/ Chet Baker / Forgotten Romantic /

''I’m definitely a romantic, I don’t think life is really worth all the pain and effort and struggling if you don’t have somebody that you love very much.'' Chet Baker

Chet Baker the cool jazz icon from the West Coast, was born in 1929 in Oklahoma. As a boy he was surrounded by music, his father professionally played guitar, and small Baker went early to the church choir. His first instrument was a trombone; however, it turned out to be too big for the weak Cheat,so he quickly moved to the trumpet- the passion of his life.

Baker didn't have an official music education. After returning from Berlin where he served the army after the Second World War, he enrolled at El Camino College in Los Angeles where he would study music for only two years. On the musical scene, Baker breaks out in 1952 where he performs at gigs with Charlie Parker.

That gave Baker an instant credibility in jazz. Ruined or not, Charlie Parker, with Dizzy Gillespie the progenitor of bebop, was the genius, the savant, the seer, the stumbling visionary who heard what others could not and could translate what he heard into a new language that others could immediately understand, even if they could never speak it themselves. If Parker said that Baker's playing was "pure and simple," that it reminded him of the Bix Beiderbecke records he heard growing up in Kansas City, that made the perhaps apocryphal story of Parker telling Gillespie and Davis, "There's a little white cat on the coast who's gonna eat you up" almost believable. But it was Baker's face -- as much or more than his joining in a new L.A. quartet with Gerry Mulligan, the baritone saxophonist and junkie who had played on the "Birth of the Cool" sessions, or Baker forming his own group and then headlining at Birdland in New York with Gillespie and Davis below him on the bill -- that made many people want to believe it. (1)

Well before the end of his life, after he had lost most of his teeth in a drug-related beating in San Francisco, after he had turned into as charming, self-pitying, manipulative, professional a junkie as any in America or Europe, where for decades he made his living less as a musician than a legend, Baker wore the face of a lizard. In some photographs he barely looks human. But at the start he was, as so indelibly captured in William Claxton's famous photographs, not merely beautiful, not merely a California golden boy -- in the words of the television impresario and songwriter Steve Allen, someone who "started out as James Dean and ended up as Charles Manson." He was gorgeous, he seemed touched by an odd light, and he did not, even then, look altogether human -- but in a manner that was not repulsive but irresistibly alluring.

His legend -- the way in which, with the clarity and ease of his tone as a trumpeter, and the preternatural calm, quiet, and reflectiveness of his singing, the way in which he could, "somehow," as Gavin quotes the Italian pianist Enrico Pieranunzi, "express the question mark of life in so few notes," the way in which Baker was a cult in and of himself -- was as the years went on not just a Johnny Thunders death watch, a spectacle of self-destruction, the face of the monster slowly grinding down the memory of the angel. Rather it was, through all the years of working less as a musician than as his own pimp ("One uninspired night at the Subway Club in Cologne yielded three albums"), of a self-degradation so extreme it had to be, in its way, its own reward ("Waking from a nod ... he found his face crawling with cockroaches ..."), the chance that the pure talent, as a thing in itself, might still be there, might still emerge on any night, in any song, and then, again, vanish, humiliating the man who could not find his voice at will or even refused to, and mocking the memories of those who could not admit that they had not heard what they thought they heard. (1)

The many women in his life — Halema, Carol Baker, Diane Vavra, Ruth Young, to name a few — remain faceless, emblems of his excess and decay, little more than appendages, as can be seen in the 1988 documentary about Chet Baker, Let’s Get Lost, produced and directed by fashion photographer Bruce Weber.

Chet tried to strangle Young with a telephone cord, injected girlfriend Jones with heroin then left her passed out and turning blue in an apartment. Vavra left him after a relationship of years, and one too many beatings. All of this is documented in James Gavin’s darkly surreal and painfully real, Deep in a Dream, The Long Night of Chet Baker.

In 1988, the year he died from a fall out of a window on a street in Amsterdam, Baker was using more than six grams of heroin a day, and, having run out of veins to use, had resorted to shooting up via his scrotum. He was a wasted man, trapped in his own shadow, a whisper of talent still straining to deliver music. (2)

''With every defense shattered, he lived the songs with a painful intensity.''

(1) The rise and fall of Chet Baker
(2) “Chet Baker and his Abandoned Shadows” — an essay and poem by Arya F. Jenkins