Chet Baker

 

Listening to Prestige: Chronicling Its Classic Jazz Recordings, 1949–1972, my history of Prestige Records, will be published in January 2026. Order in advance from Amazon or through your local independent bookstore.

LISTEN TO ONE: Madison Avenue

If this seems reminiscent of Miles Davis’s Contractual Marathon sessions, that’s because it’s supposed to. That is to say:

 First: The Baker sessions are nothing like the Davis sessions.

 Second: They were absolutely marketed to mimic the Davis sessions.

 Why are they nothing like?

 The Davis Contractual Marathon sessions are actual Prestige recording sessions, supervised by Bob Weinstock, recorded at Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in Hackensack. The Baker sessions were recorded somewhere or other, supervised by Richard Carpenter, and licensed to Prestige.

 The Davis Contractual Marathon sessions were recorded in three sessions over the better part of a year: November 1955, May 1956 and October 1956. The first was solid six-tune session, a good day’s work by most standards. The second and third were something else again: two full days of work, with eight tunes in May and 12 in October. But this was a half-marathon at best, compared to the Baker sessions – 32 tunes in three days, all in the same week.

 The Davis sessions utilized his newly formed ensemble that came to be known as the First Quintet, one of jazz’s greatest groups, with their leader at a creative peak. The marathon nature of the sessions was necessitated by Davis’s new contract with Columbia Records, which couldn’t take effect until he had fulfilled his obligation to Prestige. The Baker sessions featured four excellent musicians who had been gigging together when they could get work, with their leader at a low ebb creatively and reputationally. He still had a name with drawing power, but he was associated with the West Coast school which was pretty much passé by 1965. And heroin had left him such a wreck that a marathon may have seemed a good idea—who knew how much longer he’d he around? In fact, a couple of years later he was badly beaten in a drug-related incident, destroying his embouchure. He did gradually relearn the trumpet, and make a comeback of sorts. I saw him in a small club in New York in 1978; he played sitting down, and while he had some nice musical ideas, there was no energy at all.

 Davis had to make a lot of music in a short time, so he and his group relied on standards. It was music that they knew how to play, but they were great tunes, and Davis had an unparalleled way with ballads. Baker had to make a hell of a lot of music in a very short time, so he and his group relied on…the Richard Carpenter songbook? But there was no Richard Carpenter songbook. Or rather, there was, but it was amassed in an unorthodox way, by Carpenter erasing the name of the actual composer, substituting his own, and submitting it for copyright that way. The Chet Baker sessions featured a bunch of skilled hard bop professionals, who knew how to improvise on a riff or a standard blues lick, and with a tape recorder running, and a nimble finger on the “composed by” line of the lead sheet…that Richard Carpenter, he sure can write!

 The standards Miles Davis recorded meant royalties to the composers. The “Richard

Carpenter”compositions…well…

 And how is the music? Well, it’s pointless to compare it to Miles Davis’s marathon, so we won’t try.

 The music holds up very well. Baker, after this session was completed, returned to the scene of his former glory, the West Coast and World Pacific Records, to make some 1950s-style West Coast jazz recordings that lacked inspiration and were later dismissed by Baker himself as “a job to pay the rent.”

But these are New York musicians, some of the best working in New York at the time; and hard bop, as a genre, has proven to wear better over the years than the West Coast sound. This might better be described as a George Coleman-Kirk Lightsey group, with special guest Chet Baker. Coleman and Lightsey play some solid jazz throughout. Baker sometimes lags a bit, but mostly he shows that he can play hard bop and adapt it to his style.

 The Baker-Coleman-Lightsey sessions were released as Smokin’ with…Groovin’ with…Comin’ on with… starting to sound familiar? It’s not hard to imagine Richard Carpenter’s sales pitch to Bob Weinstock -- "Here’s a big batch of hard‑bop, quintet Chet – with the right kind of marketing, you could have another Miles Davis marathon."

 

It didn’t work. The Baker recordings sank without a trace. Down Beat doesn’t seem to have reviewed any of them – they’re not even mentioned in Billboard. Prestige was releasing a lot of product in the late 1960s – earlier recordings by artists who had moved on, stuff that had been sitting in their vaults. And Baker wasn’t a real Prestige artist – just a guy passing through on his way from his real home in Europe to his real home on the West Coast.

 

You can find them now on YouTube, but the albums didn’t get much distribution, and the only CD reissues were in Europe. Too bad. They’re worth seeking out on YouTube, partly as sort of a curiosity – yes, Chet Baker really could play hard bop! – but mostly for some outstanding work by George Coleman and Kirk Lightsey, a couple of musicians who deserve much more acclaim than they have ever gotten, especially Lightsey.

Sylvia Syms

Listening to Prestige: Chronicling Its Classic Jazz Recordings, 1949–1972, my history of Prestige Records, will be published in January 2026. Order in advance from Amazon or through your local independent bookstore.

LISTEN TO ONE: More Than You Know

Sylvia Syms was in mid-career when she came to Prestige in 1965. A native New Yorker, she found the jazz clubs on 52nd Street as a teenager, and became a protégé of Billie Holiday’s. In 1941, she made her own debut on 52nd Street, performing at Kelly’s Stable. In 1948, Mae West, who was heading up a revue that played the swanky end of New York night life – the Copacabana and the Stork Club – heard Syms and signed the hard working singer for her revue. That led to future cabaret work, and an appearance on Eddie Condon’s Floor Show, believed to be the first live jazz show on network television. 

Atlantic Records signed her in 1952 and she got her first record release, a 10-inch LP with a trio led by Barbara Carroll, also just starting on Atlantic. After a couple of records with Atlantic, she moved over to Decca, where she sang with an orchestra conducted by Sy Oliver, and her one big hit. My Fair Lady’s “I Could Have Danced All Night,” which won her a gold record. But her talent was best suited to a more intimate setting – Frank Sinatra had called he “the ultimate saloon singer” and Decca next put her with a jazz quartet led by two guitars, Mundell Lowe and Barry Galbraith. 

 

As the decade rolled over, she recorded one-shot albums for Columbia, Kapp, and 20th Century Fox Records, the less successful arm of the entertainment conglomerate (although they were responsible for that Christmas staple, the Harry Simeon Chorale’s “The Little Drummer Boy”). Her recordings were generally praised for their intimacy and emotional honesty, though critics tended to find her improvisational skills limited. 

  Prestige signed her in 1965, and brought her to Englewood Cliffs for two sessions. The first, on August 11, matched her with a trio led by Kenny Burrell. The second, two days later, added Bucky Pizzarelli as a second guitar and Willie Rodriguez on percussion. This was an ideal setting for her, capturing the saloon-singer intimacy, and giving her the support she needed for some very satisfying improvisation. 

 The trio session featured mostly standards. “More Than You Know,” written by Vincent Youmans, lyrics by Billy Rose and Edward Eliscu, sounds as though it could have been written for Syms, although virtually every other cabaret and torch singer seems to have felt the same way about it. First recorded in 1929 by Helen Morgan, it has been taken into the studio more than 400 times. 

“I’m Afraid the Masquerade is Over” (Allie Wrubel, Herb Magidson) is another often-recorded standard, but Syms and producer Cal Lampley weren’t wrong in picking them. The yoking of a good song and a good singer is always going to be welcome, especially with the tasteful and inventive backing of Burrell, Hinton and Johnson. “God Bless the Child” is going to be a tribute to Billie Holiday no matter who sings it, even if you secularize the lyrics (“So the Bible says” becomes “so the wise man says” in Syms’s version). 

The second session, two days later, added the second guitar of Bucky Pizzarelli and the percussion of Willie Rodriguez, and song choices go a bit farther afield. The addition of Rodriguez opens the door to some Latin rhythms. “Brazil” was already a chestnut by the time Syms took it on, but the other Latin tune, “Cuando te Fuiste de Mi” (When you left me) is one that Syms, Lampley, Burrell and Rodriguez plucked from obscurity – at least, from mainstream obscurity. It had originally been recorded by Cuban singer Vicentico Valdes for the Seeco label, one of the more prominent independent New York labels specializing in Latin music (Celia Cruz was one of their artists). The bolero – romantic, melodic, gently rhythmic – is a nice fit for a cabaret singer, although not too many non-Latin artists incorporated it. Syms, with sensitive percussion work by Rodriguez, makes it work. “Cuando te Fuiste de Mi” would be rediscovered in the next decade by Charlie Palmieri, who reworked it with a salsa rhythm, and gave it new popularity, The two Prestige sessions became one album, Sylvia Is!, released in 1965 with testimonials on album cover from such notables as Woody Allen, Errol Garner, Tony Bennett – and Hollywood producer Ross Hunter, whose Wild is the Wind was the source of a song Syms included in the second session. 

This was her only Prestige album, but she continued working and recording, mostly for smaller labels, with one notable exception: a 1982 album for Reprise, backed by an orchestra conducted by Frank Sinatra and called Syms by Sinatra. She sang her last note on May 10, 1992, when she was struck down by a heart attack in mid-performance – appropriately enough, in one of New York’s most iconic supper clubs, the Oak Room at the Algonquin Hotel.

 

 

Listening to Prestige 720: Charles McPherson

LISTEN TO ONE: Chasin' The Bird

 This is McPherson's second Prestige album, and he hasn't lost his love for pure bebop. In fact, he never did, and although he may have seemed a little retro in 1965, both he and his mentor Barry Harris came to be recognized as national treasures for keeping alive the inventive musical style brought to life by McPherson's hero, Charlie Parker. 

In a 2019 80th birthday tribute to twin octogenarians McPherson and McCoy Tyner at Lincoln Center, Jazz at Lincoln Center's also saxophonist Sherman Irby paid this tribute: “The bebop master is a true alto saxophonist. He plays the instrument with fire, passion and precision. He can pull your heartstrings with one note, and dazzle you with virtuosity and

imagination. There is only one Bird, one Stitt, one Cannonball—and one Charles McPherson.”

In 2020, McPherson laid to rest the old canard that you can't dance to bebop with a striking new album. Jazz Dance Suites, which led the British jazz blog Bebop Spoken Here to enthuse:"Magnificent sounds somewhat inadequate! I doubt there will be a better album released this year. It is just so listenable, so danceable, so everything …"

And Mark Stryker, writing about his 2024 release, Reverence, said "More than six decades into a remarkable career, few command and deserve our reverence quite like Charles McPherson.”

So...in 1965, they may not have been talking about McPherson as the newest sound in town, but he was making music that people still wanted to hear, as evidenced by his six Prestige albums in four years -- and as evidenced by the fact that over six decades, he has never been far from the recording studio.

And if this session doesn't exactly bring you back to 1965, it does something much more important--it brings you into the heart of jazz. McPherson has assembled a cohesive group with Clifford Jordan joining him as his companion saxophonist, Harris on piano, George Tucker on bass, and Alan Dawson on drums.

They tip their hats to the progenitors of bebop, with compositions by Charlie Parker ("Chasin' the Bird"), Dizzy Gillespie ("Con Alma:), Thelonious Monk ("Eronel") and Dexter Gordon/Bud Powell ("Dexter Rides Again"). There's one original composition, "I Don't Know."

It's hard, from a distance of years, to imagine the reception McPherson got in 1965. Was McPherson irrelevant? Was he trying to pretend it was still 1955, or even 1945? Or was he a refreshing antidote to the dumbing down of bebop by the soul jazzers, or the incomprehensible navel-gazing of the free spirits?

It's hard to imagine from a perspective of today's listeners, for most of whom what 1945, 1955 and 1965 have in common is that they all happened before they were born. No one is likely to sit down on a rainy afternoon and play, in succession, albums by Jack McDuff, Albert Ayler and Charles McPherson. Conversely, not many contemporary listeners are going to listen to a few bars of Con Alms, rip it off the turntable (my imagined listener is a technological purist), say "What is this shit? Give me the real thing!" and put on a 78 of Bird on Dial.

Today it's just the music, and interpretations of Bird, Diz, Monk, Duke and Dexter, if they're played by someone good, are going to sound good, which is the best you can hope for from a piece of music. 

 

 I'm back! Listening to Prestige the book -- a history of Prestige Records -- is in production, and will be published this winter by SUNY Press. So I'm back to the blog again, and will continue my mission to listen to, and respond to, every Prestige session.