Chet Baker

His legendary status owes as much to his troubled life story as it does his music.

Born on the 23rd December 1929 in Yale, Oklahoma, Baker was surrounded by music. His father was a guitarist and introduced him to the sounds of brass when he gave him a trombone to play. This soon proved too large for him and Baker switched to trumpet. Baker's musical education began at Glendale Junior High school, but he left at age 16 to join the army. It was then he was posted to Berlin and took up playing with the 298th army band until 1948 when he left to study theory and harmony at El Camino college in Los Angeles.

Although he dropped out of college during his second year, Baker looked set for a promising career. In 1952 he gigged with Charlie Parker before becoming a part of the Gerry Mulligan Quartet; a band which achieved great popularity on the jazz scene.

It wasn't long however, before narcotics began to take their hold. Mulligan was jailed on drugs charges and, although Baker went on to form a hit quartet with Russ Freeman, by 1960 he was in jail for heroine possession. The decade that followed marked a down-turn. After spending a year in an Italian prison, Baker was later expelled from England and West Germany for a host of drugs-related offences.

In the late sixties he allegedly got into a fight whilst trying to buy drugs. His lips were cut and his teeth, already rotten by years of drug abuse, sustained further damage, thus ruining his embouchure. There are some, however, who claim that this story is pure fabrication; and that his impairment was nothing more than the inevitable consequence of long-term substance addiction. The sixties saw Baker record a number of albums and make a a variety of appearances of inconsistent quality. Record companies were hesitant about signing him long-term as he had developed a reputation for being unreliable. His addiction to heroine forced him to take whatever came his way and, consequently, his career entered a somewhat bleak and turbulent period.

In spite of this, Chet Baker did make something of a comeback in the late sixties and throughout the seventies. After training to play with dentures and learning to control his addiction with methadone, his re-emergence culminated with a reunion concert with Gerry Mulligan at the prestigious Carnegie Hall in November 1974.

Sadly though, he was never to realise his full potential. Baker remained an addict right up until his premature and preventable death in 1988. He was found dead after falling from a two-storey window at his hotel in Amsterdam. Both heroine and cocaine were found in his system. It's impossible to know whether Chet Baker's greatness was due to or in spite of his tumultuous life experiences. What is certain, however, is that the jazz world lost an irreplaceable player under truly tragic circumstances.

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