Chet Baker
With Fifty Italian Strings

We are talking about the quintessential jazz life.

We are talking about that young man, still beautiful, too beautiful, really, to imagine he played like a god. Today, if someone is so beautiful (and it's the norm, even better, whether male or female…) they almost certainly make shitty music. Amen. Back then, no. In Italy, very often, maybe attracted by the “dolce vita” that often resided in the streets of our best cities (even that, in hindsight, so far from today's Billionaires…) this young, thin man with a thin and very sweet voice and a perfect trumpet used to roam around. Phraseology, sound, imagination, readiness, touch, attack. Everything perfect. Here as elsewhere. Here as always.

So why are we talking about this album…? For a purely historical/personal note (it's the last one I bought…) and for another out of pure curiosity: like in other cases, here Chet plays with Italians. But on another splendid occasion (still October '59…) we saw him in the company of true giants of Italian jazz, like Gianni Basso or Renato Sellani. Here he is simply accompanied by a swarm of violas, violins, double basses, and more. A wealth of romantic and quintessentially Italian rhetoric. An orchestra that was millions of light-years away from overseas orchestras. And then, the album is bad… you might say… No, not at all. Firstly, because here we are talking about one of the few King Midas of Music, capable of turning everything his voice or trumpet touches into gold. Then because everything must be historicized, amicably, affectionately, without hysteria. Even Italy, Milan of 1959, therefore. Where jazz was seen in a certain way, and only that way, where Claudio Villa reigned and Faber was grappling with his first songs. Where modernity was called Carosone, Buscaglione, and Modugno. And where jazz was a beautiful game for a few brave souls and delightful soundtracks for “Soliti Ignoti”. In short, another world, where the boundaries of rhetoric and romance were astronomically different from today's.

So we have in this album an encounter between two worlds, that of America's relaxed professionalism, the pure jazz musician, the absolute modernity of sound and phraseology and that of tradition, the score, the melodramatic crescendo, the easy effect, and eyes wide open to the world. It is not a bad orchestra. On the contrary, it is very tuned, impeccable. But by today's (ours) and then's (else’s) standards, definitely too academic, too servile to the score (the score is a bit like a car, you can drive it or be driven by it…), too correct and prepared for that occasion. The repertoire is also questionable, although obvious, as it in fact antiquates classics that were then very modern. An album not to be taken, you might think… But no, of course, since a period piece by an author is always significant both for the period and the author. We have had this type of orchestras, and from a certain point of view, one can also be proud of it, and about Chet… what to say… his absolute genius is a joy that is renewed and demonstrated “beyond any reasonable doubt” in every recording, whether well made or in the myriad bootlegs that are around.

He, a true free spirit, played with everyone (it is said… but coincidentally they were always all very good…), signed all the contracts and didn’t sign, basically, any. Often he didn't even have the trumpet anymore, pawned for some dose, like and worse than Bird's alto sax. But the reality is and remains one: whatever his voice and his trumpet touched, as I've already said, turned to gold.

Always.