I’m fond of the word ‘raddled’: it’s almost an onomatopoeic way to describe Chet Baker’s shocking physical dilapidation that resulted from hard drugs and the jazz musician’s ruinous lifestyle. For a few years, before his 1950s poster-boy good looks had been indelibly defaced, he was even touted as the James Dean of jazz. In fact, both Chet Baker and Stan Getz, alumni of the so-called ‘cool school’ of American West Coast jazz, could have been poster boys for a ‘Don’t Do Drugs’ campaign. At least it didn’t show so much on the saxophonist’s face, although the effect of all those narcotics seems to have compromised his taste in shirts and ties.
Both Baker and Getz spent periods in a kind of self-imposed exile in Europe – which is where we find them in 1983, in Stockholm, the subject of a number from the same concert that I was very tempted to choose. In the end, on balance, I plumped for this version of a song that seems tailor-made for the trumpeter, if purely because… he plays and he sings! With Chesney Baker jr. you can’t really have one without the other. Although his trumpet playing won music press awards in the ‘50s when his star was in its ascendancy, it was often subsequently criticised for its lack of adventure and the slavish influence of early Miles Davis (before his trademark sound was forever pinched by the Harmon mute}. I wouldn’t go quite as far as one commentator who suggests that ‘the man was a trumpet’, but I do love his sound for its simplicity, its purity of tone and its air of bittersweet romance that complemented so beautifully his strange, haunting, androgynous voice. It was (once) the voice of an angel – but an angel on the verge of a fall. The (shamefully) anonymous writer of the fine sleeve notes for my boxed set of his American studio recordings from 1952-to 1955, the year when he took himself off to Europe and embarked on the road to ruin, puts it beautifully: ‘Chet Baker’s sound is the sigh of total despair.’
The despair in question was both that of others, especially women, who had any regular dealings with him, and his own. An apparent death wish within Baker jr., the son of a feckless, violent father, seemed to prevent him from curbing a promiscuous appetite for women, narcotics and the demon drink despite frequent reminders of the consequences. Photographer Bruce Weber’s beautiful elegiac documentary Let’s Get Lost paints an unforgettable portrait of someone as charming and as exasperating as he was downright mean. It’s hard to equate the plaintive beauty of the soundtrack with the stories told about him, but then isn’t that often the way with life’s most driven artists? It was ever thus. Jonathan Richman audaciously rhymed ‘Pablo Picasso’ and ‘asshole’ in the Modern Lovers’ quirky song about the Spanish Lothario. Baker managed royally to piss off fellow junky Gerry Mulligan, in whose ground-breaking piano-less quartet he first really rose to fame, and early appearances with Stan Getz were coloured by the mutual jealousy of two paranoid druggies. Having garnered acclaim and controversy in equal measure, and as if fleeing his demons, the so-called 'white Miles' set sail for Europe in 1955 at the age of 26. Like many an American jazz musician, Paris was Chet's first stop. He made a series of recordings there for Eddie Barclay’s eponymous label, but even though he continued to play and record it was downhill all the way. Based back and forth between Europe and the U.S., he was jailed twice, expelled from Germany and the U.K. for drugs-related reasons and beaten up so badly that he lost sufficient teeth to ruin his embouchure. After a spell on welfare and various comebacks, he fell to his death from his Amsterdam hotel in 1988. Or was he pushed? Hard drugs were found in his room, but his death was ruled an accident and remains a mystery – as does the conundrum of why so many talented artists end up destroying themselves.
So here are the two old adversaries back together again, performing a number that Baker would replay in a moving concert appearance at Ronnie Scott’s three years later in the company of Van Morrison and Elvis Costello. In Stockholm, support comes in the form of Getz’s regular drummer Victor Lewis, his occasional pianist Jim McNeely and celebrated bass player, George Mraz. Given Baker’s signature love of melody and mellow music, he often played the flugelhorn in later years, but here he reverts to the trumpet and a style that stayed simple and clear throughout the decades. He opens and closes the performance by singing verses of the song, the first time embellished by some fairly perfunctory scatting. While his voice is still fairly unique, it is by then as raddled by drugs and cigarettes as his facial features and redolent of a distinct world-weariness. Compare and contrast… his voice here with the truly extraordinary voice of this beautifully restored footage from nearly 20 years earlier of Baker singing Jules Styne and Sammy Cahn’s ‘Time After Time’. It’s like comparing Joni Mitchell’s original rendition of ‘Both Sides Now’ with the version she recorded on her year 2000 album of the same name – or Marianne Faithfull’s ‘As Time Goes By’ with just about anything on, say, Broken English. Cigarette packets should also carry a health warning for vocalists.
In many ways, the saxophone sound of Stan Getz is the ideal foil for Baker’s mellow trumpet. Getz fleshes out the middle of the song with a typically clean, clear-as-a-bell solo, a sound that initially owed more to the mellow school of Lester Young than to the reedier, raspier school of Coleman Hawkins. It was fashioned in Woody Herman’s ‘Four Brothers’ saxophone section, where his famous solo on ‘Early Autumn’ served notice to the world of what was to come. By the time he eventually earned the nickname of ‘The Sound’, it had acquired slightly more of a metallic heft: the evolution of a featherweight into a middleweight, perhaps. Anyway, it's high time to watch the two skin-deep romantics in tandem…
Like Chet Baker, Stan Getz was a highly flawed human being, but his career followed a somewhat different trajectory. Despite the early acclaim for his work in big bands, the 1950s were not the happiest decade for the saxophonist. He was arrested and jailed for a robbery that could pay for his heroin habit, and his first marriage – to a fellow addict – ended with three displaced children and a divorce. Disenchanted with the American jazz scene, he moved to Copenhagen in 1958 for three years. However, his career really took off soon after his return: with the bossa nova craze that he helped to popularise with albums like Jazz Samba and Getz/Gilberto. Although it proved a passing phase, he went on to record some of his finest albums – often in the company of pianist Kenny Barron – towards the end of his career. Meanwhile, however, his addictions re-surfaced, there were a couple of illegal firearm incidents and his second marriage disintegrated. No wonder his fellow Woody Herman ‘Brother’, Zoot Sims, famously described Getz as ‘a nice bunch of guys’. He died in 1991, maybe unsurprisingly, of liver cancer. Damningly, when rumours circulated about a heart operation, his former collaborator, trombonist Bob Brookmeyer, questioned whether Getz had a heart to operate on.
It’s a funny thing: how often artists, musicians and film-makers whose work one reveres turn out to be shites. Here are two more: two troubled souls who purveyed some of the most romantic jazz in the history of the genre.
