Chet Baker & Paul Bley
Diane

Will the world be saved by beauty?, Dostoevsky asks in The Idiot. The answer can only be affirmative while listening to the wonderful "Diane" by Chet Baker, one of his best and most unknown albums ever (at least in Italy) and for me definitely the most beautiful and moving. We're in 1985, but it's useless to cage ourselves in dates, faced with truly classic music, that is, timeless, neither spatially bound.

Chet's breath merges with Paul Bley's piano in an incredibly refined harmonic symbiosis, Siamese twins with a single heart (only the jazz trinity comes to mind - Evans, LaFaro, Motion). 

Diane may have been Chet's last companion, the one who considered him "the devil incarnate" and foresaw his cursed and impending end. It's to her that one of the precious gems of this sorrowful album is dedicated, in addition to the title. But again we are in time, in biography, in the then. The eight whispered tracks from the Chet Bley duo are now a part of humanity's heritage and a point of no return for a disembodied humanism emancipated from specific singularities.  Even from those that made the night of May 13, 1988 (Chet's death) even darker and more ominous under the skies of Amsterdam and Jazz.

But now it is the time of Beauty and of the Eternal, which finds its epicenter in the heartbreaking "You Go to My Head", the only sung track and true gem of the album. Never has Chet sung like this. Never. An emotionally unbearable song, digging into the listener's deep heart. The trumpet solo, then, seems to gather all the poignant nostalgia a man could only imagine to feel, pouring it, like cruel lava, into the uncertain path carved by the notes. And from the last trumpet note, the voice melts again, that Voice that evaporates into a very fragile and pale sigh until the end of the track.

Then silence. A silence full of echoes and vibrations, a silence that reappears in all other tracks and molds them with darkness and poetry.  Yes, because it is to poetry that help must be sought to describe such intangible atmospheres that only this duo can evoke. "Like night that breathes memories and whispers its protagonism to mute things" - Thus Baker's trumpet. Yes, because music is magical, and sometimes, as in this case, it becomes silence and night.

A record that goes straight to the heart, without unnecessary filters of virtuosity and academies. A record that drives you out of your mind, just as poet Chet recites, through the beautiful lyrics of "You Go to My Head"

You drive me out of my mind

like an obsessive refrain

A merry-go-round of my mind

A glass of champagne