Born to be cool: The life and music of Chet Baker | Hacker News Reader

Born to be cool: The life and music of Chet Baker

thesmartset.com

83 pointstintinnabula27 comments

For 4 years in the early 90s, my ex-wife and I spent every weekend, starting Friday evening, remodelling/rebuilding our house in south Seattle (42nd Ave S., near Genessee Park for the locals). Sunday evening, every Sunday evening, we'd open a bottle of wine and listen to Chet Baker's "No Problem" album.

Good Times.

>when Parker returned to the East Coast, he told Gillespie and Miles Davis, “There’s a little white cat out in California who’s going to eat you up.” This was just the beginning.

This is the jazz world equivalent of God notifying Jesus you're coming for his spot

It's interesting to think about what Miles Davis would have thought about Chet Baker. On the one hand, Miles was light years ahead of Chet in his intellectual understanding of harmony, but Miles clearly understood the impact of direct, sparse soloing, and I think he probably appreciated what Chet was doing enough to tolerate him if not accept him. There were definitely some Kenny G's in that era who would have gotten the same response from Miles as Kenny G did from Pat Metheny, but I feel like Chet is one of those players who was far from the hippest but was formidable in his taste and that's why people are still transcribing him today.

> as Kenny G did from Pat Metheny

Burn...

For those who do not get the reference:

http://www.jazzoasis.com/methenyonkennyg.htm

https://youtu.be/3u6Ccdh2308?t=99 here is the recording in all it's bastard glory.

Also this brilliant solo https://youtu.be/uMiPkTqO6yQ?t=29 ...

>spewing his lame-ass, jive, pseudo bluesy, out-of-tune, noodling, wimped out, fucked up playing

He's even jazzy with his insults

That post, as he explains, was a response to comments people made about his original Kenny G rant video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-mjt1ypiF8

Perfect analogy.

Interesting to me because Parker’s style is so distinct from Baker.

Maybe that’s the point, he respected someone flourishing with their own sound rather than someone trying to copy them.

It’s cool to see they had such respect for him. Chet was by no means a technical master like the other famous Jazz players and not even technically that good of a singer! But he just had something else that made the rest of his skill set moot

My little contribution: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yi7spj04HBU

A french movie soundtrack by Philippe Sarde played by Chet Baker with Cobham on the drums.

If you are interested in learning more, "Let's Get Lost" is a great film https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let%27s_Get_Lost_(1988_film)

Also, for a less obvious choice of record to check out, "Silence" with Charlie Haden is a really lovely album from towards the end of his life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silence_(Charlie_Haden_album)

In his autobiography, Miles Davis describes meeting Chet Baker for the first time. Chet was really nervous around Miles because, while he was good a player, he knew he probably didn't deserve the accolades he received over a lot from black musicians like Miles.

"That was the first time we met, and he seemed embarrassed that he had just won the Down Beat poll for the Best Trumpet of 1953. I think he knew he didn't deserve it over Dizzy and a lot of other trumpet players... Chet was a nice enough guy, cool and a good player. But both him and me knew that he had copied a lot of shit from me."

For those who like a little contemporary folk with their jazz, David Wilcox wrote a nice song a while back called "Chet Baker's Unsung Swan Song." (k.d. lang covered it as "My Old Addiction.") Worth a listen while you read this article or get lost on Wikipedia.

Edit: although David Wilcox is fun live, I suggest you look for the studio version with the flugelhorn part; e.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEBncfBVmxQ.

Great piece of writing. I wonder if some of Baker's recordings were captured and put out without him knowing? In this great Rick Beato Ron Carter interview he discusses how they'd play multiple sets a night and that they were often recorded by club owners etc unbeknownst to the band and published on vinyl, no royalties etc. https://youtu.be/k2vqJ78VA4g

He could have just cut loads of sides to feed his habit of course...

Hey thank you! That is a really great interview, lots of stories I'd not heard before, Ron in great form at 84. Best one was about Ron being inspired, by JJ Johnson hardly moving his trombone slide, to find a similar 'lazy'/efficient/minimal-effort style on bass.

I mistook this to be about Chet Faker, and so I realize now that his name must be an alias/homage to Chet Baker. I hadn't heard of Baker before.

I have no idea what set off the spate of so-themed band names some years ago - Com Truise, Joanna Gruesome, Dale Earnhardt Jr Jr.

Anyhow Chet Baker is no more obscure than John Coltrane, Count Basie, Stan Getz... titans of the mid 20th c.

Chet Baker came quite often in Liège in Belgium.

His friend the sax player Jacques Pelzer was pharmacist, both were consuming a lot of the shop substances... Pelzer even lost his license.

One night in the Atahualpa restaurant, Pelzer was playing there. And Chet Baker showed up to jam. He was so high that night that the owner(the father of my then girlfriend) did throw him out, without knowing who he was.

A pity for the guests, as he was probably able to play that great sound that night.

Time to fire a Chet playlist !

Shameless self-promotion, but My Funny Valentine was an every-night song when I was playing piano bars

https://youtu.be/nhmhAvJKpLw

How does into Jazz?

Nice read, I had never heard of Chet Baker before. I wonder if his style* is at all responsible for the current trend of the depressed-sounding pop singer. Billie Eilish comes to mind, but there are plenty of them. It's like someone dragged them out of bed into the studio against their will, so their passive-aggressive response is to record the lowest-effort vocal performance possible.

* "His singing was softer still, often lingering just above a whisper."

In 1986 he was playing in London: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/aug/17/john-cl...

In 1953 he looked and sounded like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcRXIOvMxdc

I don't see that connection at all. I wouldn't call it low effort as much as just the pendulum swinging back against the studio-darling popstars of the 2000s through to the 20teens

Also remember that Chet stopped recording probably 40 years ago at least now.

The invention of the microphone is responsible for that. Before the microphone, singers had to be loud to be heard over the instruments and audience. With the invention of the microphone, it was possible to sing in a much quieter voice and still get heard. Singers who took advantage of this to sing in a quieter and more intimate style was called "crooners". The style became very popular when radio became mainstream.

Of course a lot of people hated the style (as always when something new came along) and thought is effeminate and ridiculous compared to the manliness of a trained opera singer like Enrico Caruso.

> I had never heard of Chet Baker before

That line really got me.

Enjoy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LUt4X0vwb0

Chet Baker did not invent the torch song. Does "Is That All There Is?" do anything for ya?

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