Chet Baker Quartet with Bobby Jaspar - Chet Baker in Paris Vol. 3

To mark what would have been the 95th birthday of Chet Baker, Decca Records France presents high quality reissues on 180gm vinyl of the three original Chet Baker in Paris albums released on Barclay in 1955 and 1956.  

In October 1955, Chet Baker and his Quartet were to give a series of concerts, notably in France. Many French people expected a playboy and dilettante trumpeter to get off the plane; the man who arrived was someone who lived only for, and by, his art. A first album recorded in Paris placed him in the jazz avant-garde; the series of recordings that followed formed the private journal of someone so incapable of hiding his emotions that he sublimated them in the only way he knew: in music.

Titled Chet Baker and His Quintet with Bobby Jaspar, Volume Three brings together music from a few different sessions recorded between October 25, 1955 and February 1, 1956. However, only one session (December 26) contains Jaspar on tenor saxophone, performing "Chik-Eta" and "How About You?". The other sessions feature Baker leading groups with variable formation: quartet (performing "Alone Together," "Exitus," "Once in a While," quintet (with Jean-Louis Chautemps on tenor performing "Tasty Pudding" and "Anticipated Blues") or octet (performing "Chet," "Dinah," "Vline"). Despite being construed as a poor relation opposite the others in the trilogy, this last volume contains performances that are among the most beautiful that Chet Baker produced during this period.