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Remembering CHET BAKER - My Funny Valentine (1987)
From the laserdisc "Chet Baker in Tokyo" - 1987.
CHET BAKER
Chet Baker's music has the unmistakable scent of youth. Few musicians who have left their mark on the jazz scene represent the intense breath of the spring of life as Baker does. Its evocative sound and the warmth of its phrasing recreate our inner landscape and invite us to a painful journey through memories that we have left behind a long time ago. Nothing like its pure and uncontrived sound to exorcize the pain lodged in us; and no one like him, with his gift, to make it possible. Unfortunately, he lost that particular gift after a short time.
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Like the beautiful glow of a summer evening sinking into the night until it disappears, Chet Baker was drowning in drugs. He looked like James Dean. Not only in the face, but also in the charisma… and in its fatality. The two devoured the time they had to live and generously distributed among everyone, what they had nourished themselves with, until they were consumed.
Chet Baker survived Dean and his time, and that may have been his condemnation, though it is not right to say so. I was glad that he returned to musical activity in the 1970s and that his unrivalled talent was once again recognized. But what I would like to keep in my memory is the Chet Baker of that other earlier era, in the mid-fifties, when he dazzled and sparkled on the West Coast in a vigorous, confident style. While it is already interesting to listen to his first performances as a member of the Gerry Mulligan Quartet, it is even more so with his own quartet. An example is the ten-inch LP Chet Baker Quartet, recorded for Pacific Records (the first of his solo albums), with a clean, crisp sound and phrasing, not always perfect perhaps, but with ability to reach the depths of those who listen to it.
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He is accompanied by Russ Freeman on piano, developing that characteristic touch of his, resolute, crunchy, neat, with which he provides the best possible background to Baker's evolutions on trumpet. Under the appearance of his style, of impeccable serenity and generosity, a profound loneliness is hidden. The unvibrated sound of his trumpet is gently diluted as it comes into contact with the air, as if the surrounding walls were absorbing it before the musical theme fully develops. From a technical point of view, he does not play in a refined or overly stylized way, but in a frank and open way. 'He's going to end up fainting,' we may come to fear as we hear him. Create an epic, pathos-filled sound . It touches, without a doubt, our hearts. And it is not a question of depth. You don't have to dive too deep. We simply recognize in ourselves something that is in him, something that perhaps we have also experienced. Something that hurts.
