A Taste of Tequila
1. Flowers On The Wall
2. Tequila
3. Mexico
4. Love Me With All Your Heart (Cuando Calienta
El Sol)
5. Hot Toddy
6. Twenty-Four Hours From Tulsa
7. Speedy Gonzales
8. Come A Little Bit Closer
9. El Paso
10. La Bamba
Hats Off
11. Happiness Is
12. Sure Gonna Miss Her
13. Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)
14. The Phoenix Love Theme (Senza Fine)
15. These Boots Are Made For Walking
16. On The Street Where You Live
17. Armen's Theme
18. Spanish Harlem
19. Chiquita Banana
20. When The Day Is All Done
21. You Baby
22. It's Too Late
Bonus track
23. Colonel Bogey March
Chet Baker was the epitome
of "cool", so you wouldn’t expect him to have
been involved in recording sessions where
he played in the sunny style of Herb Alpert’s
Tijuana Brass. Yet Alpert’s re-invention of
mariachi music (originally performed by Mexican
street musicians) was all the rage in the
early 1960s, starting with The Lonely Bull
and moving on through such memorable pieces
as Spanish Flea and Tijuana Taxi.
What else could a record label like World
Pacific do but join in to try and secure some
of the action?
A & R Man Bud Dain assembled
in Los Angeles a group of session musicians
who played arrangements by Jack Nitzsche in
Tijuana mode. The musicians apparently included
jazzmen of the quality of guitarists Al Casey
and Dennis Budimir and drummer Frank Capp.
But jazz fans will be most interested in Chet
Baker’s contributions. They tend to be minimal,
in the impassive style that Chet shared with
latter-day Miles Davis. Chet decorates the
themes rather than playing them, and it makes
a strange contrast with Herb Alpert’s more
extrovert playing on his many Tijuana Brass
recordings.
The jazz content is fairly
low, especially as many of the tunes are recent
pop hits like Flowers on the Wall and
Twenty-Four Hours from Tulsa, with
an added Mexican tinge. This CD includes the
contents of two LPs, the second using even
more great jazz names like Victor Feldman
and Herb Ellis. There is also a final bonus
– an incongruous version of the Colonel
Bogey March, which is hardly suitable
material for the mariachi sound.
Most of the tracks are short
– all less than three minutes, except for
El Paso which clocks in at ten seconds
more. In truth, this is really only an album
for Chet Baker completists – or for those
who are fascinated by the vagaries of commercialism
and the way that jazz musicians have sometimes
been used in the search for pop success.
Tony Augarde
CD Reviews
BGP RECORDS CDBGPD 178
