Chet Baker Quartet - Vol. 1

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.

Volume One brings together the first two sessions recorded October 11 and 14, 1955. With Richard “Dick” Twardzik on piano, Jimmy Bond on bass and Peter Littmann on drums, Chet performs eight originals of Robert L. ‘Bob’ Zieff (‘Rondette’, ‘Pièce-Caprice’, ‘Mid-Forte’, Re-Search’, Pomp’, ‘Sad Walk’, ‘Just Duo’, ‘Brash’), plus a solitary contribution from Twardzik (‘The Girl From Greenland’).