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"Touch of Your Lips" w/ Doug Raney & Niels Pederson SteepleChase 1122

	A&M 726 Ron Carter, Tony Wms, Hubert Laws, Paul Desmond, Kenny Barron, et al

World Pacific 1222

Chet, Bob Neel, Carson Smith, Russ Freeman

Chet Baker (Yale, OK 12/23/29)
This biography contains rumors, second hand stories
and actual observations by the Director of Cecilia
this Week.

He was born Chesney H. Baker in Yale Oklahoma. He became a singer and trumpet player. His family moved to California in 1940. And he began musical training at Glendale High School and played trumpet in the marching and dance bands. He was drafted in 1946 and served in 298th Army Band in Berlin, Germany. He was discharged in 1948. At El Camino College in Los Angeles he studied theory and harmony. In 1950 he re-enlisted in order to join the Presidio Army Band in San Francisco. While in San Francisco he was able to sit in nightly at Bop City, as was Andre Previn at the same time. After his discharge he had various gigs on the West Coast including dates with Charlie Parker. He joined Gerry Mulligan in the mid-50s and gained national prominence. In 1953 he left Mulligan to form his own group. During the time with Mulligan and later with his own group he recorded with Shelly Mann, Jack Montrose, Russ Freeman. Bob Brookmeyer, Bud Shank, Carson Smith and others. He appeared on NBC's "Today" with Dave Garroway, "Tonight" with Steve Allen and on radio, NBC's "Monitor" and CBS's "Woolworth Hour." He was featured in a prominent role for Columbia Motion Pictures, as a trumpet player in "Hell's Horizon." He spent September of 1955 to April 1956 touring the British Isles and Europe.

The highlight of Chet's career came in 1956 as he teamed up with Art Pepper,
the two boyish looking bad boys of jazz as Ted Gioia describes them in his West Coast Jazz: Modern Jazz in California 1945 to 1960. (Published in 1992 and recently issued in paperback.) Pepper had just been released from Terminal Island. He had discovered heroine in Chicago while on tour with the Kenton Band, "I said, 'This is it. This is the only answer for me. If this is what it takes, then this is what I'm going to do. Whatever dues I have to pay ... " And even after Terminal Island he continued his uninterrupted ingestion of smack.

The live sessions with Pepper were, "pretty without being saccharine or shallow, and their solos could burn without ever losing their melodic integrity. Their music could be appreciated on the surface, where it glistened with all the mellow beauty that was "West Coast Jazz" according to the pundits, but those who wanted to probe deeper could hear a raw honesty that was anything but superficial." -Ted Gioia.

The recorded sessions left disappointment. The musicians Richie Kamuca, tenor; Leroy Vinnegar, bass; Pete Jolly, piano; and Stan Levy, drums are some the best associated with so-called "West Coast Jazz" but with Pepper deeply hooked and each musician following his own path nothing magically cohesive comes from the first session. The second session has some of the same problems according to Ted and this writer. Here is Curtis Counce, bass; Lawrence Marable, drums; Phil Urso, tenor; and Carl Perkins, piano. Too many (even if they were some of the best) musicians and wrong arrangements (even if it was Jimmy Heath). By the way Ted's book is a page turner. As you can tell there is plenty on Art Pepper.

In 1965 he recorded five LPs for Prestige. They were released the following two years| They were made with George Coleman, tenor and pianist Kirk Lightsey. Lightly was Dexter Gordon's pianist in 1979.

In 1957 Chet toured the U.S. with the Birdland All Stars. After that he toured Scandinavia and Italy and settled in Italy for a period between 1959 and 1960, when he joined pianist Romano Mussolini son the Italian dictator. Through the late 50s and early 60s he won jazz poles in Germany, England and the U.S.

With the rise of Rock & Roll, now no longer "children's music," interest in jazz faded. The mid-60s were tough times for jazz musicians: alto player John Handy was washing cars. In the early 1970's Chet was pumping gas on the West Coast to make a living. When, in 1973, Shelly' s Manne Hole closed in Los Angeles those that couldn't make it in the studios or in Europe were generally out of work. Chet found work back in Europe. He came to New York from time to time and finally seemed ready to stay by 1977. He gigged and recorded with some of the best, Ron Carter, Richie Beirach, Hubert Lawes Tony Williams and Kenny Barron and even the younger generation, Michael Brecker, John Scofield, Don Sebesky and Ralph MacDonald.

June 1979 found Chet still making European tours. He was working Copengen's Club Montmartre when Nils Winther got him into a studio with Doug Raney, son of guitarist, Jimmy Raney and Denmark's national treasure bassist Niels-Henning Orsted Pederson. The LP is called The Touch of Your Lips on SteepleChase 1122.

He came home briefly. Close to home: Tulsa, Oklahoma. Said he thought he'd move back. (So did Barney Kessel. He only stayed a few years.) Chet stayed about two weeks during Christmas 1985 and played two public gigs. The first was played with a local big band. His conception was quite similar to the 1953 - 56 Prestige LPs of Miles, thoughtful, hesitating, sparse. The next week, Christmas Eve at the Nine of Cups with alto and rhythm it could have been (it wasn't) Bud Shank or it might have been Art Pepper. Chet was inspired. He was perfection. He was walking on egg shells. He sounded as good as he did in his youth. A few years later he was dead. Gerry Mulligan had lent him the money to pay off his drug dealers. He hadn't. They threw him from a building in Amsterdam.

Jazz Innovators

Cecilia This Week
Bill Munger, Director

http://cecilia-this-week.com
gene_debs2000@yahoo.com

Established May 1, 2000

Chet Baker was a primary exponent of the West Coast school of cool jazz in the early and mid-'50s. As a trumpeter, he had a generally restrained, intimate playing style and he attracted attention beyond jazz for his photogenic looks and singing. But his career was marred by drug addiction. Baker's father, Chesney Henry Baker,Sr., was a guitarist who was forced to turn to other work during the Depression; his mother, Vera (Moser) Baker, worked in a perfumery. The family moved from Oklahoma to Glendale, CA, in 1940. As a child, Baker sang at amateur competitions and in a church choir. Before his adolescence, his father brought home a trombone for him, then replaced it with a trumpet when the larger instrument proved too much for him. He had his first formal training in music at Glendale Junior High School, but would play largely by ear for the rest of his life. In 1946, when he was only 16 years old, he dropped out of high school and his parents signed papers allowing him to enlist in the army; he was sent to Berlin, Germany, where he played in the 298th Army Band. After his discharge in 1948, he enrolled at El Camino College in Los Angeles, where he studied theory and harmony while playing in jazz clubs, but he quit college in the middle of his second year. He re-enlisted in the army in 1950 and became a member of the Sixth Army Band at the Presidio in San Francisco. But he also began sitting in at clubs in the city and he finally obtained a second discharge to become a professional jazz musician. Baker initially played in Vido Musso's band, then with Stan Getz. (The first recording featuring Baker is a performance of "Out of Nowhere" that comes from a tape of a jam session made on March 24, 1952, and was released on the Fresh Sound Records LP Live at the Trade Winds.) His break came quickly, when, in the spring of 1952, he was chosen at an audition to play a series of West Coast dates with Charlie Parker, making his debut with the famed saxophonist at the Tiffany Club in Los Angeles on May 29, 1952. That summer, he began playing in the Gerry Mulligan Quartet, a group featuring only baritone sax, trumpet, bass, and drums -- no piano -- that attracted attention during an engagement at the Haig nightclub and through recordings on the newly formed Pacific Jazz Records (later known as World Pacific Records), beginning with the 10" LP Gerry Mulligan Quartet, which featured Baker's famous rendition of "My Funny Valentine." The Gerry Mulligan Quartet lasted for less than a year, folding when its leader went to jail on a drug charge in June 1953. Baker went solo, forming his own quartet, which initially featured Russ Freeman on piano, Red Mitchell on bass, and Bobby White on drums, and making his first recording as leader for Pacific Jazz on July 24, 1953. Baker was hailed by fans and critics and he won a number of polls in the next few years. In 1954, Pacific Jazz released Chet Baker Sings, an album that increased his popularity but alienated traditional jazz fans; he would continue to sing for the rest of his career. Acknowledging his chiseled good looks, nearby Hollywood came calling and he made his acting debut in the film Hell's Horizon, released in the fall of 1955. But he declined an offer of a studio contract and toured Europe from September 1955 to April 1956. When he returned to the U.S., he formed a quintet that featured saxophonist Phil Urso and pianist Bobby Timmons. Contrary to his reputation for relaxed, laid-back playing, Baker turned to more of a bop style with this group, which recorded the album Chet Baker & Crew for Pacific Jazz in July 1956. Baker toured the U.S. in February 1957 with the Birdland All-Stars and took a group to Europe later that year. He returned to Europe to stay in 1959, settling in Italy, where he acted in the film Urlatori Alla Sbarra. Hollywood, meanwhile, had not entirely given up on him, at least as a source of inspiration, and in 1960, a fictionalized film biography of his life, All the Fine Young Cannibals, appeared with Robert Wagner in the starring role of Chad Bixby. Baker had become addicted to heroin in the 1950s and had been incarcerated briefly on several occasions, but his drug habit only began to interfere with his career significantly in the 1960s. He was arrested in Italy in the summer of 1960 and spent almost a year and a half in jail. He celebrated his release by recording Chet Is Back! for RCA in February 1962. (It has since been reissued as The Italian Sessions and as Somewhere Over the Rainbow.) Later in the year, he was arrested in West Germany and expelled to Switzerland, then France, later moving to England in August 1962 to appear as himself in the film The Stolen Hours, which was released in 1963. He was deported from England to France because of a drug offense in March 1963. He lived in Paris and performed there and in Spain over the next year, but after being arrested again in West Germany, he was deported back to the U.S. He returned to America after five years in Europe on March 3, 1964, and played primarily in New York and Los Angeles during the mid-'60s, having switched temporarily from trumpet to flügelhorn. In the summer of 1966, he suffered a severe beating in San Francisco that was related to his drug addiction. The incident is usually misdated and frequently exaggerated in accounts of his life, often due to his own unreliable testimony. It is said, for example, that all his teeth were knocked out, which is not the case, though one tooth was broken and the general deterioration of his teeth led to his being fitted with dentures in the late '60s, forcing him to retrain his embouchure. The beating was not the cause of the decline in his career during this period, but it is emblematic of that decline. By the end of the '60s, he was recording and performing only infrequently and he stopped playing completely in the early '70s. Regaining some control over his life by taking methadone to control his heroin addiction (though he remained an addict), Baker eventually mounted a comeback that culminated in a prominent New York club engagement in November 1973 and a reunion concert with Gerry Mulligan at Carnegie Hall in November 1974 that was recorded and released by Epic Records. By the mid-'70s, Baker was able to return to Europe and he spent the rest of his life performing there primarily, with occasional trips to Japan and periods back in the U.S., though he had no permanent residence. He attracted the attention of rock musicians, with whom he occasionally performed, for example adding trumpet to Elvis Costello's recording of his anti-Falklands War song "Shipbuilding" in 1983. In 1987, photographer and filmmaker Bruce Weber undertook a documentary film about Baker. The following year, Baker died in a fall from a hotel window in Amsterdam after taking heroin and cocaine. Weber's film, Let's Get Lost, premiered in September 1988 to critical acclaim and earned an Academy Award nomination. In 1997, Baker's unfinished autobiography was published under the title As Though I Had Wings: The Lost Memoir and the book was optioned by Miramax for a film adaptation. Baker's drug addiction caused him to lead a disorganized and peripatetic life, his constant need for cash requiring him to accept many ill-advised recording offers, while his undependability prevented him from making long-term commitments to record labels. As a result, his discography is extensive and wildly uneven.
- William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide