fuss will be immediately comprehensible. If you already know the earlier record, this one shows where the approach arrived after five years of inhabiting it. Both are necessary.

The move to Riverside and the New York rhythm section produce the sharpest, hardest-swinging Baker record of his career. Johnny Griffin's tenor saxophone is as different from Art Pepper's alto as a front-line partner could be: where Pepper shared Baker's lyrical quality and emotional temperature, Griffin plays with an overwhelming urgency and density that demands Baker step up or be left behind. Baker steps up. The album is a revelation for anyone who had assumed he was only comfortable in cool settings.

Al Haig brings a bebop vocabulary to the piano that Freeman's harmonic sophistication never quite had, and the combination with Chambers and Philly Joe Jones creates the hardest rhythm section Baker had ever played in front of. The effect is audible immediately: Baker's playing is more angular, more harmonically adventurous, pushed by the rhythm section into phrasing he would not have found on a West Coast date.

One of the best arguments for Baker as a complete musician rather than a specialist in a single style. The intimacy is gone, replaced by something equally valuable: the sound of a musician discovered by a context he had not inhabited before and found to be entirely at home there.

Baker does not sing on this record: he leads the band for a young vocalist named Johnny Pace who Riverside wanted to introduce to the market. Baker's trumpet appears throughout and the instrumental performances are excellent, but the featured voice belongs to Pace, whose warm baritone sits in the tradition of the male jazz vocalists of the period without quite having Baker's particular quality of vulnerability.

Herbie Mann's flute and bass clarinet add an unusual texture to the ensemble, lighter than a saxophone and more penetrating than a piano, and the combination with Baker's trumpet creates a front-line character unlike any of the other Riverside sessions. Joe Berle's piano comping is attentive and tasteful, serving the vocal arrangements without drawing attention away from Pace. The rhythm section alternates between Philly Joe Jones and Ed Thigpen on drums, both providing precisely the kind of supportive, swinging accompaniment the material requires.

An important item in the discography for what it documents even if it is not essential listening in the way the best Baker records are. Pace sings with genuine conviction and warmth, and Baker's trumpet contributions are uniformly excellent, but the record belongs to the singer rather than the sidemen.

The culmination of everything Baker had been building toward since the first Russ Freeman quartet sessions, and the record that answers every critical reservation about his seriousness. The personnel alone commands attention: Bill Evans, Paul Chambers, Kenny Burrell, Connie Kay, Pepper Adams, Herbie Mann. This is a New York all-star session assembled around Baker's voice and trumpet, and every musician on the date brings their best work. Evans's piano on the ballads is some of his finest accompanying, a master class in how to support a soloist without competing with them.

The one-word title is both humble and confident: this is what he is, just this, nothing more and nothing less. The music fulfills the claim. Baker's trumpet has never sounded more assured than it does on the uptempo tracks with this rhythm section, and the ballad performances with Evans at the piano achieve a kind of perfection that is almost painful to listen to, the two instruments finding a shared emotional register that neither could have found alone.

The decade ended with this record, and it stands as a summary of everything Baker had accomplished in seven years: the lyricism, the intimacy, the ability to inhabit every style from cool to hard bop without losing the specific quality that made him himself. Chet is not just his best record. It is the statement that the first part of his career had been building toward.

Six months after Chet, Baker was back at Reeves Sound Studios for another Orrin Keepnews production, this time organized around a single-composer songbook concept. Lerner and Loewe had four major shows in circulation by mid-1959, My Fair Lady, Brigadoon, Gigi, and Paint Your Wagon, and jazz musicians had been working that catalog steadily since the cast album of the first one arrived in 1956. The set list pulls four tracks from My Fair Lady and fills out the rest with one selection each from the other three.

The band is a partial reshuffle of the Chet personnel. Pepper Adams and Herbie Mann are back, now with Zoot Sims added on tenor and alto to thicken the front line. Kenny Burrell and Connie Kay are gone, replaced by Earl May on bass and Clifford Jarvis on drums. The piano chair is split: Bob Corwin plays four tracks and Bill Evans plays the other four. That split is not a footnote. It is the most interesting structural feature of the record, because Evans and Corwin bring such different things to Baker that each half of the album almost functions as its own session.

"On the Street Where You Live" is the centerpiece at nearly nine minutes, a stretched-out blowing vehicle with solos from the full horn section. "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face" opens the record at a tempo that dares you not to feel something, Baker's trumpet stating the melody with the unhurried phrasing that was by now his signature. "Show Me" at the end lets the group push harder than anywhere else on the date. The program is smart, the performances are consistently considered, and if nothing here reaches the ballad peaks that Chet reached, nothing really needs to.

The record has always lived in Chet's shadow, which is fair, but it is a better album than that framing usually suggests. The Evans tracks alone would justify keeping it in circulation, and the Corwin tracks hold their own within the context of Baker's working approach at the time. Taken as a follow-up rather than a sequel, it closes out the Riverside run with more character than it is usually given credit for.