25th Annual Sizzling Summer Soiree
Join us for our 25th Annual Sizzling Summer Soiree on Thursday, July 9 from 7-9pm
We are excited to introduce Cynthia Touchette‘s new paintings based on family photographs taken in both Haiti and Quebec’s Eastern Townships.
At the party enjoy the live music of Four Chet Quartet:
Paul Adams – drums
Ken Baldwin – trumpet, flugelhorn
Jerry Battista – guitar
Steve Harris – acoustic bass
Soft summer sounds including music from Chet Baker, Antonio Carlos Jobim, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Duke Ellington, and Charles Mingus.
Complimentary High Resolution Digital Recording by We-Transfer
Chet Baker – Let’s Get Lost*
Chet Baker came from Out of Nowhere, born in Yale, Oklahoma in 1929. He studied music at El Camino College and had a short army career where he played trumpet in the band. He often played with Just Friends, including Miles Davis, Gerry Mulligan, Charlie Parker, Stan Getz, Bill Evans, Harold Danko, Paul Bley. Time after time he astonished record jazz club crowds with his James Dean looks and the birth of Cool Jazz and West Coast Jazz. He made over 480 cd recordings. The tunes were melodic, short and often came from Broadway or movies. He was not a songwriter but he knew how to caress a melody. His style encapsulated That Old Feeling and he mostly played in the middle range of his instruments, trumpet and flugelhorn. In 1955, already hooked on heroin, Chet took a quartet to Paris, his first trip to Europe. He had recruited a highly regarded pianist, Richard Twardzik, from Boston. On the second day, they had a recording studio booked and Twardzik did not show up. They went back to their hotel (There’s a Small Hotel) and found him dead in his hotel from from a heroin overdose. A local replacement was found and Chet recorded one of his best albums from the Jazz in Paris series. Chet lived and recorded mostly in Europe, including Italy, Paris, London, Copenhagen and made a flawless live record In Tokyo. A four day recording at the Jazzhus Montmartre in Copenhagen (1979) produced some of his best recordings with Niels-Henning Orsted Pedersen on bass and Doug Raney on guitar (This is Always, The Touch of your lips, Someday my prince will come, and Daybreak). Chet had many rough patches in his life mostly related to heroin addiction. This included jail time, poverty, street fights and social isolation. This has been immortalized in films (Lets get Lost, Born to be Blue) and theatre productions. In 1965 Herb Alpert of the Tijuana Brass heard that Chet was homeless and broke in a Los Angeles hotel. Despite having never met, Herb gave Chet a large amount of cash and several new trumpets to kickstart the next stage of his career. His later life was marked with deteriorating health, premature aging, and the pathos of his life was reflected in his music and his unique singing voice. I saw him live only once, in San Francisco at Kimball’s jazz club in 1983. At the intermission he went into the streets looking for heroin and came back with his front teeth knocked out in a fight.
He died in 1988, age 58, jumping from a hotel window in Amsterdam to his death.
The performance tonight, is not a concert, not a theatre production, but it is a dedication to his music and his influence on jazz music. Indeed, This is the Very Thought of You and This is Always…
Paul Adams 2026
*Titles in bold refer to Chet Baker tunes and many will be played at the show.