Chet Baker

With his good looks, gossamer trumpet tones, and melted-butter croon, Chet Baker was the golden boy of West Coast jazz. He whispered warm, sweet words of love like a summer wind blowing in off the Pacific on “My Funny Valentine,” and sang like the soul of loneliness itself on “But Not for Me.” And when the king of the “cool school” held his horn to his lips on a softly swinging tune like “Look for the Silver Lining,” it was like he was building a bridge from bebop into a sleek, subtle, sexy vision of jazz’s future.

The cool-jazz king’s trumpet tells the tale, in Next Steps.

Though Chet Baker’s velvety voice and photogenic features earned him celebrity status in the ’50s, it was his hip way with a horn that helped define the less-is-more mode of the era’s cool-jazz scene. Like his singing, the licks he unleashes on “These Foolish Things” are breathy and behind the beat, existing on a kind of Zen plane beyond bop’s manic urgency. That doesn’t mean Chet lacked the chops to pick up the pace, though — check out the quick, clean trumpet runs on his 1953 quartet cut “Happy Little Sunbeam,” where he keeps it cool without laying back. Even late in his career, after personal and physical problems took their toll, he somehow still made swapping licks with old pal Gerry Mulligan sound deceptively easy, on the swing-saturated “Line for Lyons.”

Explore every side of Baker’s story, from jazz visionary to pop idol, in Deep Cuts.

Delving into the many faces and phases of Chet Baker’s jazz journey means absorbing and embracing every side of his story. To many, he was the dreamy young sex symbol whose classically chiseled features adorned the cover of Chet Baker Sings, the heartthrob who was courted by Hollywood but preferred blowing vocal smoke rings across such standards as “I Get Along Without You Very Well.” For cool-jazz lovers, he was the trumpet titan who could trade fours with West Coast-style sax sensations from Stan Getz (“Half Nelson”) to Gerry Mulligan (“Jeru”). And to those who followed Baker’s hard-luck life to its later phases, his was the weathered-but-wise voice falling as gracefully as an autumn leaf across the electric piano lines of jazz-fusion giant Bob James on 1974’s melancholic-but-magical “My Future Just Passed.”

In the roll call of jazz trumpet greats, Chet Baker’s name doesn’t always ring out as often as it should, even though his originality and impact rivaled those of anyone from Fats Navarro to Freddie Hubbard. The same goes for his singing, which was easily on par with that of the finest crooners ever to swing a standard. Maybe the man who helped jazz jump to the next phase after bebop by putting the moody, minimalist sound of West Coast cool on the map was simply too talented. Fans of his voice and valves each wanted him to stick to one or the other, but Baker couldn’t walk away from either of his gifts. And after his tragic, untimely death, the more sensationalistic side of his life threatened to obscure the innovations that actually stamped his name into history. But the works of wonder we’ve gathered here make it crystal clear that his star will rightfully shine in the jazz universe forever.