Jazzturday: Standards, feat. Chet Baker

MOG will not let me upload any mp3s this morning, so I'll have to try to get my points across today with YouTube. I wanted to talk about jazz standards and Chet Baker; let's see how far I get. When I first started really getting into jazz in my early 20s, I discovered that I knew a great many jazz songs already; the standards that are a staple of jazz repertoires and the basis for many improvisations and recordings had been bouncing around in my head since my infancy. All of my grandparents had been singing them to me since the womb, especially my mother's mother, whose mother had been a dresser for Florence Ziegfeld, a great Broadway producer of the roaring 20s. Ziegfeld is best known for his Ziegfeld's Follies, a take-off on the Folies Bergères. My great-grandmother, Clara Sterner, an immigrant from Berlin, ironed and sewed Mr. Ziegfeld's shirts, and dressed him and his wife, Billie Burke. My great-grandparents, so the story goes, met backstage at the Follies when my great-grandfather, an Irish immigrant who was about to start a moving business in Hell's Kitchen, got a part-time gig running the cables for the Follies. My grandmother grew up running around listening to singers practicing all those songs from Ziegfeld's shows, as well as many others. Ziegfeld's most well-known production was Show Boat. I remember my grandmother always singing old songs, like "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree" and "Bicycle Built for Two;" I still find myself humming and singing those songs, especially in times of distress and crisis. They seem to just come to me unbidden. I even sing them to my cats when they get distressed, like in thunderstorms; I suppose those songs are in my DNA or something. Getting back to jazz: when I started delving into jazz, I got to the cool movement via Miles Davis' biography. From Miles I worked backwards and got to Gerry Mulligan and then Chet Baker, most definitely not the way most people got there. Chet Baker was enormously popular in his day due to his Jimmy Dean good looks and his little-boy-lost singing style. His singing voice was unpolished and wistful. He was first introduced to a wide commercial audience via Hollywood in a bit part in a movie called Hell's Horizon:Chet's success grew on the strength of his ballads, standards that people knew deep inside themselves, like I did from my grandparents. These ballads were safe to promote in the era of rock 'n' roll; the record companies had a rock star who didn't play rock music! I'm sure they were salivating. Unlike other musicians of that era, who were able to seize leadership and creative control of their music and grow forward, Chet was ruled by drug addiction all his life, and so followed the sad path of chasing the horse by doing what the public asked for in order to get paid so he could score. While that's probably a gross over-simplification, I think it's in the main true about him. Saying that, however, does not diminish the power of his ballads, or that wistful, little-boy voice. Or, frankly, the power of his playing. Chet had it, and people were drawn to it. And what he did best was the standards, those same old songs my great-grandmother worked around, my grandmother grew up around, and so did I. Today, they still bring me comfort.There are few clips of Chet performing during his heyday, but I did find this bit from the Jazz Icons series of Chet singing Time After Time, date unknown, but it had to be in the late 50s:Chet's most famous ballad ever, "My Funny Valentine," performed in Stockholm in 1983:Chet playing at Ronnie Scott's in 1986, "Love for Sale":