Chet Baker
She Was Too Good To Me

We guarantee you have never heard this album -- or any later Chet Baker album -- sound as good as this one does.

The early 70s were a good time for Van Gelder, the engineer for these sessions. Grover Washington Jr.’s All the King’s Horses from 1973 is an amazing Demo Disc for large group. We could easily name-check a dozen others on CTI recorded by RVG that we’ve done shootouts for.

But any album only sounds good on the copies that it sounds good on, on the pressings that were mastered, pressed and cleaned right, a fact that seems to have eluded most jazz vinyl aficionados interested in good sound but axiomatic (if not tautological) here at Better Records.

The extended song structures, ranging from four to seven minutes in length, leave plenty of room for the band to stretch out.

And of course Chet sings the title track beautifully.

What The Best Sides Of She Was Too Good To Me Have To Offer Is Not Hard To Hear

• The biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space
• The most Tubey Magic, without which you have almost nothing. CDs give you clean and clear. Only the best vintage vinyl pressings offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes in 1974
• Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low
• Natural tonality in the midrange -- with all the instruments having the correct timbre
• Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional studio space

No doubt there's more but we hope that should do for now. Playing the record is the only way to hear all of the qualities we discuss above, and playing the best pressings against a pile of other copies under rigorously controlled conditions is the only way to find a pressing that sounds as good as this one does.

Copies with rich lower mids and nice extension up top did the best in our shootout, assuming they weren't veiled or smeary of course. So many things can go wrong on a record. We know, we've heard them all.

Top end extension is critical to the sound of the best copies. Lots of old records (and new ones) have no real top end; consequently, the studio or stage will be missing much of its natural air and space, and instruments will lack their full complement of harmonic information.

Tube smear is common to most vintage pressings. The copies that tend to do the best in a shootout will have the least (or none), yet are full-bodied, tubey and rich.

What We're Listening For On She Was Too Good To Me

• Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
• The Big Sound comes next -- wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.
• Then transient information -- fast, clear, sharp attacks, not the smear and thickness so common to these LPs.
• Tight, full-bodied bass -- which ties in with good transient information, also the issue of frequency extension further down.
• Next: transparency -- the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the instruments.
• Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing -- an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.

The Players and Personnel

• Bass – Ron Carter
• Clarinet – Romeo Penque
• Drums – Jack DeJohnette (tracks: B2, B3, B4)
• Steve Gadd (tracks: A1, A2, A3, B1)
• Electric Piano – Bob James
• Flute – George Marge, Hubert Laws
• Saxophone [Alt] – Paul Desmond
• Vibraphone – Dave Friedman
• Arranged By, Conductor – Don Sebesky
• Producer – Creed Taylor
• Engineer, Mastered By – Rudy Van Gelder

Vinyl Condition

Mint Minus Minus and maybe a bit better is about as quiet as any vintage pressing will play, and since only the right vintage pressings have any hope of sounding good on this album, that will most often be the playing condition of the copies we sell. (The copies that are even a bit noisier get listed on the site are seriously reduced prices or traded back in to the local record stores we shop at.)

Those of you looking for quiet vinyl will have to settle for the sound of other pressings and Heavy Vinyl reissues, purchased elsewhere of course as we have no interest in selling records that don't have the vintage analog magic of these wonderful recordings.

If you want to make the trade-off between bad sound and quiet surfaces with whatever Heavy Vinyl pressing might be available, well, that's certainly your prerogative, but we can't imagine losing what's good about this music -- the size, the energy, the presence, the clarity, the weight -- just to hear it with less background noise.

Side One

• Autumn Leaves
• She Was Too Good To Me
• Funk In Deep Freeze

Side Two

• Tangerine
• With A Song In My Heart
• What’ll I Do
• It’s You Or No One

All About Jazz.com Review

The modern image of trumpeter/vocalist Chet Baker is a hopelessly fractious one. Baker is, at once, a brilliant musical autodidact with a superb ear while, at the same time, a musician with a nonexistent grounding in musical theory. Like cornetist Bix Beiderbecke before him, Baker taught himself, thereby forging a personal sound identifiable across the space-time continuum. He left a 40-year aural testament, recorded during the most revolutionary period in jazz, that revealed a remarkable focus unshaken by those changes.

Baker's peccadilloes were also larger than life. Like Beiderbecke, Baker was hopelessly chemically-dependent, a life-long heroin addict whose addiction greatly contributed to his death as Beiderbecke's alcoholism did to his. Unlike Beiderbecke, Baker recorded copiously, particularity after his "comeback" in 1974, and then primarily to fund his addiction, so copiously that at least some of his recordings had to be good, if not exceptional, conforming to the adage that, "monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type the complete works of William Shakespeare."

Perhaps this sells Baker short; perhaps not. In the end, criticism of Baker's work must be cast in a post-modern isolation from the man himself and his story; but even that is not fair. Baker did not produce the music he did because of the confluence of his chaotic life, he did so in spite of it. There were glimmers of unimpaired sunshine in his discography and one of these occurred at the beginning of his "comeback" 1974, when he recorded She Was Too Good To Me for Creed Taylor's CTI Records.

Baker reached a personal nadir in 1969 when he was assaulted in San Francisco, sustaining injuries to his teeth. His oral health always dubious, Baker finally had is teeth removed and a denture placed. Normally a death knell for brass players, Baker simply re-taught himself to play trumpet as he did after losing his left incisor in the early 1950s. Between 1969 and 1974, Baker cleaned up and maintained on methadone. He enjoyed his longest period of stability and domesticity. His last recordings before his come back—Albert's House (Bainbridge/Repertoire, 1969) and Blood, Chet and Tears (Verve, 1970)—were uniformly and appropriately panned by the music media. Baker's four years off did him wonders as he emerged with She Was Too Good To Me, his assimilation of his experience to date, marking him a more mature and accomplished artist.

Creed Taylor Incorpoated had been in business since 1967 and had released such landmark recordings as trumpeter Freddie Hubbard's Red Clay (1970) and Antonio Carlos Jobim's Stone Flower (1970), as well as saxophonist Stanley Turrentine's Sugar the same year. The label established itself as forward thinking and carefully considered. Baker presented a different, and even difficult, artist for the label to frame. Alto saxophonist Bud Shank's admonition that Baker "had stopped developing [as an artist] when he became addicted," loomed large. But Baker's period of stability fully prepared his return to the studio.

She Was Too Good To Me placed Baker in the company of contemporary alto saxophonist Paul Desmond, and the up-and-coming flautist Hubert Laws and pianist Bob James (playing electric piano). CTI's house arranger Don Sebesky provided string charts for an eclectic mix of standards, vocals and instrumentals. Taylor definitely wanted to update the sound of Baker's surrounding, doing so thoughtfully and with great care. Bassist Ron Carter and drummers Jack DeJohnette and Steve Gadd added a seamless post-bop background for Baker, and, for that matter, Desmond, who shares great empathy with Baker's playing.

The recorded results were superb. James' electric piano brightens "Autumn Leaves," preparing the way for some of Baker's most exciting solo ideas to date. Laws spars with Baker on tenor saxophonist Hank Mobley's bop anthem "Funk in the Deep Freeze." The song is played with a perfect balance of the West Coast cool Baker helped forge and the warmer climes of hard bop. While Baker remains safely in this middle and lower registers, his soloing at tempo is self-assured and spot-on harmonically.

Baker's voice, an acquired taste to be sure, is in top form. Still possessing the boyish charm of his 1950s recordings, he has not deteriorated to the wheezy croak that would be considered de rigueur listening from his "late period." He exudes absolute sweetness on the title piece and an uncommon sunniness on "With A Song In My Heart." Hard to take seriously for the majority of his career, Baker hit a home run, if not a grand slam with She Was Too Good To Me. It is an immediately accessible and enjoyable recording by an important and controversial figure in jazz.

-C. Michael Bailey, September 9, 2011