2021
Chet Baker Sings - The Mono & Stereo Versions
Chet Baker
Waxtime
8436559468701
LPS 169045
772301
JAZZ
2
Attention : dernières pièces disponibles !
Date de disponibilité:
The complementing talents of Chet Baker (1929-1988) both as a trumpet player and as a singer are now well known. Both Chet’s trumpet and voice seem to be extensions of the same musical personality, and once you’ve become familiar with both facets of Baker, you expect to hear them both.
However, this album was a revelation at the time and won Baker new fame and a new audience, which was less familiar with jazz than with pop music. The reasons are quite clear: Chet’s voice is tender and beautiful, and at the same time his phrasing always swings and surprises. While Chet Baker Sings is now considered a classic and continues to be a jazz best-seller, its initial critical reception wasn’t all that good, and many renowned jazz writers disapproved of Chet’s vocals for being rough, unprofessional and non-masculine.
Despite the critics’ opinions, the album never stopped selling and its popularity was such that after the initial 1954 release as a 10” LP (Pacific Jazz LP11) which contained just eight tracks, it reappeared in 1956 as a 12” LP (World Pacific PJ-1222), adding the results of other later sessions. Both of these original LPs were taped in Mono, but Chet Baker Sings had not lost its popularity in 1962, when the new craze of Stereo recordings arrived.
Thus, Pacific Jazz decided to reissue the LP in Stereo form. To achieve that, they recorded a complementary guitar backing by Joe Pass and mixed it with the original Mono tapes. The results, which can be heard here, were a new album which didn’t respect the track listing order of either of its Mono predecessors. In fact, while the 10” version included eight tracks and the 12” contained 14, the new Stereo issue featured 12 tunes (removing three songs from the 12” album and adding a reading of “Someone to Watch Over Me” from another date).
FORMAT | LP |
DISCS NUMBERS | 2 |
RECORDED | 2021 |
LABEL CODE | 772301 |
STYLE | JAZZ |