Chet Baker
Burnin' at Backstreet

"Chet had the bleak feeling that every time he played it could be the last, he confessed to me on several occasions. Whatever the reason, however, it was fantastic, spectacular. It was going to be an incredible night, I could feel it. I’ve played with Chet in many clubs over the years, in Europe and the United States, but that particular night felt profoundly different to me. It was as if Chet was on fire... Burnin' at Backstreet!"

Drummer Art Frank recalls that wild concert where Chet Baker’s trumpet turned scorching hot. For one night, indeed, under a scourge of notes, the Backstreet Club in New Haven became the scene of one of Chet Baker's most ruthless personal battles against what remained of himself. It is not the usual Baker that takes the stage on February 19th, 1980, this time the tone has drastically changed. In "Burnin' At Backstreet" there is no trace of the melodic aesthete of melancholy, it’s useless to search for it. It is a night of rage and outbursts, self-annihilation, and subsequent artistic depersonalization. Relentless, violent, restless to the limits of incredibility, for one night Chet is an unforgiving man. He channels an inexhaustible vortex of breath through the mechanics of his trumpet, like an apocalyptic breath destined to fuel a pyre that conserves only rancor of the human. Let the hunger and thefts of the worst days burn up, burn the syringe, the doses, the tourniquet, the methadone. Burn the past, the heroin, the pawned and stolen trumpets. Let angelic Chet Baker burn, let the image boy in his youth burn, the James Dean of Jazz. To hell with the pains, the women, the arrests, the scandals, the beatings. Could everything disappear forever, each thing forgotten, gone, finished: ashes. As in a wild fight, fought publicly, it seems that the present Baker wants to in one night annul and humiliate the past Baker (a future Baker is not considered). There is no truce and no rest in the artist's brooding and in response, there is no pity in the endless gusts that materialize furiously during the solos. They are endless pieces. Fifteen minutes, thirteen minutes, seventeen minutes: the duration and structural order of a piece or a solo no longer have value or reason to exist. Everything is destabilized, every door is dismantled, and time itself is nothing but yet another victim of an endless night of denied forgiveness. As in a devastated process of elimination, every form is denied, every ornament banned, any aesthetic attention reduced to dust. There is room only for the raw and naked content. The tracks are just the burning stage usurped by an uncontrollable expressive urgency that understands nothing refined, nothing clean. The way the musicians attack the tracks is violent, dirty, and outrageous, the main theme of each track is quickly chewed up and immediately discarded to allow the quartet to dive headlong into the solos. Baker's musical monologues are wonderfully improper in duration and arrogance. They strike and destabilize his creativity like never before, the continuous relaunches, and changes of tempo. Baker had never been so incisive and quick, his timbre is drier and sharper than ever. They are endless solos, breathless, that feed on themselves and confront each other. Baker manages to drag the entire group into his personal hell and consequently, Drew Salperto's piano manages incredibly to shine with its own light, becoming equally violent. While you lose yourself in the trail traced by Salperto’s hard and sharp blows on the keyboard, it seems impossible to think that the drums and double bass (respectively Art Frank and Mike Formanek) can find their reason for existing. Yet it happens: in the chaotic disorder of that furious night, the double bass and drums manage to impeccably adorn the unstoppable emotional flow that dominates the evening. The result is a strong, drastic, and atypical live for its instinctive and wild approach to music and spirit. After having overturned and pushed to the extremes the pieces of Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie, at the end of the concert, Baker still has the strength to sing, with a thread of voice, almost inaudible. He closes the evening with an exhausted and damnably weak voice, the result of a unique and exhausting musical and human tour de force. On February 19th, 1980, at the Backstreet Club in New Haven, Chet Baker caught fire, but he was never able to rise from his ashes. Around the corner, there is always a next dose and the future is nothing but a slow and merciless decline under the skies of Amsterdam.