Chet Baker And His Quintet With Bobby Jaspar: In Paris Vol. 3 LP

In October 1955, Chet Baker and his Quartet gave 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.

Recorded for the Barclay label between Autumn 1955 and Spring 1956 at Studio Pathé-Magellan in Paris, these sessions, vol.1, 2 (quartet) & 3 (quintet, featuring Bobby Jaspar) are repressed for the first time on limited edition 1LP 180gm. Remastered from the original master tapes and presented in single sleeves with original jackets and liner notes.

Titled « Chet Baker and His Quintet with Bobby Jaspar », the 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 having been construed as rather a poor relation opposite the others in the trilogy, this last volume contains performances which are among the most beautiful that Chet Baker produced during this period.