Album Notes

This is the complete Chet Baker Suite that I wrote and recorded, inspired by Chet Baker's life and music. These same songs appear separately, without the interludes, on my "Buddy Holly" album, but this is the original full 20 minute presentation.

I was in Amsterdam with a few days off between gigs. I found a Dutch biography of Chet written by Jeroen de Valk. Late in the night, jet-lagged in my hotel room, my mind began to wander. I wrote page after page in my song notebook and walked around Amsterdam, lost in a dream of Chet's music and life story. There was the hotel where he died, across from the train station where he came in from Rotterdam. The drug scene on the streets up near Central Station. I could imagine how he felt. Alone in a hotel, in a city away from home, where you are the guest star. They send a car to take you to the show and you are the artist, so anything goes. Anything you want, at any time, just as long as you show up and do your one hour performance, and sometimes it even added a mystique if you didn't show up.

I remember the first time I was exposed to Chet's music. I was in my early 20s, living in Portland, Maine and learning the jazz chords from a friend named Jeff Rice, who I played gigs with. The local jazz players had brought Chet up to the Holiday Inn there for a show. There couldn't have been more than 15 people attending, Jeff and I, included. We stood there and gawked in awe at the living legend that was Chet. He wasn't in good shape. The drugs had already taken their toll on his face. He was wearing those platform shoes that were in vogue in the disco 70s. This was my initiation into the dark side of the circus life. The one I was about to embark into, myself.

Years passed and I ended up in Los Angeles tangled up in the record making machine there. Bruce Weber had made a documentary on Chet's life just before Chet died, and it was stunning. Strangely enough, Chet never sounded better. In the midst of all the darkness that was his life, he sang and played with such rich beauty and light. It was a living testament to the power of light over darkness, even if in the end, the darkness won out. I watched it over and over again. There was Chet in his youth, as beautiful a face as there ever was, surrounded by beautiful women, and there he was at the end looking like death in motion, still surrounded by beautiful women. The sad footage of his abandoned children, struggling without him in Oklahoma. It was heartbreaking.

So what then am I celebrating here? Life, the downturns, the upturns, the mistakes, the regrets, the love, the losing, the darkness, and most of all the light.