Articles

Daily articles carefully curated by the All About Jazz staff. Read our popular and future articles.

BUILDING A JAZZ LIBRARY October 6, 2020

Chet Baker: An Alternative Top Ten Albums To Get Lost In

Chet Baker was born to a farmer's daughter and a hard-drinking, weed-smoking singer and guitarist in a Western Swing band in Yale, Oklahoma in 1929. Like many Okies, the family fared badly during the Great Depression but did a little better after moving to Glendale, California in 1939. Largely self-taught as a trumpeter, Baker honed his skills playing in an army band after volunteering for military service in the mid 1940s. By the turn of the decade, he was making ...

BUILDING A JAZZ LIBRARY September 21, 2020

CTI Records: Ten Tasty Albums With No Added Sugar (Almost)

By Chris May

Few jazz producers divide opinion as much as Creed Taylor. He is a hero to many and a villain to as many more. His fans love him for his high production values. His detractors accuse him of dumbing jazz down with excessively sweetened orchestrations and other sales-oriented compromises. Nowhere is the dispute more heated than over Taylor's output for his own CTI label, which spanned jazz-funk, fusion, hard bop and post-bop straight-ahead. Taylor cut his teeth in ...

INTERVIEW April 23, 2020

Bruce Guthrie: Remembering Chet Baker

By Nenette Evans

I first met the Baker family at Chet's funeral back in 1988. I took my kids out of school and went with my partner, Fonje, to the Los Angeles Cemetery. I had heard about the funeral from our local jazz station and with a big sense of duty to Chet Baker's memory, headed north on the 405 freeway. I remember thinking, this is huge, everyone will be there, everyone in jazz. Having known virtually nothing about the family or all ...

HIGHLY OPINIONATED February 26, 2020

Craft Recording's "Chet" is a Rare Win for Baker

By Patrick Burnette

"There's a little white cat out here who's going to eat you up." —Charlie Parker (to Miles Davis) Chet Baker and Miles Davis. Two trumpet players born three years apart. Both unusually handsome and slight of build. Both lacking, as trumpeters, the qualities most often associated with those brass alphas of the jazz world--power, speed, stratospheric range. Both associated, in their early years, with Charlie Parker. Both boasting incredibly prolific recording careers, with dozens of leader dates ...

ALBUM REVIEW January 12, 2020

Chet Baker: Chet

By Karl Ackermann

In the early 1950s, the rural Oklahoman Chet Baker established prominent connections in the jazz world; gigs with Charlie Parker and Stan Getz led to his first recordings. The trappings of both musicians' circles were dusted with heroin and Baker's career breaks coincided with his introduction to the disease that would stifle his musical development and kill him in thirty-something years. The Legendary Riverside Albums represents an output that some felt was Baker's best. It's an assessment that's debatable, as ...

HIGHLY OPINIONATED June 12, 2019

Good Vibes, Bad Vibes: Jazz in Film

By Douglas Groothuis

Several films about jazz depict troubled and vice-ridden musicians, such as Charlie Parker, in Bird, and Chet Baker, in Born to be Blue. I walked out of the latter after twenty minutes of excessive obscenity, graphic vice, and general disgust. These films reinforce the idea that jazz is associated with illegal activities, illicit sex, and generally flawed character. The Miles Davies film, Miles Ahead, gives the same picture. I will not watch that movie, since I already know enough about ...

CHOICE CUTS May 23, 2019

Chet Baker I'll Remember April, Zoot Sims Over the Rainbow, and Lorez Alexandria This Could Be the Start of Something Big

By Mark Barnett

Choice Cuts is an offshoot of Getting Into Jazz. Your butcher notwithstanding, we're defining a “Choice Cut" as an outstanding track from an otherwise unremarkable CD (or vinyl record); a track so good it justifies adding the disc to your collection. Here are a trio to start with... Chet Baker, “I'll Remember April" (From the album Chet Baker in Paris, Verve Records 1956) Given the ups and downs of Baker's career, it's easy to forget ...