About three years ago I read Deep in a Dream: The Long Night of Chet Baker, James Gavin’s biography of the legendary jazz trumpeter. Some Baker fans may take exception to Gavin’s unrelenting “warts and all” portrait of the artist, and others may find the book a bit thin on sophisticated musical analysis; but I found it thoroughly engaging and also enlightening about an enigmatic figure whose uneven career I came to a better understanding of by way of learning the sordid details of his life which contributed to his musical journey.I also came away from the book grateful to have learned of some of the recordings that Gavin’s narrative pointed to. Baker has a vast catalogue as leader, as co-leader, and as sideman . . . so there is no single “starting point” for getting to know the man through his work; as usual, then, I defaulted to the recordings mentioned by Gavin that feature the trumpeter in the company of guitarists. One of my favorites of these is Chet Is Back, recorded in Rome in 1962: showcasing the great (but often overlooked) Belgian guitarist René Thomas, it is a keeper from start to finish. (The other members of the supporting quartet are Bobby Jaspar on flute and tenor sax, Benoît Quersin on bass, and Daniel Humair on drums.) Baker had just been released from prison after serving more than a year-and-a-half for drug smuggling and forgery: he was in top form, and Thomas was his equal.
But two other recordings that I tracked down (both also recorded in Europe) have had staying power—and more—as far as my own “musical journey” is concerned: The Touch of Your Lips (1979), with American Doug Raney on guitar and Danish-born Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen on bass, and Chet’s Choice (1985), with Belgians Philip Catherine on guitar and Jean-Louis Rasinfosse on bass. One common denominator of these two recordings is that each features a drummerless trio—the result being a sort of “chamber music” effect: jazz well-suited to be played in a small and intimate space. At least that’s how I sold the “concept” of these two albums when I shared them with my friends Joe and Greg, who play trumpet and bass respectively, in The Next Band, the seven-piece combo that we perform in at the John Payne Music Center in Brookline (see my earlier post below). Not sure of what I might be getting into, but feeling the urge to get into something new, I wondered if they might like to try on a Chet Baker-esque trio for size . . . and they said, “Let’s do it!”
So we did it . . . after a while. I think I floated the idea at them in May. We then rehearsed once, in July: that was fun and felt promising . . . but then summer vacations got in the way. And then the start of a new semester. And then . . . and then suddenly we had the chance to make our debut—a chance offered with such short notice (just a couple of days) that we had no time to get nervous . . . or to rehearse. So this past Saturday we convened for a couple of minutes to look over a plausible tunelist and then headed off to provide the background music for a moving-away party for my next-door neighbors in another neighbor’s back garden.
By all accounts—the neighbors’ enthusiastic applause and sincere compliments and our own after-the-fact self-affirmation (“Let’s do it again!”)—we acquitted ourselves mor
e-than-respectably. And we had fun! And the secret in both regards was the tune selection. Using the principle of “The 5 Bs”—a blues, a bop, a ballad, a bossa, and a burner—to shape our two sets, we had a good workout, starting with Dizzy Gillespie’s bluesy little number “Birk’s Works.” Filling out the first set with “Groove Yard,” “Five Brothers,” “Blue Room” (which we sight-read), “Black Orpheus,” “Lullaby of Birdland” and “Billie’s Bounce,” we certainly earned our beverage break! Then after some schmoozing with our new-found fans, we jumped right back into it with Lou Donaldson’s gem “Cookin’,” followed by “Yesterdays,” Charlie Parker’s “Scrapple from the Apple,” the bossa classic “Desifinado,” “Crazeology,” and “Taking a Chance on Love.” We then had a rousing finish with “Sandu,” a catchy blues penned by Clifford Brown. What a great afternoon! Hey, we were deep in our own dream of making music—“chamber jazz,” I suppose—and making others happy in the process . . .Who knows where the trio goes from here? Well, maybe we’ll go wherever we’re invited . . . because when we get there, we get to “do it again”!
