Stan Getz, Chet Baker - Stan Meets Chet FLAC

This is an album I have a hard time turning away from, even though Stan Getz and Chet Baker, who were nearly two peas in a pod and smoldering from the inside, never really got along with each other. Some have suggested that it was more than a dislike, even more than a disdain, that these two wonderful men shared an open mutual hostility for each other, one that can be heard in subtle manners throughout this session.

Perhaps with today’s ears I can hear the eloquence that’s missing from this album, though during the later 1950’s, it sure seemed fine to me, forever holding a special secret place in my heart, as I’ve as many Getz records as I do of Baker. That said, as good as each is here, there are notable drawbacks. Take for example the opening lines of “I’ll Remember April,” where Getz seems to have found the groove, yet he’s not up to his usual standards, not to mention the squeaky reed, that no amount of digitizing can edit out. Then there’s the rhythm section, seemingly divided into the Baker camp and the Getz camp, who while adequate, just don’t deliver with the chops they should, where the studio’s piano manages to make things even worse, which is either out of tune or of an undesirable quality. That said, there are some saving moments, as on “What’s New,” where Getz lays out and rides the current of a long ballad with inspired phrasing and lyrical readings. Perhaps the finest song on the album, “Jordu,” shows Getz swinging with the rhythm section very convincingly, a song that was perhaps so good because Chet Baker doesn’t show his face on the track.

Yet still, for one reason or another, I find this recording to be totally delightful, even enchanting, after all these were the golden boys of the era in their heyday, where uptempo or cooled down, there are far too many fine moments to be missed without this album in one’s collection.

Finding images of Chet Baker from this time show him looking to be an old haggard and worn-out man. Most of the issues with this album and between Getz and Baker stem from Baker himself. Both were involved with heroin, yet Baker in self-righteous moralist disdain, and not wishing to see himself as an addict, considered Getz to be a junkie slob. Perhaps Baker’s disdain was well placed, as even for junkies, Getz would show up at Baker’s digs time and time again, overdose and put Baker in the position of reviving him. Famously, once after being revived by Baker and friends, a half dead blue Getz came to saying, “You f**kers messed up my high.”

Regardless of the ill will on both their parts, I sincerely believe there was a deep and abiding musical respect each held for the other regardless of their surreal drug habits, where it wasn’t so much their dislike of each other that kept them from delivering a fine album, but the drugs themselves that kept them from being able to play, after all, put two junkie musicians in a room, and the needle is the instrument of choice.

*** The Fun Facts (or not so Fun Facts): Chet Baker was laying in a fetal position on the sidewalk outside a cheap hotel near Amsterdam’s Central Train Station when police found his body. Blood had covered his face and coated his blue striped pants, his skull was crushed and it was 3:30 in the morning with a full moon. At the scene, the police made a judgment that the dead man had jumped out of a window in the Prins Hendrik Hotel, hitting his head on a concrete street post. There was no identification on the body, which was promptly wrapped in a white cloth and sent to the morgue. The next morning Dutch police returned to the Prins Hendrick Hotel to investigate, where they soon determined that a room about thirty feet above the street where the body had been found had been rented by one Chet Baker. Sadly, the name was not familiar to the police detectives.

Review by Jenell Kesler

Sounds very very good in stereo. Nice record great quality.