In 1988, the Vogue photographer and occasional film-maker Bruce Weber made Let’s Get Lost, a lingeringly homoerotic but revealing documentary homage to “the white Miles”, jazz trumpeter Chet Baker. Like Clint Eastwood’s Charlie Parker biopic Bird and Bertrand Tavernier’s Round Midnight (also released in the jazz-fashionable late 80s), it was a serious film about the music itself, even if the movie business’s conviction that improvisational genius, addiction and mental turmoil were natural bedfellows wasn’t far away.
Baker’s life was tailor-made for that treacherous storyboard: a James Dean-like doomed youth and Charlie Parker sideman in the 1950s; the star of the era’s chamber-jazzy cool school movement whose heroin habit brought jail terms, domestic strife, a playing life of one-night stands and early death at 58. Yet through it all, Baker kept conjuring beautiful jazz, particularly in Europe. The previously unreleased Blue Room joins together two 1979 studio sessions for Dutch radio, with classy trios led by pianists Phil Markowitz and the late Frans Elsen. The Latin-swaying Beautiful Black Eyes introduces Baker’s inimitable trumpet sound, blown as if he’s barely exhaling, the phrasing a mix of drowsy musing and impulsive flurries that hardly jolt his hypnotically flatlining dynamics.
Three of Baker’s haunting stoned-chorister vocals develop as whispery wordless-scat improvisations as capricious as his horn-playing, and the uptempo bebop sprints on The Best Thing for You, Miles Davis’s Down and the ageless Old Devil Moon are shapely, long-lined improvisations that barely need a rhythm section. The mood is mostly low key, and the everybody-solos-in-turn ensemble format might be too formulaic for some, but Blue Room is a fascinating snapshot of a unique improvising artist’s muse. Illuminating, savvy liner notes from fellow players, producers and friends are a big bonus.
Also out this month
US-based Canadian saxophonist and composer Ben Wendel joins jazz-ensemble voicings reminiscent of Gil Evans or Mike Gibbs to a contemporary producer’s palette and six star guests – including guitarist Bill Frisell, vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant and flute virtuoso Elena Pinderhughes – on All One (Edition). Salvant soars on I Loves You Porgy, Pinderhughes vivaciously duets with her electronic doppelganger on Speak Joy, and Wendel’s sax is a constant counterpoint.
Prodigious British keyboardist/composer Alexander Hawkins, bassist Neil Charles and drummer Stephen Davis release Carnival Celestial (Intakt), a gripping collage of synth-textures, enigmatic hooks, fleeting Thelonious Monkish references, and free-jazzy surges.
And ECM launches its elegantly repackaged Luminessence vinyl series, reprising its groundbreaking classics, some long out of print. Kenny Wheeler’s 1975 Gnu High (featuring Keith Jarrett’s last sideman appearance on piano!) and Brazilian percussionist Naná Vasconcelos’s Saudades, with guitarist Egberto Gismonti and an orchestra, are the first two in the line.
