Chet Baker – Lonely Star (Prestige)

Nineteen-sixty-five was a deleterious year for so-called Cool Jazz. Art Pepper was serving a prison stretch on smack possession charges. Gerry Mulligan had just dissolved his Concert Jazz Band and would spend the next few years looking for a new direction. Stan Getz was several styles removed having conquered bossa nova and successfully embraced orchestral arrangements. Chet Baker, former erstwhile poster child for Cool had just returned from Europe, his ongoing imbroglios with narcotics blackening the eyes of his previous playboy reputation. Baker was on the ropes and urgently in need of a constructive creative outlet. A rescue ladder out of the abyss came with a marathon session for Prestige that mirrored Miles Davis’ earlier cycle for the label in terms of gerund-centric titles. Richard Carpenter, Baker’s industrious manager, provided the majority of tunes and assembled a terrific backing band comprised of Memphis-born tenor George Coleman, just one year removed from his high profile post with Davis, and a Detroit-based rhythm section led by young pianist Kirk Lightsey. The other twist was Baker’s decision to stick solely to flugelhorn and the rounded tone of the larger horn suits him. Coleman’s Coltrane and Rollins influenced tenor is a surprisingly better fit with Baker than it was with Davis and as frontline partners go the two are uncommonly copasetic. Baker responds to the earthier surroundings by sharpening his attack, but the underlying polish and poise that were his trademarks are still intact. To date, I’ve only heard two in the trilogy of collections, this one having a slight advantage over its companion Stairway to the Stars. Baker would fall off and on the wagon repeatedly over the next several decades before falling out a window and ending things permanently. With that level of hindsight, there’s something overtly poetic about this survey of a damaged jazz man vying for a comeback and, for a short time, succeeding in his cause.