On May 13th 1988, jazz trumpeter Chet Baker took a premature route to eternity. Just like in the rest of his adult life, he was scrambling for drugs at the time. The fact that his end was via a second-storey window onto a cobblestone courtyard below surprised no one. The Amsterdam police said they couldn't rule out suicide, but friends said that, for the first time in years, his career was on the up and he was talking about buying a little house outside Paris. Right to the very end he had - as throughout his career - snatched failure from the jaws of success.
Baker, the sulky icon of Californian cool jazz, once enjoyed phenomenal success in the 1950s as a member of the Gerry Mulligan Quartet and subsequently with his own groups. Despite the acclaim - Charlie Parker once warned Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis: "There's a little white cat out here [in California] who's going to give you boys a lot of trouble," - his great talent came too easily and was abused. He lasted longer than most heroin-addicted musicians and for a long while, it seemed nothing he did to himself, and nothing the police of several countries did to him, could still the lyricism of his playing.
Baker may now be gone now, but he is certainly not forgotten. Last year, Leonardo DiCaprio bought the movie rights to Baker's lost memoir, As Though I Had Wings and this month sees the release of German trumpeter Till Brunner's tribute to Baker, Chattin' With Chet. On it, he plays the songs most associated with Baker, but updated with contemporary rhythms. "Chet Baker came along with no intention to cause a revolution," says Brunner. "He played as he sang and sang as he played, but he touched people with his music and he showed how he actually felt, and that was a something of a revolution in itself, in my opinion."
Brunner points out people don't forget cult figures such as Baker. "I tried to give him a big credit for what he has done. I chose the biggest hits that he had - like You Don't Know What Love Is, and She Was Too Good To Me - and I tried to add something of myself in the way that I would like to listen to those tunes today. We had the cover photographs done to pretty much look like the William Claxton thing, but if I had done the music in the same style and idiom as Chet Baker, this whole thing, to me, would be a little tasteless. So it's a big homage to Chet Baker, done in my style, today's music."
Brunner, dubbed "the German Chet Baker", despite the fact his playing is inspired by hard bop trumpeters Freddie Hubbard and Kenny Dorham, is a virtuoso musician. You only have to play Chet Baker In Paris, also out this month, to see just how different Brunner's style is from Baker's.
Comprising 14 tracks made in 1955 during Baker's first tour of Europe, two tunes on Chet Baker In Paris - Just Duo and Sad Walk - are with the group Baker brought with him from the US - Dick Twardzik on piano, Jimmy Bond on bass and Peter Littman on drums. These recordings are particularly valuable since Twardzik would die of a drug overdose 10 days later in a hotel room in Rue St Benoit.
Baker, who considered him an "authentic genius" was devastated. But apparently not sufficiently devastated to kick his own habit.
Shocked by the death of Twardzik, Bond and Littman returned home. Baker remained in Paris alone, and the rest of the album is with top French musicians, including Pierre Michelot, Francy Boland and Bobby Jaspar. In the remaining tracks, the beguiling low-key ardour of Baker's trumpet playing is very much to the fore, especially on a version of Summertime. This was Baker before the tailspin into oblivion began in earnest.
Baker's narcotics possession charges, from his first West Coast bust in December 1952 and nine subsequent drugs offences to a six-month sentence in New York's Penitentiary in 1959, is charted in his recently released FBI file. In 1960, just as he was about to be indicted on another drugs charge, he abruptly left for Europe where the FBI, somewhat bizarrely, tracked his movements through the pages of a celebrity gossip magazine, Hush-Hush.
Baker was arrested in Italy in 1961 and deported. He was caught again in Germany, in 1962, and deported, only to be arrested again in England. A taker and manipulator, particularly of women, his fecklessness simply added to his mystique.
His spectacular nose-dive into skid-row reached its nadir in 1968 when his teeth were knocked out at the behest of a drug dealer. Then followed a slow and painful comeback, with a concert with Gerry Mulligan at Carnegie Hall in 1974 which helped to re-establish his reputation, albeit as one of the most precarious bookings on the jazz circuit. The disparity between his "notorious" reputation as a jazz musician who drank and did drugs and the fragile beauty of his art proved to be a powerful drawing card. If he gave a bad performance it was interpreted as life reflected in art, if he gave a good performance, it was seen as art reinforced by life, and he could do no wrong.
Baker was perhaps the most conspicuous victim of that well-known euphemism in jazz, "personal problems". During the last decade of his life, his face told the story. Much photographed, the boyish good looks of the 1950s - when he was mentioned in the same breath as James Dean - had disappeared with the ravages of his lifestyle. His deeplylined face the all-too-tangible evidence of the blight of addiction, he once quipped to fellow trumpeter Jack Sheldon that they were laugh lines. "Nothing in life is that funny," responded Sheldon.
Chet Baker In Paris (EmArcy) and Till Brunner's Chattin With Chet (Verve) are released this month by Universal Jazz