Chet Baker

Baker was twenty-three and had just come off his celebrated stay with the Gerry Mulligan Quartet, where the pianoless format and the two-voice conversation with baritone saxophone had made him briefly famous. Pacific Jazz wanted to capture what that group had found and put it in a format Baker could call his own. What emerged was something quieter and more intimate than the Mulligan records: a quartet that played without urgency, as if time was something to inhabit rather than keep.

Russ Freeman was already Baker's most compatible musical partner, a pianist of exquisite taste who understood how to lay a harmonic cushion without calling attention to it. His comping behind Baker's trumpet creates a kind of sympathetic resonance, each phrase answered rather than simply accompanied. Carson Smith and Larry Bunker are unobtrusive and steady, giving the two principals exactly the support they need and no more.

The cool jazz label fits and doesn't fit simultaneously. The music is emotionally cool in temperature but not detached: Baker plays with feeling, just feeling that does not announce itself. The difference between this and the more overtly emotional East Coast approach is one of expression rather than substance. Both are about something real. This one just doesn't tell you what it is.

The voice sold more records than the trumpet ever had or would, and the critics who hated it most were often the ones who had to admit it was doing something real. Baker sang without vibrato and without what most jazz singers meant by technique: no swooping, no demonstrating range, no invitation to be impressed. He sang the way you might tell someone something important in a quiet room. "My Funny Valentine" became his signature because the song describes a person defined by their imperfections, and Baker sang it as though he understood that from the inside.

The same qualities that made his trumpet playing distinctive translate directly: the understated delivery, the careful placement of syllables, the sense that he is listening to the words as he sings them rather than simply delivering them. The melancholy that runs through everything is real rather than performed. The effect on the listener is a kind of intimacy that most singers spend careers trying to manufacture.

Russ Freeman's piano, Carson Smith's bass, and Bob Neel's light drumming create the same kind of supportive environment that the instrumental records use. Everything is arranged to make room for the voice, which is wise: this voice needs room. It fills space not by being large but by implying depths that you want to explore. The best records do that.

The University of Michigan concert captures the Baker quartet in a live setting that loosens the music considerably from the studio recordings. This is the same core group that made the Pacific Jazz studio dates: Baker and Freeman up front, with Carson Smith and Bob Neel providing the rhythmic foundation. The college venue strips away the studio's careful control and lets the music breathe in ways the controlled environment didn't allow.

The college audience is present but not intrusive, and the applause between tracks gives the record the slight documentary quality of a live performance captured rather than constructed. Neel drives the rhythm section with more urgency than the studio records, and Freeman's piano solos are longer and more adventurous when given the space that live performance provides.

The set list draws from the standard repertoire of the Baker group at this point, no surprises but every performance slightly different from the familiar studio versions. Baker's tone in a live room has a presence that the studio recordings only hint at, and Freeman matches him with some of his most engaged playing on record.

The sextet format gives Baker a richer ensemble palette and more complex written material, with the three-horn front line of trumpet, valve trombone, and baritone saxophone creating a layered quality that the quartet records deliberately avoid. Bob Brookmeyer's valve trombone adds a warm middle voice between Baker's trumpet and Bud Shank's baritone, and the written ensemble passages have a density the smaller groups didn't attempt. Whether you prefer this or the quartet depends on whether you want the color or the intimacy.

Shelly Manne behind the drums changes the character of the rhythm section: where Larry Bunker was gentle and unobtrusive, Manne is more assertive and propulsive without being heavy-handed. The difference is audible in how the soloists play: there is slightly more urgency in Baker's lines here, a little more forward momentum. Brookmeyer's trombone and Shank's baritone create a textural contrast in the ensemble passages that generates real interest.

An underrated record in the Baker catalog precisely because the quartet sessions and the vocal albums get most of the attention. For anyone interested in what West Coast jazz arrangement could accomplish at its most sophisticated, the Sextet sessions are a better document than most.

The dual format album that makes the case that the vocalist and the trumpet player are the same artist reaching the same ends by two different routes. On vocal tracks Baker inhabits the lyric the way he inhabits a standard as an instrumentalist: from inside, with attention to the harmonic implications of each syllable, letting the words determine where the phrases resolve rather than imposing an external idea of phrasing onto the material. The instrumental tracks show what happens when the words are removed: the same quality of attention, the same emotional temperature, just the trumpet saying what the voice said.

Russ Freeman is on the piano throughout and this is one of the better documents of that partnership: on the vocal tracks he accompanies with a sensitivity to Baker's timing that is remarkable, giving him room and catching him when he stretches a phrase longer than expected. On the instrumental tracks the two of them move as a unit, the piano comping anticipating what the trumpet is about to do.

Pacific Jazz's recording quality on these sessions is excellent, the trumpet placed clearly in the center of the soundstage with the rhythm section behind and around it. A useful record for anyone who wants to understand why musicians who had never heard anyone quite like Baker immediately understood what he was doing.

Baker's reception in Europe was warmer and more sustained than in America, where the critical establishment was already finding reasons to discount him: too pretty, too soft, not serious enough. Europeans heard the same music and found a serious artist who happened to be beautiful. The touring sessions from 1955 document Baker adapting to different rhythm sections in different cities, and the adaptation is seamless: his playing does not depend on a specific band sound the way some musicians' does. He sounds like himself everywhere.

The European rhythm sections vary in quality and compatibility, but Baker's trumpet is unchanged regardless of what is behind it. There are performances here that are as relaxed and focused as anything he recorded in Los Angeles, and others where you can hear him finding the accommodations a touring musician makes. Both kinds are valuable documents: the first because they are simply excellent music, the second because they show how a musician maintains identity under pressure.

Vocals are scattered through the set, and the performances of familiar material from the Sings albums benefit from the looser context. Baker's phrasing on "My Funny Valentine" away from the studio has a slightly different quality, as if the song is newer to him than it should be. Which is exactly right.

The hardest-swinging record Baker had made to that point, and the shift in character is largely attributable to Bobby Timmons. The gospel-blues piano that Timmons brought to everything he played pushes Baker in a more earthbound direction than the airy coolness of the Freeman recordings. Phil Urso's tenor saxophone adds weight to the front line, and the combination creates a sound that is identifiably Baker but with more muscle than the Pacific Jazz records had previously contained.

Baker responds well to the challenge. His trumpet lines are more assertive here, the phrases placed with more attack, the blues content turned up without being manufactured. He was always a more versatile player than the cool jazz label suggested, and this record is good evidence: the same sensibility that made the gentle vocal recordings works in a harder rhythmic context, because the sensibility is about listening and responding rather than maintaining a fixed temperature.

The album represents Baker's most direct engagement with the hard bop style that was dominating East Coast jazz in 1956, and the engagement is genuine rather than commercial. The cool and the hot turned out to share a common root that Baker and Timmons were both native to.

The commercial logic of the big band album is clear: Pacific Jazz wanted to reach listeners who had responded to the vocal records but might want something with more production scope. Marty Paich's arrangements are intelligent and well-crafted, the ensemble played with Los Angeles precision, and Baker's trumpet is given prominent solo space throughout. As a document of competent professional jazz production in 1956, it delivers what it promises.

The problem is that Baker's specific gifts do not benefit from the big band setting. The intimacy that makes him distinctive is a function of space: his trumpet sounds best when there is room around it, when you can hear the silence before and after each phrase. Big band writing fills that space with organized sound, which is its purpose but not Baker's. He plays well within the format but does not transform it, and the arrangements do not find a way to use his particular qualities rather than simply placing them in front of the ensemble.

For completists and for listeners interested in how the West Coast big band sound of the 1950s worked in practice, this is a fine example of the form. For listeners primarily drawn to Baker's intimate qualities, the quartet and vocal records serve better.

Art Pepper's alto saxophone and Chet Baker's trumpet are two of the most beautiful sounds in West Coast jazz, and the decision to put them together on a record was either the most obvious thing imaginable or a genuine act of curatorial intelligence. Both players had the same quality: a lyrical gift that made even complex harmonic material sound inevitable, a tone that was warm without being soft, a California quality that had nothing to do with geography and everything to do with how both men heard music.

Pete Jolly's piano fits between them well, providing harmonic support without imposing character, letting the two horns carry the conversation. Curtis Counce and Lawrence Marable are the right rhythm section for this meeting: rhythmically secure without being heavy, driving without pressure. The five of them play as if they have been playing together for years, which in some cases they had: the Los Angeles jazz scene of the 1950s was a community, and these musicians knew each other's playing intimately.

This is the definitive West Coast cool jazz front-line recording: not because it is the most technically accomplished but because it captures what the movement at its best actually felt like, which was lyrical, personal, and quietly beautiful without any self-consciousness about any of those qualities.

The most concentrated document of the Baker-Freeman partnership, and the title's unusual co-billing is accurate: Freeman is not a sideman here but a co-equal voice whose contribution to the music is as essential as Baker's. Leroy Vinnegar's bass brings a slightly deeper groove than Carson Smith, and Shelly Manne gives the rhythm section a more assertive character than Larry Bunker. The result is the intimate Baker quartet sound with slightly more rhythmic traction underneath it.

Freeman's piano compositions appear throughout the set, which is a significant difference from earlier Baker quartet records that drew primarily from the standard repertoire. The originals give the group material that has been conceived with the specific instrumentation in mind, and the fit is exact: every Freeman original sounds like it was written for this trumpet sound in this quartet, which it was.

If you are going to own one Baker quartet record without vocals, this is the one. The combination of Freeman's writing, Vinnegar and Manne's rhythmic sophistication, and Baker's trumpet playing at its most lyrical produces the quartet format at its most fully realized. Everything the cool jazz movement was reaching toward, this record finds.

The third vocal album in three years, and the formula is unchanged because the formula works: Baker, Freeman, standards, tempos that give the voice room to breathe. The Gershwin title track is among his finest vocal performances, a song about the desire to hold someone close given a reading that is about as close as Baker ever comes to sentimentality without actually arriving there. The sentiment is real but it is observed rather than wallowed in, which is always his method.

By 1957 the influence of the Sings album was visible across a generation of jazz vocalists, male and female, who had absorbed Baker's understated delivery and the idea that restraint could be its own form of expressiveness. Baker himself sounds unaffected by his influence and continues to sing as if discovering these songs for the first time, which is the hardest and most important quality for any musician to maintain.

Instrumental tracks interspersed between the vocals provide contrast without disrupting the album's emotional consistency. Freeman's playing is, as always, exactly right, and the overall production maintains the warmth of the earlier Pacific Jazz sessions. Not the essential Baker vocal album but an excellent one.