Limited edition 180-gram French reissue. Remastered from the original master tapes. Pressed by Optimal in Germany; artwork using the original photos.

In the tradition of labels wholly devoted to vinyl re-pressing, Sam Records puts out a product of top-notch musical and visual quality. Sam Records uses only master tapes and re-creates record covers using the original photographs, paintings and/or drawings. That generally involves some painstaking detective work, so it’s a job for conscientious professionals, not corner-cutting amateurs.

This Chet Baker reissue uses the original photos from Jean-Pierre Leloir, and is remastered from the original master tapes. Edition limited to 750 copies, on 180-gram vinyl pressed by Optimal in Germany.

This LP comes with a large-sized high-quality print of a photograph from the archives of Jean-Pierre Leloir.

The session was recorded at Studio Pathe-Magellan in Paris, Monday, October 24, 1955. By that date only Jimmy Bond was still with Chet. Peter Littman had returned to America, and his seat was now occupied by Nils-Bertil “Bert” Dahlander, a Swedish drummer who’d accompanied Lars Gullin. At the keyboard was an almost-unknown pianist named Gerard Gustin who’d just been signed to a contract by Eddie Barclay. Given the context, they were obliged to fall back on standards. Chet knew how to play these better than anyone. He chose eight: “These Foolish Things”, which stayed in his quartet’s repertoire for a while; plus five others that the trumpeter performs here for the first time — “There’s a Small Hotel”, “Autumn In New York”, “Summertime”, “You Go To My Head”, “Tenderly”; and two — “I’ll Remember April” and “Lover Man” — that he’d done less than ten days earlier together with Lars Gullin and Dick Twardzik, whose disappearance was still something Chet refused to accept. Given this state of affairs, the whole session exudes a kind of sadness that’s impossible to put down, whatever the choice of tune or tempo.