Will Friedwald, author of The Great Jazz and Pop Vocal Albums, is exploring some of the finest recordings of the 20th century on The Jonathan Channel. This week he discusses The Best of Chet Baker Sings.

Will Friedwald: The wonderful thing about Let’s Get Lost, which is also known as The Best of Chet Baker Sings, is that Chet Baker’s singing voice, and it’s interesting that he never really thought of himself as a singer... a lot of these musicians who sang, we say this about Nat King Cole too, they thought of themselves as singers very much secondarily, and when a lot of Chet Baker’s audience was there to hear him sing, he very rarely indulged that. He couldn’t really understand why people would value that so much. And as a result, unfortunately, he did not make a lot of vocal records. When you collect Chet Baker records, maybe he sings once in awhile in a concert here and there, but there are very few all-vocal records. And this particular one, which is from his earliest sessions as a leader right after he parted company with Gerry Mulligan and had his own group, and was singing at the insistence of the producer Richard Bock, these sessions are just wonderful. They capture him in all of his youthful freshness, before he started using drugs heavily, before he started experiencing all that dissipation. And the innocence and even the naivety of them is quite charming. This is the only album in my book that is a compilation, where they took twenty tracks from a period of about three or four years and put them all together. It never came out like this during the LP era but it was an early release in the compact disk form right around the time that Chet died. It did more for his reputation at that point… after Chet died, all of the sudden he became much more famous as a singer than he ever had before.

It’s just a wonderful set of songs, many of which were from the WWII period. They were all songs that Chet heard when he was a young musician listening to the radio in the early forties when he was a teenager or preteen, studying the trumpet and just being wrapped up in the world of popular music. His singing on these things is so exceptional and so full of life and energy, that as he got older, as he got more dissipated… it’s still there to a certain extent, but these are the tracks that really define Chet Baker as a vocalist. But more I would say than anything else he ever did, and like I say, it’s unfortunate that he didn’t do that many other albums as a singer, but this one album really is enough to cap his whole reputation.

Listen to the audio on this page for more on The Best of Chet Baker Sings.