Chet Baker

A notoriously tortured soul, Chet Baker performed a nearly unimaginable feat: Like Louis Armstrong before him, he managed to revolutionize the sound of both jazz trumpet playing and singing. Born in Oklahoma in 1929, he developed a love for the progressive jazz of the ’40s while in the Army. Living in Los Angeles and playing trumpet in the Gerry Mulligan Quartet in the early ’50s, Baker became an integral figure in the city’s burgeoning cool-jazz scene. On the merits of his debut vocal album, 1954’s Chet Baker Sings, Baker established a legacy as a singer; it features many of the standards that defined his career, delivered in his customarily melancholic and anti-virtuosic fashion. Baker recorded many more influential LPs in the ’50s, but battles with addiction took a toll on his embouchure and voice. In the decade before his death in 1988, however, a rehabilitated Baker recorded heavily for smaller labels, committing to tape some of the most moving performances of his career.