Five from '65
£159.00
Format: Vinyl LP
Label:Newland
Out of stock
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Description
Five original Chet Baker studio albums from 1965 (AAA) remastered and cut directly from the original mono tapes by Kevin Gray
Manufactured on 180gm vinyl and housed in reverse-board deluxe sleeves, the expansive book includes liner notes from GRAMMY® award nominated James Gavin, interviews with Chet Baker, George Coleman, Kirk Lightsey, Herman Wright, Roy Brooks and previously unseen photographs.
Packaged in a secure, heavy lift-off lid box with spot-gloss finish.
These superlative recordings bridge Cool Jazz elegance with the raw immediacy of East Coast Hard Bop.
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Five original studio albums, recorded in New York City across one week in August 1965: Boppin’, Smokin’, Groovin’, Comin’ On, Cool Burnin’ available on vinyl for the first time in over 50-years. Representing a critical moment in his career, Chet Baker hooked up with a superlative band for these recordings: George Coleman; Kirk Lightsey; Herman Wright and Roy Brooks play throughout on these thrilling sets, which were originally issued by Prestige Recordings.
Chet Baker's 1965 Prestige recordings mark a transitional period - his return to the U.S. after time in Europe and a brush with the legal system. These sessions show him leaning into a grittier, more expressive tone, yet still laced with his signature lyrical beauty.
Cut at the height of Prestige Records’ hard bop renaissance, this session pairs Baker with saxophone titan George Coleman - fresh from his tour with Miles Davis. The result is a raw, swinging quintet sound that’s immediate, soulful, and unvarnished.
After years of drifting through Europe and seemingly unending personal turmoil, Chet returned to the U.S. and cut these sessions. Stripped of the youthful innocence that defined his early West Coast days, Baker plays with a darker, more introspective edge - his horn still sings, but now it sighs too.
Joined by a tight NYC rhythm section, these recordings bridge cool jazz’s elegance with the raw immediacy of East Coast hard bop. This is Baker at his most human - fragile, lyrical, unfiltered.
When he made these records during three frantic sessions in the summer of 1965, Chet Baker was struggling through what one critic termed “a decade of frustration found at the point of a hypodermic needle.”
Expectations were low when Prestige Records, a bastion of modern jazz at its toughest, released the first of five albums culled from those dates. They had plunged Baker into post-bop, an almost alien land for him. His bandmates in The Chet Baker Quintet, none of whom he had previously played with, were the aforementioned Memphis-born tenor man Coleman; drummer Roy Brooks, a graduate of Horace Silver, and two promising bop-schooled newcomers: pianist Kirk Lightsey and bassist Herman Wright. Baker was the only white member of the group. He rose to his surroundings with empathetic verve and earned his colleagues’ respect.
These aren’t just “late-era” Chet recordings - they’re a document of reinvention. For collectors, this fills a crucial gap between his iconic 1950s cool jazz era and his darker 1970s European sessions. The interplay with Coleman is especially rare and electric.
“These sessions let one know he could break through his "cool" image by playing heated bop when he wanted to. It also finds him debuting on flugel horn and the softer tone fits his introverted sound well"
"These recordings might not be as famous as Chet’s Pacific Jazz sides, but they’re every bit as vital - raw, searching, and deeply human." Jazzwise Magazine
“These records are the basis for my being known at all in the jazz world” Kirk Lightsey
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