Chet Baker
Chet Baker's first six years as a recording leader produced more music than most jazz musicians make in a lifetime. The Pacific Jazz catalog defined West Coast cool; the move to Riverside at the end of the decade hardened his sound and put him alongside the East Coast small-group mainstream. The comeback years that began on CTI in 1974 ran to the Tokyo farewell of 1987. Twenty-one albums across three eras. Browse below.
Browse by Era
Each era page covers a distinct period in Chet's career, with full reviews, personnel details, Apple Music audio previews, and album art for every record.
Eleven Pacific Jazz and World Pacific records from Baker's first stretch as a leader on the West Coast. The quartet with Russ Freeman, the vocal sessions that broke him commercially, and the early international tours that began before his addiction problems took hold.
Six records from the late 1950s when Baker moved his recording base east to New York. The Stan Getz collaboration on Verve, the final Pacific Jazz date, and the four Riverside albums that include Chet Baker in New York and the Lerner and Loewe set.
Four records from the long late period after the lost 1960s. The CTI comeback She Was Too Good to Me with Paul Desmond, the Copenhagen SteepleChase dates with Doug Raney and Duke Jordan, and the farewell live set Chet Baker in Tokyo, recorded eleven months before his death.
Seven landmark Chet records embedded as full-album videos: Chet, Quartet with Russ Freeman, Picture of Heath, She Was Too Good to Me, The Touch of Your Lips, No Problem, and Chet Baker in Tokyo.
Open the Chet Baker video page →Chet Baker, 1929–1988
Chesney Henry Baker Jr. was born December 23, 1929 in Yale, Oklahoma, and moved to California with his family in 1940. He took up the trumpet as a teenager and was largely self-taught. After a stretch in the Army, he was working clubs in Los Angeles by the early 1950s, and Gerry Mulligan's pianoless quartet of 1952 to 1953 put him at the center of the West Coast cool jazz movement.
The Pacific Jazz catalog reviewed here runs from the first quartet date in 1953 through the late-1957 sessions, with the vocal records that made him a commercial crossover figure in 1954 and 1955. Chet Baker Sings remains the record most non-jazz audiences associate with him.
His move to New York in 1958 produced the Riverside sessions that close this catalog. The narcotics convictions and European prison stretches that defined the second half of his life were still in front of him when the Riverside catalog closed. The comeback years page picks the story up in 1974, through the CTI return, the European SteepleChase dates, and the Tokyo concert recorded eleven months before his death in Amsterdam on May 13, 1988.
Baker died on May 13, 1988, in Amsterdam, after falling (or being pushed) from a hotel window. He was fifty-eight.