The first solo album by Mickey Baker is perfection itself. Cutting through one dozen tunes plucked from before World War II up to the then-present day of 1959 with all the saw-toothed finesse of a self-taught musician who threw out all the boring stuff and just concentrated with all his soul on the heart of the matter. 

And what matter! His stinging tone and dexterous motoring upon the neck of his Fender Jazzmaster and overall command of his instrument were equally as liberated from the strictures of convention. His playing is absolutely dazzling, as though all his notes are rendered in misaligned houndstooth that create an audio moiré pattern due to the curtain of reverb they are set in, while glittering like jewels thrown up in the moonlit air, never to land on terra firma but only to be glimpsed whenever this album is played.

Baker was a self-taught tearaway, a runaway wild child who couldn’t be contained. Born to a 12-year old mother and an absent father, once cast into the world, survival quickly became everything for the pre-teen McHouston Baker. This in turn would inform his pragmatic sensibilities for the rest of his life.¹ He would upend his jazz guitar style in favour of string-bending blues in order to keep financially afloat, which resulted in feeding into the huge reservoir of his musical knowledge. Before long, it was difficult to tell if his style was blues infected with jazz, or jazz guitar with blues inflections. Nowhere was this more apparent than on his first — and best — solo album, THE WILDEST GUITAR, that links together rhythm and blues and the earliest Rock in a series of startling instrumentals that point as much to “San-Sa-Shun”-era Freddie King as “Ram-Bunk-Shush”-era The Ventures and beyond… (Which makes poetic sense as Bill Doggett cut the original of the latter-named track for King Records in 1957 — with what in all certainty was Baker providing its guitar break.)

For the better part of the fifties, Baker was a top New York City session man as both accompanist and arranger. As guitarist, he would be hired to throw rocks at songs that needed some “pep,” “moxie,” or “verve” — Which he did all over countless sides for Savoy, Okeh, King, and Atlantic. For the latter-named label, Baker’s handiwork was evident throughout a massive catalog of songs for Ray Charles, Ruth Brown, Jesse Stone, LaVern Baker and other. His shoring up of the sax on Big Joe Turner’s “Shake, Rattle And Roll.” Or the repeating one-note wrestling with a different sax on The Coasters’ “I’m A Hog For You Baby.” Or showering sparks throughout the real-life Eddie Riff on his “My Baby’s Gone Away”… There are many other examples of Mickey Baker as the tip of the spear of Rock guitar. But best known of all was his 1956 million selling single, “Love Is Strange,” an inspired, Latin-tinged call-and-response flirt-a-thon which he recorded with his protégé, guitarist Sylvia Vanderpool. Formed as a rock’n’roll version of Les Paul & Mary Ford, after two more hits in 1957, Mickey & Sylvia parted ways in 1958. Looking to capitalise on this recent success, Baker was signed by Atlantic Records to record his debut solo album. A total of 12 instrumentals with 4 original Baker compositions, there is not a speck of cereal within the confines of THE WILDEST GUITAR. All arrangements were scored by Baker and, judging by the cover, were quite possibly executed on a then-brand new 1958 Fender Jazzmaster with a quizzical geometric shape placed over the pickguard.

Side one kicks off in fine style with “Third Man Theme,” the famed musical introduction to the astonishing Carol Reed film. Originally rendered by Anton Karas on zither, here Baker takes it into the latter-half of the 20th Century with a blistering fanfare comprised of reverb with solid fretting informed by his jazz discipline. Baker’s original “Whistle Stop” follows. Replete with a loping rhythm shored up by Everett Barksdale’s Danelectro 6‑string bass for Baker to run continuous scattershot over, under and sideways through, his picking gathers speed, strength, holds off and then continues only at the magnitude (which is great) and duration (which is far too short) of his emotional flow. Cole Porter’s “Night And Day” emerges and it is a web of sound spun with a feel that rolls, writhes and tumbles about with a near-continuous solo for the song’s duration that never repeats and only directs with forward motion. Slowing down a skosh is another Mickey Baker original, “Midnight Midnight.” Slow-paced and reflective, bluesy and driving in third gear, lotsa whooping and hollerin’ in the background celebrate Baker’s soulful approaches while a long train passes by in the lonesome dead of night at a midnight crossing. The feel is total Edward Hopper 1940 filing station, only at night and replaced with an empty train station. The elegant, near-tango paces of “Autumn Leaves” enters with an extended, fragile plectrum runs that resolve into a patch of gentle riffing quietude. The song will repeat this contrast, until ending with a progressive build into five ending crescendos. The threshold now crosses into a cover of “Baia,”² balanced spatially with silence as much as the rhythm remains unchanged. Placed upon a slow paced, insistent drum pattern, Baker’s soloing alights and skips over the surface like the flattest stone skimming the surface of a lake… forever.

A Baker original, “Milk Train,” starts off the second side of the album in fine style, churning rhythm and tightly rendered fretwork propels the track forward even as it mutates into soloing. Baker’s solos are longer than they seem, but shorter than they should be. Both fragmentary and of a piece, Baker’s solos never forget where they’ve been, where they are, or where they’re heading AND they sound like no one else. Taking its title from a phrase in “Fun To Be Fooled,” a song co-written by Yip Harburg with Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin for the 1934 musical LIFE BEGINS AT 8:40, “Old Devil Moon” exhibits Baker’s plectrum dexterity, his articulate feel for mood placement, use of slight slide guitar and overall construction. It is another masterful piece of Baker’s reverse-engineered sonic work, as if he had it sketched out beforehand but played it live as if it were improvisation. The driving “Chloe” (also known as “Chloe – Song Of The Swamp”) was first recorded in 1945 on shellac by Tommy Dorsey & His Orchestra but here, with hints of Chuck Berry’s then-recent “Memphis, Tennessee” (1958), Baker runs rampant through this read with precise, stinging lines running alongside and in-between with slipping and sliding phrases. Self-penned by Baker himself, “Baker’s Dozen” is a raucous instrumental that constantly returns in reverbed cyclical motions with a superb solo thrown in the middle as a sonic all-points bulletin rave-up doubling up inside itself and crowned with an array of fragmentary chording outside of its 1959 vintage. Taking things way, way down, “Lullaby Of The Leaves” enters as if a soothing late night breeze wafting through gossamer curtains printed with palm frond patterning. The moonlight casts brightly through the plain eggshell whiteness of the background, shifting the darkened, swaying pinnate leaves onto the wall in film noir shadowing. The longest track of the album at 4:11, “Lullaby Of The Leaves” this tranquil ready by Baker was originally written as a jazz standard and was consequently a hit for (just dig the naïveté here) George Olsen and His Music back in 1932. A subsequent run of cover versions were produced by various artists in both instrumental and vocal accompaniment form, but one of the first after Mickey Baker’s version was The Ventures’ 1961 cover of it in a “Walk Don’t Run” style on their ANOTHER SMASH!!! album. 

The album bids farewell with the reflective melancholy of “Gloomy Sunday.” Also known as “The Hungarian Suicide Song” due to its tail-dragging qualities, it soon builds into several standalone phrases that needle and build like magnetic attractors that divide, rejoin only to scatter — but in only the most elegiac ways.

Three years after the release of THE WILDEST GUITAR, Baker emigrated to France, where he continued to release albums. Oftentimes paired with other Black American expatriates the like of Champion Jack Dupree and Memphis Slim, his output remained oddly sporadic. Releasing only half a dozen albums in the sixties and less than a dozen in the seventies, none of them exhibited the power and skill as his stunning debut. As Baker himself once said: “The whole idea was to make the most noise you could possibly get, and as loud…with lots of feeling.” This was in reference to his use of Fender and not Gibson guitars. But for the King of the Slip and Slide Guitar, Baker could probably coax similarly electrifying sounds and effects out of a Sears & Roebuck Country Gentleman, a 3/4 Martin acoustic, or even an adjustable steel rake with humbuckers, for that matter.