Chet Baker – Shine

Chet Baker showed with his music that little bit of dark substance that exists in the human being – the shadow side – just as very few other jazz musicians have been able to do. However, such a reading that looks for traces of anguish and self-destruction in every note – and which has also been translated into a couple of films – has ended up overshadowing something very important: namely, that Chet Baker was a top-notch jazz musician, the creator of a unique and personal poetics, an interpreter who did not wallow in his own torments but who also knew how to take less introspective paths, including a superfine and very lively swing. Chet Baker’s music had characteristics of it’s own. Of a bebop nature in the fast pieces, he had in solos that complex and pulsating way that characterized this style. He differed from it in the soft timbre of the trumpet, which rarely indulged in the “flare-ups” typical of the boppers, and above all for the insistent use