After several years in New York, trumpeter Chet Baker (1929-88) returned to California in 1965, desperately needing cash. He had a habit and, in theory, a family to support. After nearly a decade away from the West Coast, Baker asked World Pacific’s Richard Bock for money.
Bock, whose Pacific Jazz label was built during the previous decade on the early appeal of Baker’s sound and good looks, was generous to a fault when it came to the troubled and wayward trumpeter.
Instead of cash, though, Bock offered Baker work. Bock proposed that Baker prove himself as a guest on two World Pacific records, one by guitarist Joe Pass and another by saxophonist Bud Shank. Remarkably, Baker turned up, played his part and proceeded to impress Bock that he could do the work.
Bock had recently sold his label to Liberty Records (like Blue Note’s Alfred Lion would do two years later) and while he stayed on to produce for several more years, he was required to push more commercial-oriented music to crossover. Baker was therefore drafted to head up a series of records with a studio band the label called the Mariachi Brass, a gimmicky and obvious copy – in name only – of Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass.
Four records – all recorded in the span of less than a year – resulted. Since the records were marketed outside the strictures of jazz, they probably sold a little better than most Chet Baker discs. But Baker’s fans were not pleased and critics – who were rarely very kind to Baker – were merciless.
What’s less well known is that Bock also paired Baker with strings on several occasions during this period. It’s not clear whether this was Bock’s idea – or Baker’s. It could very well have been Baker’s plan and Bock agreed to it. The trumpeter adored the idea of fronting an orchestra. In 1954, as his star was rising, Baker insisted to Bock that we wanted to do a record with strings – just as Charlie Parker, who Baker played with in 1952, had done.
Bock, who did not have the financial resources at the time to hire an entire orchestra, partnered with the major label Columbia (which, months later, signed Miles Davis, the trumpeter many thought Baker copied) to produce Chet Baker & Strings (1954) – with arrangements by Johnny Mandel, Shorty Rogers, Marty Paich and Jack Montrose.
During his Italian holiday a few years later, baker recorded two sessions with strings, both bookending a year-long stint in prison. The first of these was released in Italy as Angel Eyes and in the U.S. as Chet Baker with Fifty Italian Strings (both 1960), with arrangements by Giulio Libano and Len Mercer. The second set featured Baker recording four of his own songs (written in prison) with the great Ennio Morricone, included on the Italian LP Chet is Back! [1962] and, many years later, as part of the American CD titled The Italian Sessions.
Thanks to the deep pockets of Liberty Records, Richard Bock now had the resources to mount Chet Baker in front of an orchestra. But rather than putting his former trumpet star in a shiny, new – and expensive – setting, Bock appropriated one that World Pacific had already used.
The first Carmel Strings album, Boss Baroque, was released in January 1966 and fronted by legendary Wrecking Crew member Larry Knechtel (1940-2009) on harpsichord. There, pop producer Andi Di Martino (The Cascades, The Accents) had arrangers Billy Strange and Buddy Prima fuse rock beats on to popular classical melodies and make chamber music out of such current hits as “Yesterday,” “As Tears Go By” and the record’s lone single, “I Hear a Symphony.”
The sometimes desultory Boss Baroque was anything but a success. But Bock, likely sensing World Pacific’s answer to Capitol’s Hollyridge Strings, took over the “group’s” identity and production reigns, assigning arrangement tasks to Harry Betts and Julian Lee (only Betts returns for the second of these records). The producer cast Baker, who was playing flugelhorn at this time, for his two Carmel Strings records.
Considering these records were specifically intended as “smooch music,” dreamy tunes for romantic interludes, it is telling that Baker’s once-princely visage is absent from from both album covers. That pretty face appears on the back cover of Quietly There, but in a photo that’s at least a decade old and printed so darkly that Chet is barely visible. Into My Life doesn’t even rate a photo of its star – just pictures of recent releases that also decline to picture this aging James Dean type.
Speaking of genre, these records hardly pretend to be jazz. But, remarkably, they were originally marketed as “teen-beat,” as if anyone in that age range would ever listen to this sort of thing – then or now. The original thought was that the records would be pitched to kids hooked on pop and give ’em a taste of jazz. No one was fooled.
Like every other easy-listening record of the period, it was a way to get the parents (with the money) to enjoy their kids’ music in an easy-on-the-ears musical language they might understand and, with any luck, make parents seem cool to their kids. Again, as if.
Frankly, these are not among Chet Baker’s best recordings. But there is something very appealing about hearing Chet with strings. While the flugelhorn is a nice match with the orchestra, little is asked of Baker here. Whether by accident or design, Baker merely shares melody lines with the orchestra and only gets space for a half-chorus solo or so. Still, Baker could always swing a nice melody and he does not disappoint here.
Quietly There
Recorded in June 1966 and released two months later, Quietly There is the first of Chet Baker’s two Carmel Strings records. Like so many easy-listening records of the period – and World Pacific albums at the time – the program boasts an even dozen tracks in the two-and-a-half to three-minute range. Not much time for jazz, but Baker swings with the warmth his flugelhorn offers.
The arrangements are handled by Harry Betts and Julian Lee, each of whom tackles six tracks a piece. While neither musician was particularly well-known among listeners, both were industry pros who toiled in the studios for other stars.
Harry Betts (1922-2012) was a jazz trombonist, best known for his work in Stan Kenton’s band and his work with fellow West Coasters Shorty Rogers and Pete Rugolo. He began arranging in the early sixties, mostly for singers. But he did “crossover” work with the Dave Pell Octet and wrote the great swinger “Mexicali Nose” for Buddy Rich.
Betts went on to score TV shows and films, including the cult favorite The Fantastic Plastic Machine (1969) and Black Mama White Mama (1973), which yielded the track “Police Check Point” that was used in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003).
Australian Julian Lee (1923-2020) was born blind but took to music at a very early age. Frank Sinatra – who doesn’t seem to have ever recorded with Lee – convinced the Aussie to come to the United States in 1963, where he worked on many George Shearing records. Lee also worked with The Three Sounds, Gerry Mulligan and added lovely string overdubs to Brazil! Brazil! Brazil!, the 1966 record by Bud Shank with Chet Baker.
Remarkably, the arrangements here are so consistent they could have come from one hand, not two. That also means the relatively anodyne treatments lack the personality of, say, jazz writers like Claus Ogerman and Don Sebesky or such Muzak-meisters as Percy Faith and Stu Phillips.
Baker is set against a swath of strings and a vocal choir that oohs and ahhs in a similar fashion to the Bud Shank records arranged by Bob Florence. But Baker’s inability – or unwillingness – to lead the proceedings or care very much about what he’s doing merely renders him – and the music – as anonymous. The trumpet parts could be anybody. (Given Baker’s reliability around this time, it’s fair to consider that Bock might have had to edit a good bit to get a usable part.)
Betts’s best moments here are on “Early Autumn,” easily the album’s high point, and the spritely, though unusual, “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most.” Lee shines on the dreamy “Quietly There” (from Johnny Mandel’s score to the 1966 Paul Newman film Harper) and “Stranger on the Shore,” an old Acker Bilk number that was later a hit for the Drifters.
Lee’s tracks are easily the album’s more interesting choices and include “Forget Him,” a hit for Bobby Rydell, and “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me,” a hit for Dusty Springfield and, later, Elvis Presley, with music written by pop-song writer turned film composer Pino Donaggio.
There is also an odd but not unappealing country twang to “The Christmas Song” – a peculiar choice – and “The More I See You,” both arranged by Betts. “The More I See You” is the only song here Baker had previously recorded (on Chet Baker Sings – It Could Happen to You) but, curiously, one which Betts also arranged the very same year for a group called, of all things, The Sunset Strings.
As for the star of the record, Chet Baker accords himself nicely on “Early Autumn” and “No More Blues.” His uncanny way with a melody is at its best here. While he doesn’t get much of a chance to express himself, he manages to work his magic with an economy that is surprisingly enjoyable. Elsewhere, he just sounds bored. He seems to have recognized this exactly for what it was: a paycheck.
But two enjoyable tracks hardly make a memorable record. DownBeat‘s Pete Welding was unsparing in his “half-star” review: “[This] disc…contains a dozen samples of “mood jazz,” a debased musical hybrid that dilutes whatever vitality jazz might possess by reducing it to the androgynous level of background music.
“This art of the epicene is practiced superbly here; rarely, in fact, has Baker sounded as flaccid as he does against the keening strings and choral ooh-ings and aah-ings of these performances. He’s a shade out of tune, too, for added drama.”1
Into My Life
Recorded in October 1966 and released in January 1967, Into My Life finds Chet Baker switching from the flugelhorn back to the trumpet. But is it really Chet Baker? Maybe not.
Three months before the recording of Into My Life, Baker was badly beaten in San Francisco. He was likely attacked by people to whom he owed money for drugs. In addition to other injuries, the melee cost Baker some teeth and a busted upper lip – something his assailants knew was important for a trumpet player. Although he would eventually have to get dentures, Baker’s ability to play was badly hampered in those following months and, really, for the next several years.
What is most suspicious here is that the trumpet playing is nearly flawless, containing none of the flat, behind-the-beat casualness – or sloppiness – that is heard on Baker’s previous Carmel Strings record or the first one or two Mariachi Brass albums. The trumpet is also more prominent – and more mindful of the mission – on this record than on the previous one.
That doesn’t mean the-then ironically-titled Into My Life is a better record. The program is not nearly as thoughtful as the first record. From the song choices to the way Harry Betts arranges them – notably adding then-in harpsichord, electric guitars and bass – there is a somewhat obvious need to be more contemporary.
Here, we are treated to such AM radio fodder by the Beatles (“Here, There and Everywhere,” “Got to Get You in My Life”), the Sandpipers (“Guantanamera”) and Dionne Warwick (“Trains and Boats and Planes”) as well as covers of Herb Alpert’s and the Tijuana Brass’s (!) “More and More Amor” (also covered by guitarist Wes Montgomery around the same time) and “All,” the theme from the little-known 1965 film Run for Your Wife.
Broadway gets such nods as “I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm,” from On the Avenue, and “If He Walked into My Life,” originally sung by Angela Lansbury in Mame. Also included are songs that easily – and frequently – crossed the line between jazz and easy listening, like “A Man and a Woman” (another film theme and a minor hit at the time for Herbie Mann & Tamiko Jones), “The Ballad of the Sad Young Men” and “Serenata.”
That the album opens with a somewhat off-putting Topkapi-tinged “Man and a Woman” suggests a sign of things to come. But Into My Life recovers some of its muted mojo with the breezy “I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm,” another oddly chosen number associated with the Christmas holiday; the bouncy “More and More Amore,” which might have worked as a single since it was not one for the Tijuana Brass; and the lovely “Trains and Boats and Planes.” The gimmicky James Bond-ish handling of the already Bond-like “All” was probably another unnecessary touch.
There is also a curious Mariachi Brass quality to several of the tracks heard here, notably “Guantanamera,” “Cherry Pink And Apple Blossom White,” and, obviously, “More and More Amor.” Maybe it was a happy accident or a bit of cross-promotion. But did anybody want this sort of thing? Especially here?
Not surprisingly, DownBeat refused to acknowledge Into My Life.
But Billboard took an altogether different tact: “This album is a programmer’s delight. Featuring exciting treatments of recent and vintage tunes including ‘A Man and a Woman’, ‘All’ and Leroy Anderson’s ‘Serenata’, it’s sure to enjoy healthy sales. Baker’s solos are enhanced by the lush Carmel Strings, with ‘Guantanamera’ a highlight.”2
Of course, no one got the memo. Okay, the promo.
Into My Life is among the most obscure of all of Chet Baker’s American releases. Like Quietly There, it has never received any CD release. But, oddly, a promotional single of “A Man and a Woman,” backed with “All,” was issued – and, oddly credited only to “Chet Baker & Strings” – but never found enough of an audience to be released as an official single.
The album effectively finished off the Carmel Strings. Not only did the whole enterprise fail to raise any interest from, well, anyone, Baker himself was likely unable to deliver much thereafter that was worth listening to. Bock and Baker never worked together again. Bock finally got the message: Baker ruins people in his lifelong quest to be drug-addled.
What’s worse is that World Pacific never had the popular catalog heft of, say, Capitol Records, which had the Beatles, Beach Boys and Nat King Cole – all of whom had their easy-listening day in court with Stu Phillips’s inventive and still-remarkable and relevant Hollyridge Strings records, also on Capitol.
The Carmel Strings was not the Hollyridge Strings and Chet Baker and the Carmel Strings was not Chet Baker either. But so much could have been made of this. But it never happened.
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