‘Recordings from early 2025, while Johnny was bed-bound in an assisted living facility with multiple sclerosis. He speaks into an iPhone laid gently on his chest, in remarkably tender and emotive form. Love in all its permutations. The tangled, but caring nature of familial love, to the anguish and euphoria of romantic connection. Johnny has a remarkable ability to pose questions, and answers, that reflect the truest of realities, without cliche.
‘Joel Nelson nimbly helms the nearly entirely electronic backdrop, with Buchla Music Easel bubbling up between Johnny’s stream of consciousness. At times, Broadcast’s fuzzed out ballads come to mind, while at others, early Oneohtrix Point Never’s gauzy, distant drones cast anchor beneath the slippery syntax.’

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

His unmissable debut as leader in 1960, bringing with him Sam Jones and Jimmy Cobb from the Adderleys’ set-up. Highlights include the reclamations of three mighty Timmons originals — Moanin’, already recorded by Art Blakey, and Cannonball’s This Here and Dat Dere — and a near-solo rendition of Lush Life.
Unmistakable, irresistible jazz pianism — grooving, direct, gospelised, funky.

The original JA mix, and Sid Bucknor’s UK remix for the Atra label, just down the road from us in West London. From 1975, twixt Flesh Of My Skin and Brand. Chinna and the Soul Syndicate, the Barrett brothers, Candi McKenzie… Rawly, uncomfortably compelling; discombobulating and moody as hell.