Chet Baker

[Manton]

I was introduced to this by someone a long time ago, forgot about it, then somehow remembered it. Awesome.

 

[Philip]

'The Best of Chet Baker Sings' is very good for rainy nights

 

[Manton]

I think Parker was Chet Baker in a previous life.

 

[romafan]

[ATTACHMENT=1729]Chet.jpg (30k. jpg file)[/ATTACHMENT]

Love the music - not so crazy about the singing. The sets Mosaic put out are very nice.....

 

[Connemara]

Not my favorite voice but it is very sincere. And when he was good he was great.

 

[Manton]

I remember when I first heard it. I was like, Is this some kind of gag? Hipster irony avant la lettre? No one can really think this is good; is it like it's so bad it's good?

Now, much of my fondness for the music stems from fond memories of the person who introduced it to me and the situation at the time, which was rather ... um ... well I'll leave it there.

However, I now actually think it is good music. His rendition of Funny Valentine is gold.

 

[Connemara]



I remember when I first heard it. I was like, Is this some kind of gag? Hipster irony avant la lettre? No one can really think this is good; is it like it's so bad it's good?
Now, much of my fondness for the music stems from fond memories of the person who introduced it to me and the situation at the time, which was rather ... um ... well I'll leave it there.
However, I now actually think it is good music. His rendition of Funny Valentine is gold.

Awwww.

To be honest I don't listen to Baker. When it comes to jazz there's so much stuff that I enjoy a lot more.

 

[Parker]

Chet Baker by Dave Hickey from his Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy. On his popularity and how he confounded the critics.

"So, while most jazz albums of the period include, at best, five long instrumentals, Chet Baker Sings is made up of eighteen two-and-one-half-minute cuts—played and sung without any of the popular signifiers of "jazz expression." There is no vibrato, no "beautiful" singing, and no "strong" statement. There are no extended solos, no range dynamics, no volume dynamics, no tempo dynamics, no expressive timbre shifts, no suppression of extant melodics, no harmonic meandering, no virtuoso high-speed scales, and, in fact, very few sixteenth-notes—none of that stuff, in short, that told jazz critics of the time what the player was doing and how "good" he was at it. All you got was the song—dispassionately articulated with lots of spaces—swinging to be sure, but played mid-tempo and mid-range, shot through with melodic and rhythmic nuance that defied notation or interpretation. Baker's album, then, was a totally other form of expression for its time. Its only contemporary aesthetic analogy was in the cool economy and intellectual athletics of long-board surfing—another lost art of living in real time that may be coming back."

All the while, the minions and mavens of the "serious jazz world" stood on the sidelines, exasperated on the one hand that Baker refused to do something "historical," like Miles, that they could write about and teach in their college courses, and annoyed on the other hand that he continued to play so beautifully, that he refused to quit and be the bum they wished he was. "It really pissed them off, " Lowell George told me once, "that they couldn't learn anything from Chet's playing, not anything they could teach. All they could learn was that he could do it, and they couldn't. It was all about thinking and breathing in real time, and they couldn't grasp that. It had too much to do with life, with how you live in time."

 

[nohio]

His brief solo on "Time after time" from that album is one of my favorites. In the space of 16 bars he develops a germinal idea, builds to a climax, and provides a perfect transition back into the vocals. The concision of Bix, the silence of Davis, and the melodicism of Lester Young. Lots to like there.

If you can get a hold of it, I highly recommend his album The Best Thing for You. (Also, available as part of a double album, although the other half is not worth the price of admission.) Features: Kenny Barron, Paul Desmond, Ron Carter, and others. Great playing and singing, although much later in his career.