As far as I know, this is the first time I’ve been quoted in Magyar. It’s a blurb on the back of the Hungarian edition of Jeroen de Valk’s Chet Baker: His Life and Music. That invaluable book is also available in English.
Thanks to photographer Paolo Gant (behind the book) for sending the pictures. Gant captured stunning images of Baker not long before the trumpeter’s death in 1988. You can see a few of them, prominently copyright-protected, at his gallery’s website.
All of that is a perfectly good excuse to hear and see Baker in Stockholm on his 1983 tour with Stan Getz, Jim McNeely, George Mraz and Victor Lewis. Getz all but owned “Dear Old Stockholm;” he’s the one who recorded the traditional Swedish song in 1951 and made it a jazz standard. This night, though, he presented the melody and gave Chet the solo. And what a solo.