Amos Lee My Ideal: A Tribute to Chet Baker Sings LP

In his 2022 full-length effort, My Ideal: A Tribute to Chet Baker Sings, acclaimed singer-songwriter Amos Lee reanimates the songs of his lifelong musical hero Chet Baker. Working with material sourced from 1954's iconoclastic Chet Baker Sings, including "My Funny Valentine" and "I Fall in Love Too Easily," Lee and his well-oiled jazz quartet deliver 14 gorgeous recordings that are, at once, expansive and understated, intimate and ambient—the perfect soundtrack for holiday gatherings of every variety.

A daily listen for Lee as he weathered the darkest days of the COVID-19 pandemic - which included losing two of his closest mentors in Bill Withers and John Prine - Lee reflects that: "I was drawn to the aching and the tenderness, to the way it expressed sadness with levity, to the way it explored sorrow without becoming beleaguered by the depths of it."

The first track released from the album is Amos' interpretation of Chet Baker's signature song "My Funny Valentine," a version he's subtitled "For Oskar and Eli" in tribute to the lead characters of Swedish film Let The Right One In (a personal favorite of his).

Backed by a trio of jazz all-stars from his hometown of Philadelphia - David Streim (piano/trumpet), Madison Rast (bass) and Anwar Marshall (drums) - Lee reminds listeners of vocals perfectly suited for the genre while harkening back to the earliest days of his career on legendary jazz label Blue Note Records. A reverential collection without attempting to duplicate Baker's 1954 epic, Lee found himself inspired anew the deeper he dove into the source material.

"When you listen to Chet Baker, it sounds like he took a drag on a cigarette and the smoke just came out as a song, but it's so much more than that," says Lee. "The breath work, the pitch control, the poignancy, the gaiety; the deeper I got inside the music, the more I fell in love with everything about it...it was a revelatory experience. It didn't just change the way I thought about these songs; it changed the way I thought about myself as a singer and as a songwriter. It changed everything."