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LINER NOTES
by Jim Gavin

WHEN BRUCE WEBER, the famous fashion photographer, first heard Ruth Young sing in 1987, he reacted just as a lot of others have: "Who is this magical woman?" he wondered. Weber was playing a tape of a ten-year-old Chet Baker album, recorded in Milan and scarce even there. He had started filming the documentary Let's Get Lost, his dark, disturbing valentine to the fallen idol of the jazz trumpet. In two vocal duets, Young's smoky voice sounded shy and sexy, cool yet dark, and appealingly fragile, much like Baker's.

It so happened that she had lived, toured, and sung with him from 1973 through 1982. Now she was in St. Thomas, living on a boat with her new boyfriend. It took Weber months to find her. But no one who saw Let's Get Lost can forget the funny, acid-tongued, intellectual blonde whom Weber garbed in a skimpy black dress and made a central part of his film. Viewers learned that Young had come from a Hollywood background: her father was Vice President at United Artists Pictures; Marilyn Monroe, Jane Russell, and Warren Beatty were all guests in the family home. Rossano Brazzi, the Italian heartthrob who played Emile de Becque in the screen version of South Pacific, posed for pictures with the three-year-old Young; even then, she commanded the camera like a star. In her teens, she discovered the records of Anita O'Day, June Christy, Peggy Lee, and Chet Baker, and decided that she wanted to sing, too.

But nothing in Young's life has come without trouble, especially after she met Baker. By his side everywhere, from beer-stinking dives to Carnegie Hall, she absorbed his minimalist style; enduring his self-destruction through drugs, she learned about survival. As much as she loved him, she had to step out of the path of a speeding train, which she did when she left him. Pauline Kael, the New Yorker film critic, would aptly call her "lively, witty, and tough."

Young's charisma on and off screen made Weber fantasize about turning her into a movie star, a recording star. But after the film's release in 1989, she slipped out of sight again, leaving behind too little evidence of her singing.

I had my own problems locating her and persuading her to talk to me for a project I had just started, a biography published in 2002 under the title Deep in a Dream: The Long Night of Chet Baker. Once she agreed, I was treated to a landslide of memories - some hilarious, some harrowing, all of them shaped by an endlessly probing mind. Critical as she can be, Young is also movingly candid about her own foibles, some of which kept her from making an album until now.

How fitting that she would dedicate her first one to the master who changed her life. She recorded it in Augsburg, a city near Munich, at the studio of Wolfgang Lackerschmid, the vibraphonist and composer. Two of the musicians who back Young have their own connections to Baker. Alto saxophonist Herb Geller, born in Los Angeles, was a colleague of the trumpeter's in the great era of '50s West Coast Jazz. In 1965 Geller moved to Hamburg; since then he has played with Europe's best jazz orchestras and led his own bands. Young met the gifted bassist Rocky Knauer - a bandmate of Freddie Hubbard, Art Blakey, and other giants - in the late '70s, when Baker hired him for the first of numerous tours. German-born but raised in Canada, Knauer now lives and works near Munich. Pianist Walter Lang left Germany as a young man to study at Boston's Berklee College of Music; later he accompanied such masters as Lee Konitz and James Moody. Now back in Germany, he has his own trio.

But this is Young's album, and she, like her late partner, needs space. In the Baker tradition, you'll hear no drums. Baker considered most drummers bashers, and avoided using them whenever possible. "They make too much goddamned noise!" he told a Spanish interviewer in 1983. "I don't need anybody to keep time for me - I've got the time locked up right in my head!" The arrangements for Young drape around her like the sheerest silk. That is how it should be, for her work has grown more and more revealing with the years. This album is what intimate singing is all about. You'll hear no showing off, just pure feeling.

The songs are beautifully chosen from one of the richest repertoires in jazz. The Wind was composed for Baker in 1953 by pianist Russ Freeman (1926-2002), the backbone of his poll-winning '50s quartet. Harry Gladstone added the words; Young captures their desolate chill. This Is Always, Time After Time, and Let's Get Lost hail from the golden age of '40s film musicals, in which starry-eyed boys and girls vowed their love for eternity. In the Gershwins' But Not for Me, Young's tart and breezy sense of humor, so well captured onscreen in Let's Get Lost, transforms a bittersweet torch song into the lighthearted farewell of a woman who's got greater plans in store.

In a letter he sent her after they parted, Baker wrote: "You're a great, great lady, Ruth... Keep singing." Luckily for us, she has.

James Gavin, New York City 2003
Author of Deep in a Dream: The Long Night of Chet Baker (2002)