Latest Release
- NOV 1, 2024
- 91 Songs
- Chet Baker Sings · 1954
- The Best of Chet Baker Sings · 1954
- Silent Nights · 1986
- Chet Baker Sings · 1954
- Chet Baker Sings · 1954
- Chet Baker Sings · 1954
- Chet · 1959
- Chet Baker Sings · 1954
- Chet Baker Sings · 1954
- The Best of Chet Baker Sings · 1956
Essential Albums
- This 1989 compilation, much like its 1992 companion The Best of Chet Baker Plays, gathers tracks from different sessions to paint a portrait of an immortal jazz stylist. The first eight songs and the final six are from Chet Baker Sings (1956), while the middle six are from Chet Baker Sings and Plays (1955). Four tunes from the latter that involved string arrangements got left off, and the omission underscores how different Baker was from the marquee crooners of the day, who were often backed by big orchestras. Baker retained the sensibility of a small-group jazz artist who saw his trumpet improvisations as inseparable from his singing. So on these sessions he did both, imbuing everything with his mellow, casually hip delivery, securing a unique double status as a teen idol and a legit West Coast bebopper. Every melody here is spot-on, and the expressive range, from the almost dirge-like “My Funny Valentine” to the sunny swing of “Let’s Get Lost,” is remarkable.
- 2024
Artist Playlists
- The archetypal tortured jazz artist.
- Reinterpretations and late-career collabs from the trumpeter.
- Lean back and relax with some of their mellowest cuts.
Appears On
- Stan Getz Quartet
- The Mariachi Brass
About 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.
- HOMETOWN
- Yale, OK, United States
- BORN
- December 23, 1929
- GENRE
- Jazz