'Blue Room' by Chet Baker
The relaxed bossa nova of Wayne Shorter’s “Beautiful Black Eyes” sets the mood. Chet Baker was in fine form, sending out gorgeous if unassuming solos on his trumpet, mellow but always with an undercurrent of melancholy. Baker’s playing sought out the shadows on the sunniest day.
Blue Room is comprised of two previously unknown sessions, cut at Dutch radio studios in 1979. In those years Baker circulated around Europe, looking for a gig and a fix, disappearing but working regularly in the style he established two decades earlier. He epitomized cool jazz. Even when the tempo lifted, Baker never emitted heat. He was a musician attentive to the possibilities of the musicians alongside him and the melodies in their heads. His playing was precise as a good poet, with never an extraneous note on Blue Room’s set list of Miles Davis, Yip Harburg, Rodgers and Hart and Irving Berlin. And when he sang? On “Oh, You Crazy Moon,” his misty voice sketches rather than paints the picture, expressing emotion within narrow limits.
Blue Room’s package includes extensive reminiscences from the musicians who worked with him during 1979.
