Chet Baker Chet Baker And His Orchestra

This was Chet’s last visit to the Pathé-Magellan studio, and he was to be reunited with a septet: he’d loved the Pierre Michelot arrangements he’d recorded five months earlier, and he’d asked the bassist to write more. With such a short deadline, Michelot had only been able to deliver "Mythe" and "Not To Slow", but they were remarkable nevertheless. So much so that, on this return to The United States, Chet took them with him, expecting, for reasons that were mainly contractual, that his Parisian recordings would have difficulty crossing the Atlantic. To bring these scores to the attention of his compatriots, Chet recorded them again in Los Angeles, together with ‘Chet’, ‘Dinah’ and ‘Vline’, the Christian Chevalier tune presented here in a second version that features the flexible brushwork of Pierre Lemarchand. The original 45rpm record was completed by Bobby Jaspar’s "In A Little Provincial Town", and the sad serenity of it is reminiscent of the writing he’d produced shortly beforehand for the quartet augmented by five woodwinds. These four pieces, all grand finales among the works recorded in France for the Barclay label, proved to be irrefutable arguments showing that jazz now had a new voice to be reckoned with, a voice was uniquely original.