Chet Baker: "Look for the Silver Lining"

They constitute the supreme odd couple of jazz. There are a dozen ways they are unalike, ranging from their skin color to the cultures from which they sprang to their aesthetic conception of the music. Rarely are Louis Armstrong and Chet Baker spoken of in the same sentence. Yet they are twins in a crucial way: They are influential jazz trumpet stars whose vocal and instrumental prowess is coequal. Indeed their expression is fully continuous from one mode to the other. One gets the sense that when they are singing they are eager to start playing and when they are playing they can't wait to sing, that is, to say the same thing in a different language, with the shades of emotion and meaning that only that language can provide. And we, the lucky listeners, often get to hear them both in the same song.