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Chet Baker
Deep In A Dream

(Blue Note, 2002)

"The ultimate Chet Baker collection", they called it.

Chet Baker

Back in 2002, when labels still flew journalists overseas, and didn't ask them to hole up in $7 flophouses, I found myself staying in The Scott House, a 19th Century Detroit mansion with its own library, drawing room and beautiful Arts & Crafts detailing. Even though it was only a short walk from the museums and galleries of Midtown and many of the now famous "feral houses of Detroit" I was told that it was unwise to explore the neighbourhood on foot. Being without a driving license, that meant plenty of sundown time waiting around in the library, reading up on the history of Michigan and (in the days before my first iPod) nodding off to the one CD I'd remembered to bring with me.

Thankfully, this was the Chet Baker Deep In A Dream comp. Chosen by author James Gavin to accompany his Baker biog of the same name, Deep In a Dream is in no way the definitive comp it holds itself up as but provides a handy insight into the beclouded, opiated world that Baker cruised through for most of his life. The Scott House also had one of those Bose CD alarm clocks (so new and fancy at the time) so every morning I would wake up to The Gerry Mulligan Quartet playing My Funny Valentine. Not the five-minute Pacific jazz version from 1953 but the mist-shrouded three-minuter, from September 1952. Recorded in Los Angeles, for the Fantasy album Gerry Mulligan Quartet (with Carson Smith on bass and Chico Hamilton on drums), this pianoless, anchorless drift - complete with uncredited are-they-really-there ooh-oooh vocals - possesses a ghostly narco-haze on a par with Phil Phillips' Sea of Love and The Jaynettes Sally Go Round The Roses. Baker's horn sounds like crying while Mulligan echoes the distant harbour lament of a fog-shrouded fishing smack. But it's Baker's vocal cuts on the album - often dismissed as easy listening by hard core jazzers - that really cue you in to that dark and fuzzy no-man's land of the junk high. Baker sings love songs, true; but they're love songs of resignation and defeat like The Thrill Is Gone and Spring Is Here ("No desire / No ambition / Leads me") or dreams of oblivion (Let's Get Lost, the title track) all delivered with fading heart, weary soul and the self-pitying exhaustion of a stoned saloon-bar clip-artist; it's like he's been cored and hollowed, a ghost in a shell, high on his own ephemeral smoke. Try as you might, you know he's not really in love with you, or wanting you, or wanting anyone on these love songs; but, hey, you just may be able to get him something, fix him up, if you could just spot him till the weekend. Nasty, really, which gives these vocal cuts another edge, placing them at the distinctly uneasy end, that dark violet bloom, of the easy-listening jazz spectrum.

Andrew Male

Posted by Ross_Bennett at 6:00 AM GMT 01/02/2010

Further Listening

The Gerry Mulligan Quartet– Featuring Chet Baker (Fantasy, 1952)

Chet Baker- Sings It Could Happen To You (Riverside, 1958)

Billy Holiday – Lady In Satin (Columbia, 1958)

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Chet Baker

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