The King of Cool

When I was in high school, there was a small group of us who liked jazz. I don’t recall how we discovered it in the Nashville, Tenn., of the mid-1950s, but in the sounds of the Count Basie Orchestra, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Clifford Brown and Max Roach we heard statements about living that were far different from those in the banjos and steel guitars of the country music for which Nashville was famous.

Bebop had the exhilaration of an improvisatory order being imposed on a chaos that could be controlled only to the extent and only as long as one plunged into it. It was one cultural response to the giddiness of the postwar economic expansion accompanied by the Cold War against a communist enemy and the ever-present possibility of a nuclear war that could end human life on the planet.

Another and almost opposite cultural response was found in the “cool” sound of what came to be known as West Coast jazz. Where Parker and Gillespie would leave one breathless with the number of notes they could play on one breath, “cool” jazz made silence an integral part of the music and showed that one held note was as expressive as the 10 Parker or Gillespie would have played in the same time.

“Cool” jazz was both more controlled and more melodic than bebop, attributes that made it more accessible and appealing to white audiences. For a brief few years in the ‘50s, no one exemplified cool jazz more than the white trumpeter and vocalist Chet Baker. The biography “Deep in a Dream” by James Gavin and Bill Moody’s mystery, “Looking for Chet Baker,” describe vividly the paradoxical existence of a man who created art of ineffable beauty while simultaneously living a sordid and self-destructive life.

Born in 1929 in Oklahoma, Baker moved with his parents to the Los Angeles area in 1940. His father, a failed musician, bought him his first instrument, a trombone, and later a trumpet when Baker found the trombone too big to handle. Because music came as naturally to the young Baker as breathing, he could scarcely read a score and was never known to practice. He only had to hear a melody once to be able to play it back flawlessly. Baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, with whom Baker teamed in 1952 to make some of his best recordings, describes him in “Deep in a Dream” as an idiot savant, “a kind of freak talent. I’ve never been around anybody who had a quicker relationship between his ears and his fingers.” Ruth Young, one of Baker’s many abused lovers, went further: “You gotta realize, Chet was not that intelligent. He did not know what he was doing.... He just did it.”

Baker’s reputation grew when, at 23, he played with Parker on the great alto saxophonist’s West Coast tour. In 1953 and 1955, Baker was voted the top trumpet player by the readers of Down Beat, the jazz magazine. Black musicians derided him as the “Great White Hope” and wondered if Baker really believed he was a better musician than Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Gillespie and Brown, all of whom finished behind him in the polls.

But Baker’s popularity was not only the result of the lyric sweetness of his trumpet playing and the depth of feeling he conveyed. His image on album covers was the quintessence of “cool.” He looked like an androgynous puer aeternus, the eternal youth who belonged on a Keatsian Grecian urn. Baker was perhaps the first jazz musician who was conscious of his image, so much so that he seldom opened his mouth to reveal the missing front tooth knocked out when he was a child.

Gavin says that beneath that cool exterior, however, was an insecure man. Because playing jazz came so easily, perhaps he did not value his talent or think he deserved the acclaim. He admitted to an Italian magazine that playing in public terrified him and only drugs made him feel in control. “The public stops being an enemy, a hostile bunch of adversaries ready to strike me down with their whistles. I don’t have anyone in front of me anymore. I am alone with my trumpet and my music.”

But perhaps there is no deeper reason for Baker’s almost lifelong drug addiction than what he wrote in his brief memoir, “As Though I Had Wings.” After thanking the person who introduced him to marijuana, he added, “I enjoyed heroin very much.” Heroin use was an integral part of the world of jazz, bebop and cool. But although many musicians, such as Davis and John Coltrane, struggled to free themselves from the drug, Baker was among those musicians for whom playing jazz was merely the means to make enough money for the next fix. In Europe, where Baker lived most of the time from 1955 until his death in Amsterdam in 1988, many doctors were willing to keep him supplied with narcotics. Mulligan explained Baker’s popularity in Europe as “a case of worshipping the self-destructive artist .... It’s a Christ-like image of self-immolation.” By the end of his life, he was injecting drugs into the arteries of his neck because a lifetime of needles had destroyed the veins everywhere else on his body.

Gavin does not romanticize Baker’s life and, although his portrait of the trumpet player is balanced, one closes the book in agreement with singer Lesley Mitchell, who told Gavin that Baker “had been a junkie for so long that his soul was gone. The only time you could perceive it was in his playing. There was such a duality there, because he was a coldhearted, almost demonic figure. It was very hard to understand where the beautiful music came from.”

The author has also compiled a CD, “Deep in a Dream: The Ultimate Chet Baker Collection” to be released by Blue Note as a musical companion to the book. Consisting of 19 tracks, it is worth it for the opening track of Baker playing “My Funny Valentine,” a song he did much to popularize. However, fewer ballads, less of Baker’s breathy, toneless singing, and more up-tempo numbers would have made for a better compilation.

Baker died under mysterious circumstances. His body was found lying in the street outside an Amsterdam hotel, his head bashed in. Some believe he got high and slipped or jumped from his hotel room, but the one window in the room was only raised 15 inches. Others think he was killed by drug dealers to whom he owed money.

The mystery of Baker’s death is the subject of Bill Moody’s “Looking for Chet Baker,” the fifth in his wonderful mystery series featuring Evan Horne, a jazz pianist who gets embroiled in unraveling mysteries, generally involving the lives and deaths of jazz musicians.

Horne is in Europe for a couple of gigs when his close friend, Ace Buffington, a professor of English at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, seeks his help in researching a book on Baker, but Horne turns him down.

However, Horne’s Amsterdam promoter has gotten him a room at the same hotel in which Baker was staying at the time of his death, the same hotel from which Buffington has mysteriously disappeared, leaving behind his leather portfolio containing his research materials. Concerned that something has happened to his friend, Horne begins looking for him. To find Buffington, he must retrace Baker’s steps during the last days of his life and try to solve the mystery of his death.

A characteristic of the modern mystery novel is the intimate look it provides to readers of a world they might never see. As a professional jazz drummer, Moody knows jazz clubs and musicians, and he is adept at evoking place, whether it is Los Angeles, San Francisco or Amsterdam. He is wonderful at melding the facts of musicians’ lives with fiction, and here he vividly re-creates the sad and painful last days of Baker.

“Looking for Chet Baker” is the best in the series. The writing is fluid, the plotting is tight and there is a wealth of interesting minor characters. The book also has a lovely introduction by Russ Freeman, who played with Baker for many years, and closes with a selected discography of Baker recordings; Gavin’s biography contains as complete a discography as one will find. Moody’s and Gavin’s books skillfully re-create the jazz subculture and pay tribute to a man who could not apply his extraordinary musical intelligence to the rest of his life.