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A Newsletter Dedicated To Chet Baker And His Music
 

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USA Editor
Elizabeth Little

 Copy Editor
Bert Whitford		 European Editor
Gunthar Skiba

Editorial - Betty Little

            While in school at Tulane in 1956, I first heard of Chet Baker.  One of my friends who worked in production at the Gallery Circle Theater could not believe that I’d never heard Chet, “… because he’s won all the polls.”  Naturally I rushed out and bought my first LP, the 10” PJ recording, CHET BAKER SINGS, for $2.98 - the price tag is still attached.  It’s value is now strictly sentimental because it is worn out.

            I thought he was sensational and bought all the recordings I could locate and afford.  Suddenly the recordings stopped and his picture in the tabloids explained why.  I forgot about Chet until one day I was rummaging in the CD bins and saw the Reunion Concert.  From that day forward the hunt was on to find everything he ever did which had been issued on CD.

            Not only had I found Chet, but I recalled all the fun days of living in New Orleans.  It was incredible that he was still playing well after the loss of his teeth.  As a therapist, I regretted his self-destructive lifestyle; but as a fan, I was so glad that he still pursued his muse and continued to grow as an artist.  His recordings were not easy to find ‘midst the top 40 record stores in my town.  Also I was amazed at the short shrift given him in many of the publications.  Quotes such as:  “The consensus among his critics, however, is that Baker was unable to realize his early promise” and “Baker was not the complete trumpeter and played mostly in the middle register, featuring pensive, low-volume stylization’s …”

            In May of 1988 on the way to the beach, I was reading a newspaper and noticed a very small article about Chet Baker falling from a window in Amsterdam.  This just couldn’t be;  but, of course, it was.  It seemed all the more unjust because he was playing better than ever;  I thought he had realized his early promise and more.

            I was pre-occupied with the idea of doing something to preserve his music and create a wider audience for his work.  The article in “People” magazine saying that the sound track of LET’S GET LOST is as good an introduction as any to his music did not gibe with my perception.  A VANITY FAIR  article on Miles Davis extolling him as the best trumpet player since Louis and Diz really got me going.  I had to do something, but what?  Trying to see LET’S GET LOST in this part of the country was futile, it never played the theaters.  The largest video store argued me down that it was not out on video despite the fact that I had a letter from the film company saying that it had been released.

When I received the brochure from our state Art Museum and saw that it was scheduled for a showing in August, I was delighted.  Then I was able to reach the film’s discussant, Larry Whitford, by phone one Saturday AM, and learned that he and Gunther Skiba had talked of organizing a fan club, I thought, this is fate.  We reached Carol Baker through ENJA Records in Germany and now we are ready to begin..  

United States Editor, Gastonia, NC

IN MEMORIUM
 RICHARD BOCK  

            We were saddened recently to learn that Richard Bock had passed away in 1988.  After seeing the documentary LET’S GET LOST we felt that Dick Bock  would be an excellent source of material on Chet Baker and others for the newsletter.

            Dick Bock founded Pacific Jazz Records back in the ‘50s and was the first one to record that new music called “West Coast Jazz”.  Bock began a series of special releases entitled JAZZ WEST COAST that took its name from a book of photographs of the same name by William Claxton.  Claxton’s photographs were on many of the Pacific Jazz releases.

            Over the years Pacific Jazz records became World Pacific Records then Liberty Records and then went finally to Capitol Records.  The last we heard, Dick Bock was producing records for Contemporary Records, part of the Fantasy Inc. group.

            If Dick Bock had not started Pacific Jazz Records, would we ever have heard of Chet Baker, Gerry Mulligan, Bud Shank, Shorty Rogers and many others?  Maybe, but we doubt that much of the multitude of music that was issued on Pacific Jazz would ever have been heard.

            Chet Baker fans and jazz fans the world over should mourn the passing of this JAZZ GIANT.

The TENDER TRUMPET OF CHET BAKER
By Mike Zwerin
The International Herald Tribune

Paris – Audiences do not generally shout “yeah” or cheer after a Chet Baker trumpet solo.  All that tenderness has driven them too far inside.

    He reaches the same pure part of us as Beethoven’s late string quartets.  This extraordinary artist has been taken so much for granted, but his career has been managed poorly, he does not compromise and he’s no angel.

  Though small by mass industry standards, his audience is select and passionate.

            “Chet cares for each note and makes it sing,” said Manfred Eicher, head of the Munich-based record company ECM (for which Baker does not record).  “He approaches phrasing and harmony in a highly aesthetic fashion.  He was one of my most important influences when I first started listening to jazz, and he still is – more than ever.”

            The pianist Keith Jarrett said, “Chet’s unique combination of sound, form and time is a remarkably unified artistic statement.  He is concerned with being himself rather than new or different or avant-garde. 
                                                        ‘It Looks So Easy’

 

            “It’s kind of depressing to realize that so much of what I’m trying to do and say is going by completely undetected,” Baker said, looking depressed.  “It’s really very complicated but it looks so easy, I’m sure that 95 percent of the audience is unaware that I’ve said anything unique or that there’s more depth to it than there was 25 years ago.”

            Chesney Baker was born of poor parents in Yale, Okla. In 1929, and one of his problems may well be that the world is not, and may never be, ready to accept a redneck jazz musician.  But that’s not the main problem.  He has been his own worst enemy, and drugs were the weapon.

            When he made his big splash in 1952 in Los Angeles with the revolutionary piano-less Gerry Mulligan quartet (“One day the piano player didn’t show up for rehearsal and we decided it was better without a piano.”), it seemed as if his combination of James Dean’s looks and Miles Davis’ talent would take him far.  He could even sing and on the basis of his first vocal album, “Chet Baker Sings,” he tied Nat King Cole for third place in a mid-‘50s DOWNBEAT Magazine poll.

            By the time he came to Europe in 1959, he was putting most of his assets into his veins.  After doing 14 months for drug offenses in jail in Lucca, Italy, where he learned fluent Italian, he went back to the United States in 1964.  In 1968, his teeth were knocked out in a San Francisco brawl.

            On methadone and welfare, he lived with his wife and three children at his mother’s house near San Jose, Calif.  Gradually, painfully, he learned to play again with dentures (“I use a product called Fast Teeth; it’s very sticky.”) and when critic John s, Wilson wrote that Baker had acquired “more range and assertiveness within the wistfully ruminative style with which he has always been associated.”

            Although the similarity is only in general texture, Baker has been accused of being a Miles Davis rerun.  Responding to this, he just smiles at the irrelevance and says, “I’m a Miles Davis fan.”  Some critics accuse the recording industry of having tried to push him as a sort of great white hope.

            Hopes were dashed by bad habits.  Now Baker records with just about anyone who asks him and plays with anyone who happens to be around in any joint that happens to be available.  They are usually small, but always packed.  He recently did six nights in New York’s Village Vanguard and a week at Fat Tuesday’s (with Ron Carter), both stints totally sold out.  He works whenever he wants but rarely in large halls.  He is hard to reach and does not always return calls.

  Sometimes he is hired just for sound rather than content – he plays mostly written music on the soundtrack of a recent Jean-Paul Belmondo film, for example.

  He lives in New York but travels a lot in Europe and wants to move back.  “People are nicer to each other here.  In New York it comes down to half the people pimping off the other half.  A lot of people hurting one another.”  His slow manner of speech and weak physical appearance give the impression that there is perhaps not room for much more hurt.

                                                         Feeling First
  To his fans, Baker becomes the measure by which to judge the honesty quotient in others.  He goes for feeling first, with just as much technique as he needs.  Other improvisers try to overwhelm the trumpet, screech down the walls of Jericho.  Baker builds a new wall; he needs it for protection.

            He always plays seated, folded into a question mark.  Between solos he sits, trumpet resting on his crossed legs, without moving.  Then ever so slowly, he brings the instrument up to his lips and those sweet, strangely innocent notes bloom again and it’s a relief, almost as though you’ve made it through one more winter.

            Chet Baker is summertime but the living isn’t easy.

 

(The editors would like to express their appreciation to Mike Zwerin and the International Herald tribune for allowing us to reprint this article from 12 Nov 1981.)