Chet Baker - "It Never Entered My Mind"

The iconic poster boy for the West Coast cool school, Chet Baker left a profound mark on jazz in his 40-year career, proving you didn’t need to be a Juilliard graduate to make great music.

Since then, interest in Baker’s life and music has never diminished. He’s been the subject of two films – 2015’s Born To Be Blue, in which Ethan Hawke played Baker; and Bruce Weber’s 1988 documentary, Let’s Get Lost – and had several books written about him, including James Gavin’s revelatory, warts’n’all biography, Dare To Dream: The Long Night Of Chet Baker. And, of course, his music continues to interest people all over the world. It’s also been heavily sampled, most notably by R&B singer Mariah Carey and trip-hop MC Tricky.

Somewhat curiously, Chet Baker has been dubbed by some as “The James Dean Of Jazz”, though, in truth, it’s an odd and ill-fitting description. For one, the singer/trumpeter’s career was much longer and more productive than that of the doomed actor, who died at 24. Perhaps the comparison has come about due to the largely erroneous notion that Baker didn’t fulfil the initial promise he showed as a young man. But as harrowing as some of his life experiences had undoubtedly been, Chet Baker, unlike Dean, didn’t die before his time. In fact, he was a prolific recording artist (he recorded over 100 albums during his lifetime) and made a profound mark on jazz, helping to shape its course during a career that lasted almost 40 years.

Baker proved that you didn’t need to be a Juilliard graduate to make great jazz – all you needed was an instinctive grasp of its vocabulary, the ability to play and improvise with deep feeling, and, crucially, your own unique sound.

Three decades after his death, the world’s fascination with Chet Baker is as strong as ever. When he was at his best, the music he made with his horn was pure poetry, and that’s why it continues to resonate with listeners, both young and old, today.

So today, softly and tenderly, I choose Chet Baker’s version of “It Never Entered My Mind” as my softly and with feeling, hold on to it like a whisper, like a dream, song for a, choose yes, choose now, choose love, Friday.