Chet Baker Essentials

Chet Baker Essentials

With his soft caress of a voice and trumpet tones to match, Chet Baker pioneered and personified the cool school of jazz in the ‘50s. Listening to him volley with Art Pepper on a tune like “Tynan Time” makes it clear he'd done his bebop homework. But Baker took jazz someplace else: His haunting croon could make a standard like “My Funny Valentine” feel inexplicably modern, and when he laid his graceful, deceptively easy-flowing trumpet lines down with Gerry Mulligan on “Walkin' Shoes”, he epitomised an arch but unhurried stylistic stance that helped put “cool jazz” into the musical lexicon.

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