Like such recent Verve by Request vinyl releases as Kai Winding’s Modern Country (1964) and Stan Getz’s Marrakesh Express (1969), Chet Baker’s Blood, Chet and Tears is a bit of a stumper. None of these shameless crossover efforts sit well in the artists’ otherwise more jazz-oriented catalogs. Likewise, they’re neither classics nor widely sought after by crate diggers or samplers. It makes you wonder who is actually requesting these things.
Still, all three discs are fascinating finds and, since the originals were probably not pressed in huge quantities, they’re not all that easy to find in the used-record bins. Blood, Chet and Tears is, by no means, the typical Chet Baker record – nor anybody’s favorite – but, after a slew of forgettable or altogether awful discs Baker waxed over the previous decade, it’s hardly an embarrassment either.
Released in September 1970 – at a time when albums with titles like Bitches Brew, Gula Matari, Black Talk and Swiss Movement1 were, literally and figuratively, rocking the jazz world – Blood, Chet and Tears is the second of only two records Chet Baker waxed for the storied Verve label and quite a bit different than the first, the Norman Granz-produced Stan Meets Chet (1958), with Stan Getz.
“They asked me, so I did it,” Baker said of Blood, Chet and Tears in an October 1981 DownBeat interview. “But I have to say, it sounded better in the studio, when we made it. Afterward, they overdubbed a lot of stuff on it.” That ever-elusive answer doesn’t quite get at what’s behind this record. What DownBeat referred to as a “money-maker” was hardly that. But Baker did get paid for showing up and, to these ears, he really earned his money.
Baker’s playing and energy here are vastly improved over his most recent studio recordings (going back at least five years) and, despite his lack of feeling for the material (the trumpeter apparently despised rock music and even fusion jazz), he sounds engaged and engaging here – particularly on “Something” and “Come Saturday Morning,” his two vocal features.
And considering his physical – not to mention biological – condition at the time, it’s a wonder that Blood, Chet and Tears sounds as good as it does. Baker is right on point here. These are tunes he wouldn’t have known and he handles them with the authority and dexterity that the young Baker impressed audiences with two decades before.
II.
The unusual Blood, Chet and Tears had a most unusual back story all its own. It all came about due to Baker’s unlikely friendship with an avid and unapologetic fan, Art (later Artt) Frank2 (1933-2024). Frank, an aspiring drummer and actor, who made his living at the time as a housepainter, first met his idol at a Baker gig in Boston, at the trumpeter’s peak in 1954.
Their paths crossed again a full 14 years later, when both were living in California. Baker, who had lost most of his front teeth in a 1966 brawl and was adjusting (poorly) to an ill-fitting dental bridge, was no longer playing nearly as well or as often as he once had. Drugs had taken over Baker’s life, further limiting his reliability and, as a result, his recording and performing opportunities.
Baker’s seemingly harsh descent allegedly deeply disturbed Frank. As the two began building their friendship, Frank vowed to help the trumpeter gain back his chops and get the gigs and recording opportunities he believed his idol deserved. Franks, in his all-too rose-colored memoir, Chet Baker: The Missing Years, considered Baker “the most hauntingly melodic, swinging player of all time, including all and barring none.”3
In his capacity as a house painter, Frank made connections to such Hollywood players as Nicky Blair (1926-98), a bit-part actor and proprietor of a popular high-end Italian restaurant on the Sunset Strip, famous among celebrities such as Frank Sinatra.
Blair, who had small roles in such films as Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), Viva Las Vegas (1964), Seven Days in May (1964) and many TV shows like “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.,” “The Munsters” and “Batman,” and Frank apparently became fast friends.
Later, Blair recommended Frank to former TV executive James Aubrey (1918-94), who had recently become head of MGM Studios. While Frank was painting Aubrey’s house, the painter suggested that Aubrey’s record division, MGM/Verve, might want to consider recording Baker.
Open to the idea (for some reason), Aubrey later set up a meeting with himself, Frank and Mike Curb (b. 1944), who had recently taken over MGM’s record division. Curb, who was all of 24 (!) at the time, and the youngest-ever president of the MGM and Verve labels, was a successful producer and devout Christian who went to great pains to clean house, not only of drug users but those who glorified drug use. (Curb would go on to serve as Lt. Governor of California from 1979 to 1983.)
Suggesting Baker had cleaned up his act, which, of course, he hadn’t, Frank – also a devout Christian – somehow managed to persuade Curb into giving Baker, not a contract, but a shot. Curb proposed that Baker record a jazz version of the eponymous album by the rock-jazz group Blood, Sweat & Tears, a Grammy Award-winning hit record from the prior year. The title, Blood, Chet and Tears, was also Curb’s idea. Baker apparently rolled his eyes and said, “I don’t know, man.”
“[Curb] planned to get the same producer/arranger, Jerry Styner, for the album project,” wrote Frank,4 despite the BS&T original being produced by James William Guercio, better known as the long-time producer of Chicago, which, at that time, was also considered a rock-jazz group.
In the end, only the three singles from Blood, Sweat & Tears wound up getting covered. The rest of the program was rounded out by covers of AM radio hits that rode the charts in 1969 and 1970, no doubt chosen by Curb’s point man, Styner.
Jerry Styner (1936-2024), was, at the time, A&R director of Mike Curb’s Sidewalk Productions and likely better known to studio musicians than record buyers. His songs peopled many beach movies from the sixties, including Beach Blanket Bingo, and Vincent Price’s Dr. Goldfoot comedies, one of which was directed by Italian cult favorite Mario Bava.
His work here is, not surprisingly, journeyman-like. But it doesn’t do much to either stand out in any significant way or make this particular soloist sound worthy of the accompaniment, as Don Sebesky did for so many soloists – including, later, Chet Baker himself – on so many recordings.
III.
The album gets off to a bumpy start with the lumbering “Easy Come, Easy Go.” A Top 10 hit for Bobby Sherman in 1970, the decidedly uncool “Easy Come, Easy Go” gets a pedestrian TV variety show-like arrangement here. The clever melody certainly deserved better than the dated early-sixties rock rhythm it gets – here and on the original. Baker’s awkward solo sections don’t do much to help.
“You’ve Made Me So Very Happy,” “Spinning Wheel” and “And When I Die” were all number two-hits in 1969 by the jazz-rock group that gives this album its title, Blood, Sweat & Tears, from the Grammy Award-winning album, also known as Blood, Sweat & Tears. The familiar melodies are just that, familiar. None would even stand out on an easy-listening radio station.
The plodding take of “Sugar Sugar,” the 1969 number-one hit by the fictious cartoon group The Archies, is marred by an especially bored-sounding rhythm section. It hardly inspires Baker to do much more than play along. Only at about the song’s two-thirds mark, at the key change, is where the horns start to provide any sort of interesting counterpoint and Chet begins to sound half engaged.
It’s here that this listener finally perked up and started hearing some of the possibilities at hand.
“Something” is the first of two vocals Baker takes on the record. The George Harrison original, of course, originates from the Beatles’ final studio recording Abbey Road. It is one of the few occasions Baker has waxed quasi-poetically on – or let’s just say covers – the Beatles: others include “Michelle,” “Yesterday” and “Norwegian Wood” with Bud Shank and “Here, There and Everywhere” and “Got to Get You Into My Life” with the Carmel Strings.
Baker’s vocal here is what makes the song well worth hearing. As on his best vocal moments elsewhere – think anything from most takes of “My Funny Valentine” or even Elvis Costello’s beguiling “Almost Blue” – he sounds sincere and commanding, even boyishly vulnerable and fragile.
The unlikely and little-covered “Vehicle” is, for this listener, one of the album’s highlights. The song was a hit in 1970 by the Detroit-based rockers and one-hit wonder The Ides of March. At the time, many listeners (including this one) mistook The Ides of March for Blood, Sweat & Tears: their gruff and muscular lead singer (and “Vehicle” songwriter), Jim Peterik, and upfront horn section resonated with the same sort of jazz-rock vibe BS&T gave off.
The electric rhythm section beautifully drives this piece of propulsive jazz-rock. Styner provides some terrific horn charts and one of the guitarists takes this “Vehicle” for a welcome rock-ish spin. (There is something about this “Vehicle” that reminds this listener of the “Runaway” cue from Bill Conti’s score to the 1981 James Bond film For Your Eyes Only.)
Baker, too, is all in. The trumpet player is considerably more fiery here than he ever was before or since: surprisingly more Maynard and less Miles. His brief solo here is flawless. It’s difficult to imagine Baker enjoying this kind of music, but he plays the hell out of it anyway.
So, why all this fuss over what is clearly a mediocre album?
Because when an artist of Chet Baker’s caliber waxes something mediocre – even such a failure of a crossover attempt as Blood, Chet and Tears – a weird alchemy has to yield some sort of magical reaction. I find this to be true of Baker’s Carmel Strings records in particular. On this record, that magical moment comes on “Come Saturday Morning.”
The haunting ballad, originally performed by Liza Minelli for the soundtrack of the film she starred in, Alan J. Pakula’s The Sterile Cuckoo (1969), was Academy Award-nominated, though it lost to “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The Sandpipers had a minor hit with the song, which was also covered by such vocalists as Johnny Mathis and Tony Bennett. Woody Herman is one of the few jazz players to cover the Fred Karlin-Dory Previn theme.
Baker delivers an absolutely exquisite take of “Come Saturday Morning.” Styner’s arrangement is perfect – although the strings, though lush, are so high in the mix that it threatens to overtake Baker’s sensibly sensitive (if not surprisingly mournful) vocal. The nomadic, hippie-like lyric seems to reach something deep inside Baker that I think rung particularly true for this nomadic musician. His conviction here is utterly convincing.
IV.
“Chet Baker,” wrote Record World in a surprisingly upbeat review, “who had a few hints picked up from him by Blood, Sweat and Tears, repays the compliment here in his return to recording from one of his frequent long absences. Among other delights and diversions, Chet sings ‘Something’ and ‘Come Saturday Morning’.”5
Predictably, the jazz cognoscenti were not amused.
“The sad thing about this album,” wrote DownBeat‘s Doug Ramsey in his one-star review, “is that Baker is such a fine musician, that he’s been away from recording for so many years, and that this LP could have been done by any competent trumpet player. It’s faceless, gutless music, another attempt to justify recording a jazz artist by having him play undistinguished arrangements of popular songs in hopes the rock titles will sell a batch of records.
“I hope the ploy works here. Chet no doubt needs the royalty checks. There is no other reason to buy the record.
“The trumpet playing is dispirited except for a good solo on [And When I] Die and a few seconds in [Spinning] Wheel when Baker almost takes off; visions of the producer wagging his finger and shaking his head. As for the singing go back to Baker’s old Pacific Jazz albums. This is no way to welcome Chet Baker back to the scene.6
In his terse one-star assessment of Blood, Chet and Tears, Baker biographer Jeroen de Valk, said of it only that it was “[h]ighly professional garbage.”7 Another Baker biographer, James Gavin, in the brief paragraph he devotes to the album, further elaborated that Baker “recorded with a rhythm section of high-school rock-band quality8; afterward, the tracks were slathered with saccharine horn playing and twinkly bells. Not surprisingly, Baker sounded as if he were half asleep.”9
Surprisingly, Verve opted not to issue any singles from the album, a program that’s pretty radio friendly – particularly the vocal tracks. Blood, Chet and Tears never found its way on to CD, either. But some of the tracks from the album have found their way on to several “jazz goes pop” CD compilations, though most have been issued in Europe.
No less than three tracks from the record – “Vehicle,” “Spinning Wheel” and “Evil Ways” (the last two of which British jazz magazine Jazzwise improbably called “surprisingly aggressive and effective”10) – were featured on the 1998 European CD compilation Talkin’ Verve Groovy.
“Chet was really grateful to Mike Curb for giving him an opportunity to record again,” wrote Artt Frank. “He was, however, relieved that it was over with…Chet didn’t ever want to have to play that kind of music again.” (He didn’t.)
That night, Frank accompanied Baker and his family to a restaurant to celebrate with a lavish meal. On the way home, Baker became ill and threw it all up. According to Frank, Baker would “tell me later on that he felt he had prostituted himself and he couldn’t take it.” 11 (Or, the food did not agree with the heroin in his system.)
Several weeks later, Baker apparently told Frank that he and his family were moving – the very next day, in fact – to the Bay Area, where Baker’s mother had taken a job. By Frank’s own account, the two stayed in touch over the years (at least through 1974, shortly after Baker recorded the next studio album that appeared, She Was Too Good to Me) and continued playing the occasional date with the trumpeter – mostly on the east coast.
One of those dates, recorded in 1984, was issued on CD as Live at Buffalo in 1991 – three years after the trumpeter’s death from a fall from an Amsterdam hotel window – on wife Carol Baker’s CCB Productions label and reissued in 2001 as Live at the Renaissance II. The disc has also been released as Nightbird and I Remember You.
Endnotes:
- Bitches Brew by Miles Davis; Gula Matari by Quincy Jones; Black Talk by Charles Earland; and Swiss Movement by Les McCann and Eddie Harris. ↩︎
- A second “t” was added to Frank’s name – many years later – when Baker told Frank that he knew three Arts: saxophonist Art Pepper was the first, so Art Frank became his “Artt.” Frank eventually adopted the odd nomenclature, while not acknowledging Baker’s other Art. ↩︎
- Frank, Artt, Chet Baker: The Missing Years, Book, BooksEndependent, LLC, California?, 2014. ↩︎
- Frank, p. 183. ↩︎
- Record World, September 26, 1970, p. 24. ↩︎
- DownBeat, December 24, 1970, p. 26. It’s worth noting that Doug Ramsey wrote the effusive liner notes for the next studio album released by Chet Baker, 1974’s She Was Too Good to Me. ↩︎
- Valk, Jeroen de, Chet Baker: His Life and Music, Berkeley Hills Books, Berkeley, California, 2000, p. 272. ↩︎
- Chet Baker (trumpet, vocals) is featured with a studio orchestra of such “Musicians of note” as Tony Terran and Ray Triscari (trumpet); Ollie Mitchell and Dick Hyde (trombone); George Roberts (bass trombone); Plas Johnson (tenor saxophone); Buddy Collette (reeds); Larry Knetchel, who helmed the first first Carmel Strings record before Baker took over (keyboards); Mike Deasy, Tommy Tedesco, Al Casey and Joe Pass, all of whom factor on Baker’s Mariachi Brass and Carmel Strings records (guitar); Joe Osborn and Ray Pohlman (electric bass); Hal Blaine (drums); and “The Sid Sharp Strings.” ↩︎
- Gavin, James, Deep in a Dream: The Long Night of Chet Baker, Chicago Review Press, Chicago, 2002, p. 231.. ↩︎
- Jazzwise, July 1998, p. 45. The brief review amusingly quotes a line from Richard S. Ginell’s “wacky” sleeve notes to Talkin’ Verve Groovy: “some of this music sounds dumb to me, but…its energy makes me feel good.” ↩︎
- Frank, pp. 190-191. ↩︎