By Stuart Mitchner

A good way to go in this life is to find something you really enjoy doing and then learn to do it better than anybody. — Chet Baker

Tis the season to be jolly and celebrate Chet Baker, who was born on this date, a day short of Christmas Eve, December 23, 1929. What does the man whose trumpet and voice put West Coast jazz on the map have to do with Christmas? You could ask the same of the weather, with 72 degrees predicted for Christmas Eve, or of Bob Dylan, whose album, Christmas in the Heart, was reviewed here on the same day of the month six years ago.

Online you can join the patrons of an Amsterdam jazz club watching Chet Baker play “Auld Lang Syne” on the last New Year’s Eve of his life, December 31, 1987. He begins in a tentative, almost desultory way before the momentum of the moment moves him and he makes a gesture to the rhythm section, as if to say really play it, take it to the limit, give it the full measure of your devotion, and with that he dives into the second chorus, bending the notes just so, as only he can do, each one as bright and simple as the lights on a Christmas tree. 

The following May 13th he’s found dead on the sidewalk below his room at the Hotel Prins Hendrik in Amsterdam, the death ruled an accident. A plaque outside the hotel says “he will live on in his music for anyone willing to listen and feel.” The room he was staying in, No. 210, is now “The Chet Baker Room.”

Musing on a Dream

Besides listening to the music and reading As Though I Had Wings, the “lost memoir,” I’ve been watching Bruce Weber’s frequently cringe-inducing documentary, Let’s Get Lost, in which the stoned-out zombie Orpheus is led by a ghoulish retinue of “beautiful creatures” through a demonic “city of dreadful joy.” In both book and film, Baker acknowledges the wages of a drug-dependent life in a matter of fact, unapologetic, this-is-how-it-is manner. One of the calmest, warmest sequences in the film comes when Baker sits musing over the words of a song closely identified with him, “I dim all the lights and I sink in my chair … the smoke from my cigarette climbs through the air … The walls of my room fade away in the blue …. And I’m deep in a dream of you.” Speaking with a depth of feeling rarely seen in Weber’s freak show, Baker speaks the words as if he were discovering them all over again, “The smoke makes a stairway for you to descend … you come to my arms, may this bliss never end …. Then from the ceiling, sweet music comes stealing …. We glide through a lover’s refrain …. My cigarette burns me, I wake with a start …. Awake or asleep, every memory I’ll keep …. deep in a dream of you.”

Another such moment is at the end. He’s smoking a cigarette, something he does as expressively as he plays; no private eye in any film noir ever made, not even Bogart, smokes with such endgame eloquence, as if the last drag might be his last breath. The voice, too, has a quality no actor, not even Brando, could convey, as he peers at us through the smoke, putting the words together: “It was so beautiful … it was a dream … things like that don’t happen ….”

“Isn’t It Romantic”

Now it’s time to go “back back way back to the days before rock and roll,” as Van Morrison sings on his 1991 album Hymns to the Silence, back to Bloomington Indiana when I first heard Gene Sherman, the local DJ, play that hymn to the silence, Chet Baker and Gerry Mulligan’s “Moonlight in Vermont,” and felt that a new world of music had been revealed. Soon I was selling Pepsi at college football games for enough cash to buy pieces of the new world at bandleader Al Cobine’s Turntable Record Shop on Kirkwood Avenue. By then we’d moved into a house with a grand piano where my father showed me how to poke out “Isn’t It Romantic,” the opening track on Chet Baker’s first Pacific Jazz EP.

My involvement in the music was only marginally influenced by the Dorian Gray glamour of Chet Baker. If anything, I found the high cheekbones and vaguely repellent good looks a bit too close for comfort to Charlie Starkweather. For me, the charisma was in the playing of the ballads, the making of a thing of beauty, and the way his singing complemented it in “I Get Along Without You Very Well” and “Like Someone in Love.” But when it came to charisma, Chet was no match for a kid from Indiana named Jimmy Dean who wore glasses like me and had gone to school upstate with my best friend’s older brother.

Chet Baker was 25 and already winning the Downbeat and Metronome polls when James Dean streamed across the pop culture firmament. “Isn’t It Romantic” was no match for multiple viewings of East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause. It still seems uncanny that Dean came and went in less than a year, dead at 24, and by that time I’d moved on from Baker and Mulligan to Count Basie’s big band. A few years later it was John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins, and then, speaking of new worlds, the Beatles.

Absolutely Staggering

Those are only among the most obvious reasons it’s taken me so long to move beyond the ballads to an appreciation of Chet Baker’s virtuosity, the fire Charlie Parker was talking about when he warned Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis to watch out for “a litle white cat out in California that’s gonna eat you up.” Doug Ramsey’s liner notes to the limited edition Chet Baker Quartet collection sum up the benighted critical consensus that Baker was a “limited” talent, “lyrical … but not really much of a trumpet player.” Ramsey goes on to quote bandmate and musical director pianist Russ Freeman from a 1987 interview:

“There would be certain nights, maybe once a week, when it was absolutely staggering. To the extent where I would sit there … listening to him play, and think, ‘Where did that come from? What is it that’s coming out of this guy? You mean I have to play a solo after that? … [It] didn’t happen all the time, you know, but when it did it was like he’d suddenly got control of the world.”

I heard what Freeman meant on the car stereo driving to and from Kingston last week with the window rolled down to let in another ineffably temperate dreamlike West Coast December day, as tracks like “Swing House” and “Love Me or Leave Me” blended with and transcended the weather, “Swing House” smooth and flawless, the other capped by the dazzling counterpoint of Baker’s bell-clear trumpet scooting in and out and all around the dancing bear of Mulligan’s nimble baritone.

Bix

In As Though I had Wings, Baker recalls the time his father gave him a trombone, which he found too cumbersome to play: “After a few weeks, the trombone disappeared and was replaced by a trumpet. It was much more my size, and I was able to get a sound (of sorts) right away …. My dad initially wanted me to play trombone because he was a great admirer of Jack Teagarden, but his disappointment diminished little by little as he watched my progress on the trumpet — see, he liked Bix, too.” When Baker’s at his best, you can hear the sound Bix got that Eddie Condon compared to “a girl saying yes.”

Ethan Does Chet

Reading Baker’s accounts of Army life and of his turbulent stay in the stockade brings to mind another ill-starred trumpet virtuoso, Montgomery Clift’s Prewitt in the film of From Here to Eternity made from James Jones’s novel. Baker himself appeared as a doomed trumpet player in a Korean War B movie called Hell’s Horizon, and in 1960 Robert Wagner played a character clearly modeled on Baker in All the Young Cannibals. Fifty-five years later Princeton comes into the narrative by way of Hun School graduate Ethan Hawke, who pays Chet in Robert Brudeau’s Born to the Blues. Having premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in September, the film will be released here through IFC. In Sunday’s Los Angeles Times, Hawke explains to an interviewer how “Dino De Laurentiis approached Chet to have him play himself in his own movie. So we say: What if that had happened? So I’m playing Chet Baker playing himself in a movie.” Hawke says the film does what jazz loves to do, “to take a standard and riff off it. We took the standard legend of Chet and dug in and explored and riffed.”

Diving for Pearls

While it’s unlikely that any film will ever contain as much actual Chet Baker as Let’s Get Lost, you can see him online at Ronnie Scott’s in London playing with Elvis Costello and Van Morrison and you can hear him making something beautiful in Elvis Costello’s 1983 recording “Shipbuilding.”

What Baker creates in and around and all over Costello’s line “diving for pearls” is as eloquently emotional as his playing on that last New Year’s Eve in Amsterdam, which was also the scene of the last interview he ever gave. Speaking about how he much he’s enjoying the occasion, he recalls the various New Years Eves he spent in prison: “I was locked up in 1960, I missed that New Years. But in ‘61 they let me out a month ahead of time so I wouldn’t be in jail over Christmas and New Years.”

You can sample Chet Baker’s “cup of kindness” when he plays “Auld Lang Syne,” making something beautiful, at peace with his demons, for a time.

Note: The quote at top, from Lets Get Lost, is the lesson Chet Baker says he wanted to “instill” in his children. “The city of dreadful joy” is Aldous Huxley’s term for Los Angeles, from his book Jesting Pilate.”