Earliest Chet

I recently came across a CD called Ascent of the Cool: Rare and Unissued Chet Baker from the 1950s. It begins with a version of Get Happy, from a home recording made in 1949, between Chet's stints in the US Army, and it's amazing how assured he was even at that early time, when he was just 19. He had mastered the bebop idiom even then and his incisive trumpet cuts through the crackly recording as he negotiates the chord sequence with great confidence and force. Apparently another title (All The Things You Are) was recorded that day, but it is not included on the CD. Other tracks feature Chet alongside Bird, Mulligan (of course), Pepper, Rogers, Clifford Brown, Paul Desmond and Percy Faith (!). A rich mixture. If you're a stickler for clean hi-fi sound, this is not for you, but it's an important historical document for Chetophiles and contains some great swinging jazz from the West Coast.