6. Chet Baker
I heard Chet Baker for the first time in around 2010 or 11 I think. Nina Simone and Chet Baker. I grew up around a lot of music – my parents listened to music all the time – but one of the things they did not listen to was jazz or any kind of funk or soul or anything like that – they were much more folky. So the jazz stuff, I didn’t really come around to any of that until much later. [My parents] both played guitar and different instruments. We had lots of different instruments in our house. I can recall many times when I was upstairs in my room going to sleep, they were downstairs sharing a bottle of wine and playing records for each other [laughs]. Back to Chet, there was a guy from Iceland called Daníel Bjarnason. He’s released some music with this label called Bedroom Community. We were working on a project together with the band Efterklang who I was playing with for a while, and he was staying with me in Berlin. One night, he put on Chet Baker, and he was just sharing his love for it. He started talking about how smooth and honey-like the voice is, and how kind of cool and laid-back the delivery is – how beautiful it is when he switches between trumpet and vocals. You know, sometimes that’s what it takes for you to get turned onto something – someone else sharing their passion for it. And sure enough, I just came to love that super-soft vocal delivery, and the kind of laid-backness about it.
