Chet Baker

Chet Baker Sings

Pacific / Blue Note

This 1954 vocal LP was the trumpeter’s idea. Pretty much everyone in the studio was sceptical, but Baker stuck to his guns during the numerous takes required to iron out his tuning. ‘I thought it was bullshit,’ recalled his close collaborator, pianist Russ Freeman. ‘Louis Armstrong and Jack Teagarden sang like jazz singers. This was ballads. Totally meaningless.’ Metronome magazine pilloried Baker’s ‘abysmal vocal deficiencies’, like ‘a four-month-old baby’s lack of coordination because he can’t walk.’
Punters loved it. The same year, audience polls in Down Beat magazine made him best trumpeter and best vocalist, above Miles Davis and Nat King Cole. This LP became his best-seller, over the decades. Its version of My Funny Valentine is arguably definitive.

The sexual and racial politics of its reception run fascinatingly deep. Baker’s ‘white’, ‘effeminate’ singing style demurs a throw-down with ‘expressive’, ‘black’ machismo. (Bob Dorough, Mose Allison, and Michael Franks are fellow travellers.) ‘A lot of people thought — foolishly so — that because of the way I sang, I, y’know, liked fellas or something,’ Baker once remembered, nervously. According to his biographer James Gavin, the album made him the first jazz musician with a ‘strong homosexual following’. Pacific Jazz producer Dick Bock’s marketing survey in 1955 found that most of Baker’s fans were women who wanted to hear him sing. It was a massive hit in Brazil, too, coursing into the bossa nova movement via admirers like Joao Gilberto and Nara Leao.