Chet Baker - Chet (2021 Craft Recordings/Riverside 180g Vinyl LP)

Chet Baker - Chet | 180g Vinyl LP - Craft Recordings/Riverside Reissue (CR00359)

Keepnews wanted to record Baker as an instrumentalist. By late 1958, Baker's vocal albums had overshadowed his trumpet playing, and Keepnews assembled a cast of musicians designed to put the horn back at the centre. Bill Evans had just left Miles Davis's group. Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones were still in it. Connie Kay came from the Modern Jazz Quartet. Pepper Adams brought a baritone saxophone that sits in the opposite register from Baker's trumpet, creating a tonal spread that gives even the smallest ensemble moments a sense of weight. Mann's flute adds colour from the upper register. Kenny Burrell plays on only two tracks ("It Never Entered My Mind" and "September Song"), the sessions where Adams and Mann sit out, and those sparser quartet readings are among the album's most intimate moments. "Alone Together" opens with Baker's tone at its most characteristic: soft, vibrato-less, each phrase placed with the precision of someone who knows that silence is as important as sound. Evans comps beneath him with the same economy, and Chambers holds the bottom with a warmth that Jack Higgins's close-miked engineering captures clearly.

The December 30 session produced six tracks with Connie Kay on drums. The January 19 session, with Philly Joe Jones, produced the remaining three. The two drummers bring different textures: Kay's brushwork is feathery and precise, Jones's is busier and pushes the tempo slightly harder. Baker adjusts to each without changing his approach. "How High The Moon" is the most uptempo piece, Adams and Mann trading lines with Baker over Kay's ride cymbal. "You'd Be So Nice To Come Home To" swings harder than almost anything else on the album. "'Tis Autumn" and "Time On My Hands" are ballads where Evans's piano and Baker's trumpet sound like two halves of the same instrument. The album is entirely standards, no originals, and the playing never pushes beyond what the material needs. Baker was 29, already carrying the weight of addiction and displacement, and the quietness of the playing is not passivity. It's control.

This is the Craft Recordings reissue on CR00359, mastered and lacquer cut by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio from the original analogue master tapes, pressed on 180g vinyl at RTI.