That voice: a tenor, so soft and naive. I didn’t know whether a man or a woman sang “My Funny Valentine” until I saw William F. Claxton’s photos of Chet Baker, trumpet in hand, jutting jaw, pompadour, full lips, high cheekbones, heavy brow. Sexy bastard. I guarantee Chris Isaak and Morrissey have at least one photo of Chet taped up in their locker.
Another photographer, Bruce Weber, made a kind of documentary, Let’s Get Lost, a eulogy in high-contrast black and white, as the jazz trumpeter/singer haunted Europe and California in the late ’80s. Chet floated then—floated like that voice, really—in a fog of cigarette smoke and methadone, recall so ragged he nearly couldn’t remember the name of a son by his first of three wives.
But that love was a long time ago, when he played with Stan Getz and Charlie Parker—imagine, this Okie trumpeting with those guys and epitomizing West Coast Cool. Chet latched onto the expat jazz scene in Paris of the late ’50s and early ’60s. Drugs dragged him down further and he spent a year in an Italian jail for possession. Back in the U.S. in the ’60s, a group of toughs jumped him and knocked out his teeth, or so he says. He never let the truth intrude if it didn’t need to.
In Santa Monica, he’s 60 but looks 80, and in the tightly cropped shots of him seated glassy eyed in the back seat of a speeding convertible at night, he resembles a more fiercely weather-beaten Kris Kristofferson. One or two anonymous pretty women accompany him wherever he goes. He horseplays on a beach and rides in bumper cars with some young fans. They’re giddy to be in his presence although they don’t much know him beyond the fact he used to be famous for something. One asks if his trumpeting sounded anything like that of Miles Davis. Not to anyone with two ears, Chet says.
A few months after the release of Let’s Get Lost, he fell from a hotel room window in Amsterdam and died. According to Weber’s postscript, Dutch police on the scene initially reported they’d discovered the body of a 30-year-old musician.