He was a brilliant musician whose bright promise was hopelessly dimmed by heroin. He died unexpectedly in Europe, depriving us all of a magnetic presence in jazz. Yes, the story of Dick Twardzik is indeed one of music's great tragedies.
Oh, you thought. . . . No, we'll get to Mr. Baker in a moment. You know all about him anyway.
Twardzik, a pianist-composer who accompanied Baker on a European tour in the mid-1950s, is heard on only two of the 14 tracks on "Chet Baker in Paris." Yet both "Just Duo" and "Sad Walk" haunt the imagination for three reasons: One is the startling, farsighted inventiveness of Twardzik's playing. Two is the way his playing seems, in turn, to draw out more invention from Baker's trumpet than one could imagine. And three is the fact that Twardzik would die, at 24, of a drug overdose just days after these sessions were recorded in the fall of 1955.
In the wake of this calamity, a grieving Chet Baker, himself a veritable kiosk of drug-addiction issues, recorded several melancholy renditions of such ballads as "Summertime," "Tenderly" and a vocal turn on "Everything Happens to Me." Which may well have summed up his sense of self in that dismal autumn.
Yet if a case can be made for great art to emerge from the depths of tragedy, then these "legendary sessions" for the Barclay recording label can surely be classified as Exhibits A through N. (Fourteen tracks, remember?)
Since Baker's own sudden (possibly drug-related) demise in 1988, reissues of his albums have arrived by the truckload. The searching energy, high drama and mood-inflected karma of these sessions make "Chet Baker in Paris" one of the very few must-haves to be found in a large, ever-expanding corpus of work.
Though life for Baker may have been at its lowest during this period (and that's saying something given the turbulence and traumas to come), his art was very much in the snow-leopard reaches of transcendence. That such peaks would rarely come again is yet another reason for this disc's haunting resonance.