Amos Lee: For the Love of Chet

By Alexa Peters I Mar. 21, 2023

Lee started listening to *Chet Baker Sings* every day during the initial weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic.
(Photo: Courtesy DC Modern Luxury)

For Amos Lee, the Philadelphia-bred singer-songwriter who first broke as the opening act on Norah Jones’ 2004 tour, the pandemic was defined by the loss of his two greatest musical idols who’d also become personal friends: Bill Withers and John Prine.

His go-to music listening now inflected with grief, Lee spent the initial weeks of the pandemic focused on an online Madden tournament, unable to listen to music at all. Then, one day he logged onto Spotify and clicked on Chet Baker’s iconic debut 1954 album, Chet Baker Sings.

Holed up alone in a house in the Philadelphia suburbs, Lee listened to Chet Baker Sings daily during quarantine, a ritual that helped him ground his grief and opened him up to new vocal approaches that he says have left him “forever changed.” As a result, Lee released his full-album tribute to the classic album, entitled My Ideal: A Tribute To Chet Baker Sings.

Though this is Lee’s first straightahead jazz recording, it is not his first exposure to the tradition. In his early 20s, Lee worked at Papa Jazz Record Shoppe in Columbia, South Carolina, where he got a crash course in the music, listening to Charles Mingus and other legends with owner Tim Smith, and reading copies of DownBeat.

“It was like going right to grad school,” said Lee, who, despite his lack of introduction, still loved what he heard, particularly Eric Dolphy. “They liked really heavy stuff in that shop. I didn’t get, ‘Hey, here’s some introduction to jazz.’”

Lee was also in school at University of South Carolina and beginning to write and perform his own songs. Eventually he recorded a demo that fortuitously landed in the hands of A&R at Blue Note Records, which was enjoying major success at the time with Norah Jones.

Blue Note signed Lee in 2004, and though he was not a jazz artist, he felt right at home at the label and with president and CEO Bruce Lundvall.

There was a full-circle feeling about it, too: He’d sold many Blue Note albums during his time at Papa Jazz.

“The origin of my music industry life was sitting in Bruce’s office and listening to jazz with him,” Lee said. “I never made jazz, but I always wanted to talk jazz with him, and I wanted to learn. I was a 26-year-old kid, and he was like the guru and he would play me stuff and be like, ‘What do you think of this?’”

Though Lee had never listened to Chet Baker until 2020, My Ideal is a return to the lesser-known jazz roots of Lee’s career, and an homage to an album that had a profound effect.

“I learn a lot about myself through other peoples’ music, and it sort of helped me reframe my sorrow.” Lee said. “I just kept listening to [Chet] and it kind of saved me in a lot of ways because I didn’t have any music that I felt like I really connected to, and there was something about this approach that Chet takes. I like the dynamic of all of these songs that are heartbreaking but also they’re like, look for the silver lining. I’m not saying there is one, but let’s look for it.”

The more Lee listened, the more entranced he became by Baker’s vocal technique, studying his quintessentially “cool” delivery that was a stark diversion from the more ornate or “hot” vocal styles of the other male vocalists of his day.

“You realize, ‘Where is he breathing?’” Lee said. “How are you singing this so softly but with the perfect amount of volume — with emotion? There’s not a ton of vibrato. There’s just an acuity, a tonal shape that he has that took me a long time to find.”

As Lee dug deeper into Baker’s nuance and the record’s arrangements, he got the idea to do a tribute album and called up his friend David Streim. Streim is an mainstay on the Philadelphia jazz scene who began playing and touring with Lee about six years ago. He ultimately played piano on and produced My Ideal.

Streim brought in Philadelphia jazz musicians Madison Rast on bass and Anwar M. Marshall on drums, and in one day, the three of them recorded several versions of the “alive and sweet and sad” arrangements Lee loves on Chet Baker Sings.

From there, Lee added his vocals, which strike a fine balance. They pay diligent respect to Baker while highlighting Lee’s talent in a new way. With a luscious, round tone, he keeps his vocal performance quite close to Baker’s original, while also letting the warmth and soulfulness of his own voice shine through at choice moments. This is particularly apparent on ballads like “I’ve Never Been In Love Before” and “My Funny Valentine,” the latter of which Lee almost didn’t record.

“It’s such a classic that I didn’t want to do it. And then after the project was done ... I was like, ‘Man, we can’t leave that off,’” Lee said. So, he decided to make the song his own by performing a “dark” version of it for Oscar and Eli, a fictitious couple from one of Lee’s favorite films, a Swedish romance horror called Let The Right One In.

In the end, My Ideal is a poignant tribute to the quiet brilliance of both artists, though Lee’s humility is quick to turn the spotlight back on Baker, who Lee thinks is often written off for being too commercial.

“I write songs, I write three-chord songs,” he said. “I’m not like this super heady jazz guy. [People say Chet is] too easy. Too straight. For me, it was interesting to not only dig into the singing part of [this record], but also the way that the lyrics worked and the way that the storytelling was happening. How simple they seem, but how not really simple they are ... and when you get underneath the hood, it is absolutely genius-level singing. That’s the thing I think a lot of people miss about Chet.” DB