Bill Evans’ Riverside albums are legendary. Likewise Monk’s. Chet Baker’s? Far from it. Four so-so largely crappy-sounding records cut during the inevitable period when Baker’s savage addiction had caught up with him and then some. He wasn’t pretty anymore and neither was anything else, not his playing, singing, or his life. To paraphrase another mythical heroin hero – he wasn’t lookin too good but he was feelin real well. Unlike Keith of course, Chet never walked before they made him run. He kept running to the last.
This vinyl box will set you back 150 smackers or so for which you get remasters of the four albums and another disc of outtakes the world really didn’t need to hear. Craft Recordings is the label behind the release, and it’s all cut from the original masters by Kevin Gray and pressed on 180g discs at RTI. In short, the provenance involves the usual suspects of high-end jazz vinyl reissues.
For myself, I streamed the set on Tidal using Roon, where via the wonders of MQA I heard it in 96/24 resolution (the whole streaming experience really feels like a gift from the gods in cases like these). As one expects from a Kevin Gray joint, it is quite a sonic improvement on some shaky source material. I’m very familiar with two of these recordings, having owned them on CD for years, and I can tell you that the remaster of It Could Happen To You is a vast upgrade over the OJC edition I have – everything is richer, airier and more vibrant, with a tad more bass elicited from what is decidedly not a bass rich environment (true of all these records).
Also, and most impressively to me, the sonic disparity between what I believe are three sessions that comprise It Could Happen to You has been narrowed considerably. All of the sessions took place in August of 1958, with the best sounding one featuring George Morrow on bass and Philly Joe Jones on drums – Sam Jones and Dannie Richmond take over on another date while it’s Jones and Jones on yet another. Kenny Drew is on piano for all and adds his usual tasteful, spry presence. You can tell the difference between the sessions because Drew’s piano is mixed into the left channel for the good date and in the right for the bad ones (although panning aside it’s not hard to hear the difference – the good date sounds great, intimate, exciting, while the bad ones are watery and muffled). Usually when I listen to this record I lose interest during the tunes from the bad sessions (starting with “You’re driving me crazy”) because they sound so dead and the music… well the music is just not that great on the whole to justify the effort. Kevin Gray has closed the gap between the sessions. It’s still there, but less so.
Chet Baker in New York, the second of Chet’s Riverside albums, is best understood when you know that Chet was largely incapacitated due to his addiction when it was recorded in September of 1958. Producer Orrin Keepnews actively planned to put together a band that would hide that inconvenient truth and, if nothing else, he succeeded on that score. Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones, Johnny Griffin on tenor for three tunes (a month removed from his blistering Five Spot performances with Monk immortalized on Misterioso and Thelonious in Action) and tickling the ivories… Al Haig. Great player, wrong guy for this gig. It’s just a strange assemblage overall and one that never really clicks. Chet manages to string together some eighth notes here and there but he mostly sounds like he’s barely keeping up (barely standing up even), while Philly Joe, PC and Johnny Griffin are reined in to put it mildly. Every now and then one of them cuts loose with some excitement and you get a little sense of what the weather was like outside, out there where The Shape of Jazz to Come and Mingus Ah Um and Giant Steps were incubating, where jazz was growing in heretofore unimaginable directions and quickly leaving behind Baker’s tired pose.
I have a soft spot for Chet, mostly because of some excellent Pepper Adams solos and the overall vibe that Bill Evans gives to the date (Herbie Mann and Zoot Sims hanging around too – man they were calling in the whole team to make these things interesting). Chet’s playing is largely confined to listless restatings of the headers. I find Lerner and Loewe unlistenable – uninspired, saccharine versions of tunes from My Fair Lady and Brigadoon dripping in a bizarre amount of reverb. Pepper Adams again makes for some nice moments and Bill is on a few numbers as well but they can’t turn this into anything. It truly sounds like shit and even Kevin Gray’s wizardry can’t change that. The outtakes disc is mostly alternate takes from the It Could Happen to You sessions, Chet singing, phoning it in.
It’s a sad story, no doubt. Pre-heroin, he had real pep and style on the horn. I actually think he was a better singer than a trumpeter. He had a fabulous instrument, saturated with velvety resonance (if you can stomach an insanely-close-miked journey into his mouth, his voice is on fine albeit slurring display in the outtake of “While My Lady Sleeps”) and the idiosyncratic choices he tended to make on the horn lent his vocals an achingly elusive, now-you-see-me-now-you-don’t quality. Like many of the greats (add Miles to this list), in his prime, what he lacked in chops he more than made up for with vibe.
But if you’re going to build a career on vibe you better keep exploring and have boundless ideas and musical curiosity (like, you know, Miles). By his late 20’s Chet’s curiosity began and ended with dope. Musically he kept recycling the one vibe he’d ever seized upon right up to his death. It went from magical to spooky to tedious to downright boring, a transformation that happened right around the time these Riverside albums were recorded.
On that score, if you really want a Chet box set this Christmas, track down the Mosaic sets of his Pacific recordings with Russ Freeman and with Gerry Mulligan. Those are legendary albums. This Riverside set I admit feels a little cynical to me, some market-researched holiday product whelped up for the affluent, undiscerning vinyl resurgent. I have nothing but respect for Kevin Gray and RTI, and I’m sure the packaging is gorgeous and the wax impeccable. But I notice that at the Craft Recordings online store, a purchase of the box set comes with a t-shirt. That tells me about everything I need to know.