Chet Baker
A trumpet that played little and lingered long, and songs sung as if spoken close to the ear.
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
Companions ⏳🌊
- FamilyVera Baker
His mother, said to have encouraged his singing from early on, even taking her young son to singing contests.
- MentorCharlie Parker
At a 1952 audition he chose the unknown Baker and put him onstage for West Coast dates, first making his name known.
- ColleagueGerry Mulligan
Together they led the pianoless quartet that defined the signature sound of cool jazz, and they reunited at Carnegie Hall in 1974.
- BackerRichard Bock
Founded the Pacific Jazz label and released the Mulligan quartet's records and Baker's first vocal album.
- RivalryMiles Davis
An elder whose influence Baker never hid, he long resented being beaten by Baker in the 1953 readers' poll.
- FriendshipDizzy Gillespie
In 1973 he recommended the fallen Baker to New York clubs, opening the road to his comeback.
I. The Oklahoma boy · 1929–1946 (age 0–17)
(Yale) He was born in December 1929 in Yale, Oklahoma. His given name was Chesney Henry Baker Jr. His father, Chesney Sr., was a working musician who played guitar and banjo. His mother, Vera, is said to have helped keep the household going by working in a perfume factory. Two months before he was born, the New York stock market collapsed. In an Oklahoma swept by the Depression and the dust storms, his father could hardly support the family on music alone. (Glendale) In 1940 the family moved to California in search of work and settled in Glendale, just north of Los Angeles. The boy sang in the church choir. There is also a story that his mother used to take her son to amateur singing contests. His father first bought him a trombone. But when the small child struggled to handle it, he swapped it for a trumpet. The boy was about thirteen. (The ear) He learned the instrument in the junior high school band, but he never became fluent at reading music. Instead he memorized by ear the melodies he heard on the radio and on records and played them back. He recalled imitating Harry James, the flamboyant swing trumpeter. He had little interest in schoolwork. In 1946, at sixteen, he left school and enlisted in the Army. His lifelong way of making melodies — knowing no harmonic theory, yet hearing how the chords rang — grew from the habits his ear formed in these years.
II. From Berlin to Bird · 1946–1952 (age 17–23)
(Berlin) Once enlisted, he was assigned to the 298th Army Band stationed in West Berlin. Listening to the Stan Kenton orchestra and Dizzy Gillespie's bebop over Armed Forces radio, he woke to a new kind of jazz. After his discharge in 1948 he studied harmony and music theory at El Camino College outside Los Angeles. But he did not stay long, turning instead to the clubs and their impromptu playing (jam sessions). (San Francisco) In 1950 he reenlisted and joined the Sixth Army Band at the Presidio in San Francisco. At night he sought out clubs such as the Black Hawk and Bop City to play. Military discipline did not suit him. He was judged unfit for army life and discharged. Afterward he looked for work on the club stages of Los Angeles. (Parker) In the spring of 1952 Charlie Parker came to Los Angeles looking for a trumpeter to join him for his West Coast dates. Well-known players crowded the audition at the Tiffany Club. From among them Parker chose Baker, barely past twenty. The story goes that when Parker returned east, he told Gillespie and Miles Davis to watch out for a young white trumpeter on the West Coast. The anecdote is famous, but its source is uncertain, and it survives mainly as a story Baker himself told. The few weeks with Parker were a time for him to absorb the language of bebop in his body. At the same time, he went from an unknown newcomer to a player whose name was on people's lips.
III. The pianoless quartet · 1952–1955 (age 23–26)
(Mulligan) In the summer of 1952 he began playing with the baritone saxophonist and arranger Gerry Mulligan at the Haig, a small club in Hollywood. The lineup was trumpet and baritone saxophone with bass and Chico Hamilton's drums. With no piano, the two horns wound above and below each other's lines and took the place of chords. This weave of two simultaneous melodies (counterpoint) was new. The records released on Pacific Jazz, the label the producer Richard Bock had just founded, sold well too. This is how the face of a calm, restrained Western jazz (cool jazz, West Coast jazz) came into being. (The parting) The quartet did not last a year. It ended in 1953 when Mulligan was jailed on drug charges, and it is also said that before then the two had fallen out after Baker asked for a raise and was refused. Baker formed his own quartet with the pianist Russ Freeman. In that year's DownBeat readers' poll he took first place among trumpeters, ahead of Miles Davis and Clifford Brown. Davis later revealed his discomfort in his autobiography, saying Baker had copied his style yet won more acclaim for it. Baker, for his part, never hid Davis's influence. (Singing) His clean-cut looks drew Hollywood's interest as well, and in 1955 he appeared as an actor in the film Hell's Horizon. In 1954 Bock put out a record of his singing. He sang with almost no wavering tone (vibrato), close to the microphone, as if whispering. Critics and fellow musicians were divided, but audiences were enthralled. Around this time he began using heroin. That addiction would steer the course of his life for the next thirty-odd years.
A recording from the Gerry Mulligan Quartet years, this is the song that made the twenty-two-year-old Baker the face of West Coast jazz overnight. Over the next 36 years he played and sang it again more times than anyone could count.
- Baker barely ornaments the melody, playing it plainly in the middle register. Sparing with the wavering tone (vibrato), he draws a note out long and then quietly lets it go. This phrasing became his signature for the rest of his life.
- Mulligan's baritone saxophone draws a slow countermelody beneath the lead line, shouldering part of the harmony a piano would have carried. Follow the places where the two horns overlap and part, and you can hear how a pianoless group fills out its sound.
- Instead of sticks, Chico Hamilton sweeps the drumhead with wire whisks (brushes), floating the beat very lightly. The bass picks out the root of each chord, note by note. With the rhythm section standing a step back, even the breath of the horns sounds close at hand.
- It is a short recording, just over 3 minutes. Its heart is not a dazzling improvised solo but how an existing song is interpreted. With the success of the record it appeared on, Richard Bock's Pacific Jazz went from a fledgling label to the center of West Coast jazz.
His singing, which left critics and fellow musicians shaking their heads, won the public's love, and the record has become his most enduringly loved album.
- The voice has almost no tremor, and its range is narrow. It is a way of singing right in front of the microphone, as if speaking to one person. It is widely said that this style later influenced Brazilian bossa nova singers, above all João Gilberto.
- When the vocal ends, he carries the same song on with the trumpet. The range and breath of his singing continue almost unchanged in the trumpet, so the two sounds seem like one person's single voice.
- Russ Freeman's piano slips in short, clipped chords, leaving room for the singer to breathe. In quick numbers like “But Not for Me,” a push-and-pull feel (swing) comes lightly to life as he drags the back of the beat ever so slightly. In slow ones like “I Fall in Love Too Easily,” it sinks until it almost seems to stop.
- It first came out as a short 10-inch record. In 1956 it was reissued as a 12-inch record with added songs, and this expanded edition is what is usually heard today.
IV. Autumn in Paris · 1955–1959 (age 26–30)
(Europe) In the fall of 1955 he took his quartet on a European tour. Dick Twardzik, the young Boston-born pianist who had come along, died that October of a heroin overdose in their lodgings in Paris. He was twenty-four. The concerts and recordings went on. But those around Baker recalled that the death hit him hard. For a man already dabbling in the same drug, it was a warning, but it did not make him break the habit. (Homecoming) After he returned to America in 1956, drug arrests followed one after another, and he served a brief jail term. Much of the money he made from concerts and recordings went to drugs. Even so, he kept releasing records on Pacific Jazz, such as “Chet Baker & Crew.” Onstage he was still the young star. But the distance between the boyish image that had once captivated the public and his actual life grew ever wider. (New York) Around 1958 he moved his base to New York and worked with Orrin Keepnews, producer for the Riverside label. With Bill Evans, Pepper Adams and Paul Chambers he recorded “Chet,” an album made up entirely of slow songs (ballads). The same year, in Chicago, he recorded “Stan Meets Chet” with Stan Getz. The two were often lumped together as the white players who stood for cool jazz, but they are said not to have been at ease with each other. In 1959 he left America for Italy.
A ballad album recorded for Orrin Keepnews's Riverside after he moved his base to New York. It is some of the quietest music to come out of a period shaken by drugs and arrests.
- An album of slow songs only, with no vocals. From the first track, “Alone Together,” listen not for how many notes he pours out but for how long he holds a single note.
- Bill Evans carefully chooses how to stack the notes of a chord (voicing). His piano resembles the sound of “Kind of Blue,” which he recorded with Miles Davis around the same time, and listening to the two albums back to back invites comparison.
- Pepper Adams's baritone saxophone, Herbie Mann's flute and Kenny Burrell's guitar take turns entering from track to track, changing the color. The contrast at the moment the trumpet returns after another instrument's solo is the architecture of this album.
- Paul Chambers's bass holds the beat firmly even at very slow tempos. So even when the solo seems to drift loosely, the music never comes apart.
V. The prison at Lucca · 1959–1964 (age 30–35)
(Italy) Italy welcomed him. In 1959 in Milan he recorded “Chet Baker with Fifty Italian Strings” with a string orchestra. He also turned up in Italian films, playing on screen. To audiences he was the dashing jazz star from America. Both his playing and his singing were warmly received, and he in turn grew fond of Italian life and the Italian language. (Lucca) In the summer of 1960 he was arrested on drug-related charges in Lucca, a Tuscan city. The trial drew intense attention from the Italian press. He was convicted and spent more than a year in Lucca's prison. During that time his performing stopped. Released in 1961, he returned to the stage, but his name, now past thirty, was already trailed by a record of drugs and imprisonment. (Expulsion) “Chet Is Back!”, an album recorded in Rome in 1962, announced his return just as its title said. He also released a record of songs sung in Italian. But over the next several years he was arrested or expelled over drugs in West Germany, Britain and elsewhere. His places to stay in Europe kept shrinking. In 1964 he finally returned to America. His Italian-era recordings mix the generous sound of strings with traces of a hard life. Some critics see this period as the time his music began to shed the polish of his youth.
VI. Lost teeth · 1964–1975 (age 35–46)
(Flugelhorn) After returning to America he favored, for a time, the flugelhorn, whose sound is rounder and softer than the trumpet's. In 1965 he recorded a large batch of tunes over a few days for the Prestige label with the tenor saxophonist George Coleman and others, releasing them across several albums. He recorded so much above all because he needed money. (Teeth) In 1966 in San Francisco he was assaulted and badly injured his teeth. Accounts of what happened differ from story to story. He himself is said to have suggested that he was beaten after a quarrel broke out while he was trying to buy drugs. In the end he had to be fitted with dentures. For a horn player, the fit of lips and teeth (embouchure) was the very foundation of the sound. Over several years he rebuilt it from scratch. There is also a story that he worked at a gas station in the meantime to make a living. He began receiving methadone, a substitute treatment for heroin. It was a time when he passed through his lowest point as his father and mother looked on. Over his lifetime he married three times and had children. (Comeback) In 1973 Dizzy Gillespie recommended him to club owners, helping him return to the New York stage. “She Was Too Good to Me,” released in 1974 on Creed Taylor's CTI label, signaled his comeback. That November he gave a reunion concert with Gerry Mulligan at Carnegie Hall. His high notes were not what they had been. Instead, critics remarked, his short, fragile phrases lingering in the middle register carried the weight of someone who had come through his wounds.
This was the comeback album he made for Creed Taylor's CTI after losing his teeth and spending several years in the wilderness. The trumpet he now blew through rebuilt lips carried a weight unlike that of his younger days.
- Creed Taylor produced it, and Don Sebesky arranged the strings and winds. Even over the smoothly polished accompaniment, Baker's trumpet stands in front without ornament.
- Staying in the middle register rather than reaching high, he carefully links short phrases. This sounds both like the limit of the lip (embouchure) he had relearned around his dentures and like a new means of expression.
- On a few tracks the alto saxophone of Paul Desmond, an old West Coast jazz colleague, comes in. Both have thin, clear tones, so set side by side they revive memories of 1950s cool jazz.
- Ron Carter's bass and Steve Gadd's drums lay down a firm, crisp beat typical of the 1970s. He is, in effect, singing on different ground from the brush-drum days of the 1950s. On the title track he sings as well.
VII. Spring in Amsterdam · 1975–1988 (age 46–59)
(Wandering) From 1975 on, he spent most of his life in Europe. With no fixed home, he moved from city to city by train and car, playing in clubs and at festivals. He left an enormous body of recordings on small labels such as SteepleChase in Denmark and Enja in Germany. He is said to have often chosen a lump sum paid in cash on the day of the session over a royalty contract. As a result, for all the records he made, little money stayed in his hands. (Collaborations) In 1983 he played a trumpet solo on the British singer Elvis Costello's song “Shipbuilding,” and his name became known to rock audiences as well. That same year he set out on a Scandinavian tour with Stan Getz. But it is said that, after friction between the two men, Baker dropped out partway through. In 1987 he toured Japan. Around this time the photographer Bruce Weber filmed “Let's Get Lost,” a documentary about his life. The deep lines etched into his face in the film, set side by side with photographs of his youth, were talked about for years. That face also revived an old epithet: the most lyrical white trumpeter since Bix Beiderbecke. (Death) In April 1988 he gave a large concert in Hanover, Germany, with a radio big band and orchestra. A little over two weeks later, in the early hours of May 13, he was found dead on the pavement in front of the Prins Hendrik Hotel in Amsterdam. He had fallen from a second-floor window. Heroin and cocaine were found in his body. The Dutch police concluded that his death was an accident. He was fifty-eight. He was buried in a cemetery in Inglewood, near Los Angeles. Today a small plaque honoring him hangs on the hotel wall.
A recording he made for Denmark's SteepleChase during his years of wandering through Europe. On a small label, in a small lineup, his late music became at its most intimate.
- Trumpet, guitar and bass play as a trio, with no drums. The job of keeping time falls almost entirely to Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen's bass. The passages where that bass trades lines with the soloist, as if in conversation, are well worth hearing.
- Doug Raney's guitar lays down thinner harmony than a piano would, leaving the trumpet wide room to breathe. With so few instruments, the silence between notes becomes part of the music too.
- In place of the sleek tone of the 1950s came more notes laced with breath and more rests left deliberately empty. The glitter is pared away, and each note sounds heavier for it.
- On the title track, his voice, now that he was in his fifties, had grown lower and rougher than in his youth. Yet his way of singing as though speaking remained the same.
A live recording of the concert he gave in Hanover with a German radio big band and orchestra, a little over two weeks before his death. One last time, he set the songs he had sung all his life to a large ensemble.
- “My Funny Valentine” unfolds at length over an orchestral accompaniment that includes strings. Played back to back with the three-minute performance from 1952, the same song lets you hear the 36 years that passed over it.
- Pieces for a large ensemble (big band) alternate with pieces for a small group. The program includes tunes such as “All Blues,” which Miles Davis recorded in 1959, a reminder of the long ties between the two trumpeters.
- Even in front of a loud band, he does not raise his sound. To keep the trumpet from being buried, the arrangers held back and thinned out the accompaniment, fitting it to his small sound.
- Recorded by a German broadcaster, it was released on record after his death. That is why it is often called his last great concert.
Lesser-known stories
He had been writing a memoir. It was a manuscript in his own words covering his childhood through his European years of the early 1960s, but it was never published in his lifetime. After his death, the manuscript his family had kept was published in 1997 under the title “As Though I Had Wings: The Lost Memoir.” The story breaks off in the early 1960s, leaving it an unfinished record. Unlike the tragic image built up by documentaries and biographies, the man in the manuscript talks with delight, above all, about cars, playing music and life on the road. It is a rare source in which the events of the 1950s can be heard in his own voice, but because it appeared so late, it has been cited mostly among biographers. His 1955 Paris recordings hold a lesser-known experiment. The pianist who went with him, Dick Twardzik, brought along compositions by Bob Zieff as repertoire. Zieff's pieces had harmonies that were unfamiliar and complex for the jazz of the day. That Baker, who struggled with written music, recorded these pieces runs against the common notion that he relied on his ear alone and sang only easy songs. These recordings long went unnoticed, overshadowed by Twardzik's sudden death. He was also an actor. He appeared in the 1955 Hollywood film “Hell's Horizon,” and around 1960 he turned up as a musician in Italian films. A story long followed him that Hollywood had tried to groom him as a second James Dean, but his surviving filmography amounts to only a handful of films. As documentaries made his life more famous, this brief acting career mostly remained a footnote.
Notes on terms 📚🔎
Cool jazz
(The word) The English word cool originally means chilly, but in the slang of Black American musicians in the 1940s it was used to mean composed and stylish. The name carries a sense of calm, of not heating up. (In jazz) A current in jazz that emerged around 1950. Compared with fast, fierce bebop, it relaxed the tempo, softened the tone and refined the arrangements. If bebop is a cheer shouted at the top of your lungs across a playing field, cool jazz is closer to talking calmly in a low voice to the friend beside you. The feeling may be the same, but the manner of speaking differs. (Elsewhere) In everyday speech, calling someone cool means they are easygoing and hold no grudges.
West Coast jazz
(The word) The West Coast refers to the western seaboard of the United States, that is, the California region. (In jazz) A name grouping the jazz of musicians active in the 1950s, centered in Los Angeles and San Francisco. It inherited the calm of cool jazz while placing great weight on arrangement and structure. Many of its players also worked in Hollywood film studios. It is a bit like how, in the same game of soccer, each region favors different tactics. If New York jazz was a fast, physical attack, West Coast jazz leaned toward precise passing.
Pianoless quartet
(The word) A quartet without a piano (piano-less), that is, a lineup of four players performing with no piano. (In jazz) In a jazz band, the piano usually serves as the floor that lays down the harmony. The quartet of Gerry Mulligan and Baker left out the piano and played with only trumpet, baritone saxophone, bass and drums. The two horns played different lines at the same time, creating the harmony in its place, and thanks to that empty space the sound became light and transparent. It is like dodgeball: when there are few friends to catch the ball, those who remain must range more widely to fill the empty space.
Counterpoint
(The word) The Korean term daewi (對位) means 'the position (位) that faces (對).' The Latin root of the English counterpoint, punctus contra punctum, means 'note against note.' The name holds the idea of setting the notes of one line against the notes of another. (In jazz) The art of composing and playing in which two or more different melodic lines sound at once yet are woven so that they fit together well. In the Mulligan quartet, while the trumpet played the main melody, the baritone saxophone drew a different line beneath it, creating harmony. If there is ever a moment when two friends sing different songs at the same time and yet, strangely, they blend well, that is the principle of counterpoint. (Elsewhere) The word is also borrowed in literature and film for a structure that weaves two storylines side by side so that each illuminates the other.
Vibrato
(The word) From the Italian vibrare (to tremble, to shake), meaning a trembling. (In jazz) An expressive device in which, while holding a long note, the player wavers its pitch or intensity very slightly and quickly so that it ripples. Used heavily, it makes the sound rich and emotional; used sparingly, it makes it clear and unadorned. Baker used almost none of this tremble, on trumpet or in his singing, producing a straight, fragile sound. Think of a friend at karaoke who bends and wobbles the last note, and another who holds a note out straight, and you will hear the difference.
Embouchure
(The word) The French embouchure means 'the place where you put your mouth (bouche).' (In jazz) The way a wind player fits lips, teeth and facial muscles to the mouthpiece, and the trained condition of those muscles. For a trumpeter, pitch, tone and stamina are all decided here. After losing his teeth in 1966 and getting dentures, Baker had to rebuild his from scratch. It is easy to understand if you recall playing a recorder or a danso and finding that the slightest change in the shape of your lips made the sound change drastically, or vanish altogether. (Elsewhere) In French it can also mean the mouth of a river, where it flows into the sea, that is, an estuary.
Flugelhorn
(The word) A compound of the German Flügel (wing) and Horn (horn). The name is said to come from a horn once used in hunting and in the army to send signals to the wings on either side of a formation. (In jazz) A brass instrument similar to the trumpet in shape and playing technique, but with a wider, broader bore that gives it a round, soft sound. If the trumpet is crisp and gleaming, the flugelhorn is warm and hazy. The difference is like saying the same thing through a loudspeaker or through your cupped hands. Baker favored this instrument in the mid-1960s.
Ballad
(The word) From the Latin ballare, meaning to dance; it originally referred to a song sung to accompany dancing. (In jazz) A song or performance at a slow tempo that reveals deep feeling. If in a fast tune the virtuosity of pouring out many notes stands out, in a ballad what matters is how long, and how delicately, a single note is handled. It is like the difference between a footrace, where speed is the contest, and a slow yoga balancing pose rather than jump rope, where endurance and delicacy come through. (Elsewhere) In literature it refers to a short poem that tells a story (damsi, 'story poem'), and in Korean popular music, slow, lyrical love songs are commonly called ballads.