Shine [CD], Chet Baker, CD

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 of pauses. These were precisely one of the cornerstones of his musical language. In the ballads the trumpeter-singer expanded them to the point of absurdity (and so did with the notes), making them spaces charged of meaning, as can be seen in the somber I'm a Fool to Want You, made famous by Billie Holiday, and also in the serene In a Sentimental Mood. In this final phase of his career, Baker often liked to have groups without drums with him because, in addition to allowing him to maintain a muffled volume in his singing and trumpet playing, the drumless situation guaranteed him greater freedom. Only the double bass player was left to keep time, a role here entrusted to a solid Knauer. In Ferrara, a sensitive French pianist, Michel Graillier, took the stage; in those years he was looking for a synthesis between the energy of McCoy Tyner and the harmonic language of Bill Evans. Finally, the presence of a piano allowed Stilo to limit the use of the other harmonic instrument, the guitar, in favor of the flute.