‘In Perfect Harmony: The Lost Album’ by Chet Baker and Jack Sheldon Review: Trumpeters in Tandem by Will Friedwald

 Though the two musicians were very different in both life and music, they came together in 1972 to record this excellent, newly released album.

By Will Friedwald

April 20, 2024 Wall Street Journal

Copyright ©2024 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

“Chet Baker and Jack Sheldon didn’t have much in common. The two trumpeters and occasional singers, who are heard together on the recently discovered, newly released “In Perfect Harmony: The Lost Album” (Jazz Detective, out now), both emerged from the West Coast jazz scene of the early 1950s, but that’s where the similarity ends. Baker has come to be seen as the ultimate moody loner, the original jazzman without a country, wandering across the globe in an endless tour of one-nighters, generally staying one step ahead of drug-enforcement police. Sheldon became a mainstay in studio orchestras, playing on “The Merv Griffin Show,” singing on “Schoolhouse Rock!” and rarely leaving the West Coast. Baker’s singing was quiet, reserved and understated in a way that many found irresistibly erotic, whereas Sheldon was a figure of fun, full of irrepressible humor and wisecracks galore—he even made an album of standup comedy. Baker was unrepentantly self-destructive, leading to his death in 1988 under mysterious circumstances at age 58, while Sheldon had a long, productive life and died at age 88.

And yet the two men were, in fact, close friends. Sheldon, who was two years younger, idolized Baker, though he was careful not to emulate the slightly older trumpeter’s lifestyle.

In the late 1960s and early ’70s, Baker was back in California, but not by choice: In 1966, he had been beaten and robbed, and his teeth were decimated to the point that he needed dentures and to relearn how to play the trumpet. Other than on a series of forgettable, pop-oriented albums, by the summer of 1972 he had barely played or recorded in years.

It was Sheldon’s idea that the two should do an album playing and singing together, as a means of easing Baker back into full-time performing. Sheldon approached the guitarist and producer Jack Marshall, who had opened a recording studio in Tustin, Calif. As Frank Marshall, the producer’s son, writes in the album notes, the two Jacks then assembled an excellent rhythm section with bassist Joe Mondragon (who is playing electric on at least a few tracks here), drummer Nick Ceroli, and Dave Frishberg, the Minnesota-born jazz piano giant who had only recently relocated from New York. To make Baker feel even more secure, Marshall himself also played on the date, giving the trumpeter something he virtually never had the luxury of working with, a full four-piece rhythm section. Sheldon and Marshall prepared 11 songs, totaling 35 minutes of music: seven songbook standards, one Sheldon original, two bossa novas, and a blues.

The finished album is excellent—though at times there isn’t enough of it. The most extreme example is the opener, “This Can’t Be Love,” which starts with Sheldon singing the first chorus rubato; then Frishberg subtly shifts it into tempo and Baker sings an uptempo chorus with Sheldon playing behind him. And that’s it. One yearns to hear the two trumpeters then start trading fours, but it ends there.

Elsewhere the album seems just right, even on the shorter tracks. “Just Friends” is Baker singing all the way through, here getting to do a jazzier second chorus, with Sheldon again playing obbligatos; although both tracks are only two minutes and change, “Friends” at least feels complete. “But Not For Me” is even better, opening with a charming intro in which Frishberg pays allegiance to Earl Hines and Teddy Wilson, again with Sheldon playing in support of Baker’s singing.

They never do actually sing together, but they play in tandem on several numbers, such as “I Cried for You” and Sheldon’s “Too Blue”—a quasi-comedic novelty with allusions to the blues.

The two Brazilian songs, “Historia de un Amor,” sung by Sheldon, and “Once I Loved,” where Baker takes the lead, are satisfying vehicles for the two. Throughout, the presence of a second horn challenges and inspires Baker to play more aggressively than he later would on most of his ’70s and ’80s recordings. The longest track, “When I Fall in Love,” finds Baker singing and then playing especially rapturously and Sheldon offering equally beautiful support.

“I’m Old Fashioned” and “You Fascinate Me So” are brief but highly copasetic features for Baker and Sheldon, respectively, each playing agreeably behind the other’s vocals.  The set ends with “Evil Blues,” from the songbook of Jimmy Rushing, with Baker playing, Sheldon singing, and Frishberg paying homage to Count Basie. 

We can’t be sure what Sheldon and Marshall’s plans were for the album—to sell the master itself to a label or merely to use it as a demo. Ultimately, neither happened; about a year later, Marshall died at age 51, by which time Baker, his chops and his confidence restored, had resumed his endless nomadic trek around the world. It remained for the guitarist’s son to discover the tape in a garage 50 years later. We can be very glad he did; it’s a remarkable collaboration by two uniquely gifted musicians, Chet Baker and Jack Sheldon, so different and yet in harmony..”