His singing-unsteady in pitch, frail and delicate, with a disorienting mix of sexiness and naiveté-has always been an acquired taste, but there’s a context for it now that didn’t exist then. He still sounds young-he would turn 30 just after recording these LPs-and he’s surrounded by top-shelf supporting musicians, the kinds of bands that would be difficult for Baker to assemble once he became an industry pariah.īaker began his year on Riverside with It Could Happen to You, a vocal album aimed at a pop-leaning audience. It was a transitional period, a moment when Baker hovered between one career and the next. In the late ’50s, after his first run of legal problems connected to his accelerating drug use, Baker spent a year cutting albums for the Riverside label. His gaunt and caved-in face told the story of a promising young talent gone to seed. But in the years following Baker’s descent into heroin addiction, he became a cult artist, a figure whose musical output was often eclipsed by the tragic narrative of his life. He won both critics’ and readers’ polls in DownBeat magazine, and his recordings, particularly his early work with baritone sax player Gerry Mulligan, were essential documents of West Coast jazz. Through the mid-1950s, he was one of the biggest stars in jazz, a strikingly beautiful man who played trumpet and also sang in a strange and androgynous voice that seemed too fragile for this world.

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