Chet Baker Big Band

© Introduction Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

Given the myriad recordings that Chet Baker appeared on during his forty year career, it is not surprising that Chet Baker Big Band [Pacific Jazz 1229; CDP 0777 7 81201 2 4] gets short shrift [if it gets any “shrift” at all].

I think that this in part may be due to the fact that Jazz fans rarely think of Chet in a big band setting [Although, if truth be told, only four of the sixteen tracks that make up the Chet Baker Big Band contain enough instrumentation to be considered as a “big band.”]

Of course, Baker’s most famous association is as a member of baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan’s Quartet which took place at the outset of his career in the early 1950’s.

Although he did lead a quintet and a sextet for a while, Chet is usually thought of as fronting a piano-bass-drums rhythm section. 

Whatever the context, and irrespective of his continuing personal travails, Chet was one of the most original improvisors I ever heard.

And I’m in good company here because the noted and well-respected Jazz author and blogger, Doug Ramsey, who, by the way, is also a trumpet player holds a similar opinion about Chet:

“... at its best his playing still had the ability to go directly to a listener’s emotions in a way attained by few artists in any medium.” [Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of Its Makers].

In his essay on The Trumpet in Jazz, Randy Sandke, also a trumpeter, maintains that “Like Bix, Chet was often the understated ‘poet’ of the horn.” [The Oxford Companion to Jazz, Bill Kirchner, Ed.].

And pianist Russ Freeman who co-led a quartet with Chet during the mid-1950’s expressed what a lot of us felt while listening to Chet Baker: