Mourning for a Master Trumpeter

Some leave-takings are more mournful than others.

The sad, quick news stories reported that Chet Baker, who had been one of the pre-eminent trumpet voices of West Coast American jazz in the ‘50s, had died one day last week in a fall from a second-story hotel window in Amsterdam.

Maybe it was a third floor window. European buildings number their floors starting above the ground level; their first is our second floor and so on. But even if that had been the case, it wouldn’t have taken much of the gloom out of a melancholy and anticlimactic last chapter.

Baker was only 58, although at times his life must have seemed to him several hard lifetimes long. Despite his insistences that he was clean, it now appears that he was never able to get the 35-pound monkey off his back. (Nelson Algren’s image for narcotics addiction still carries a harrowing aptness.) Heroin was found in Baker’s room, police say.

There was a jazz Lost Generation, too, that I suppose began with Sidney Bechet (although it can be argued that Bechet found himself and his career in Paris). But I’m thinking of the post-World War II Lost Generation of American jazzmen who found in Europe, in Scandinavia particularly, both the reverent audiences in quantities not available at home and a relatively safe haven for the private demons.

The power of Bertrand Tavernier’s “ ‘Round Midnight” was that it caught so accurately so much of the expatriate musicians’ lives--the audiences, the sense, never quite destroyed, of being aliens in a friendly but alien land, the surrender of all the other amenities to the dope, the booze and the music itself. “I’m tired of everything but the music,” Dexter Gordon says with a terrible weariness in the movie. It’s easy to hear Baker saying the same thing.

In the early 1960s when I worked in London, Baker was playing gigs around town, his drug troubles already widely known. Even then he was insisting he’d got himself off the stuff. He was living in a western suburb called Staines and one of his relatives contacted me and suggested I do a story.

I was eager to because, as an avid but failed cornet player, I admired his music a lot, especially because he worked mostly in the middle register where I could at least conceive of playing the notes.

Baker and I talked on the phone a few times, chatting about Los Angeles and arranging meetings that never came off, setting visits in Staines or in town that were in the end postponed, with promises of call-backs never received.

It was all too clear that he was still in harness to the monkey. I was pained for him and disappointed for myself. I had wanted to meet a man who, it seemed to me, took trumpet style from where it had been and carried it into the era of the flatted fifth and the unexpected progressions but without losing the lyrical and propulsive qualities that made jazz jazz for me.

At his best I imagined that Baker was playing much the way Beiderbecke might have evolved if he hadn’t been defeated early by drug’s twin monkey alcohol.

The irony of Chet Baker’s playing was--as I heard it on records anyway--that there never was any of that desperate searching after the new, that pushing at the limits of the instrument or the language of music, that reaching for the unachievable, that I think marks the work of some of the revered but drug-haunted soloists of bop and beyond.

Baker’s solos were light, bright, imaginative, quick and mellow. It may well be, as Leonard Feather and other critics have suggested, that in the later, live performances you could detect the decline of ideas and execution that the years of abuse had caused. Yet on the records, especially some early sides with Gerry Mulligan, which I have worn to scratchiness, there is only a youthful, boppy joie de vivre .

Part of the sadness I feel at the death of Chet Baker (who in his early days looked like Young James Dean With a Horn), is that metaphorically he and his contemporaries played the score for the Los Angeles I first knew.

If John Steinbeck and Raymond Chandler, in particular, had given me a literary introduction to the West Coast, its music--or the music I responded to--was played by Baker and his generation, Bud Shank, Shorty Rogers, Frank Rossolino, Laurindo Almeida, Gerry Mulligan and a bandstand’s worth of others, some still blowing, some silent.

The music was its own kind of fusion: new ideas that grew out of the musical past but did not rebel against the best it had to offer. In its go-ahead optimism, its mobility and its congeniality, it reflected for me the excitement and the sense of promise of Southern California itself. So I thought as I heard the records in the gray East and so it proved to be.

It was wonderful, and I couldn’t help feeling last week that those days were a long way from a hotel in Amsterdam.