He was the white trumpeter managed to grab a place between Miles Davis and Charlie Parker. He was also a leader of the beatnik movement in America. His life beneath the stage was marked by ups and downs with colleagues from the world of jazz and its problems with drugs and alcohol. A unique voice, a sound gloomy, off a gray jazz archetype broke with established before.
His hunched figure on the sidewalk, lost in the shadows and silences of lights and voices. The face compressed into a thousand wrinkles, toes almost motionless on the trumpet and sound, the unmistakable sound full of nuances, of Chet Baker. That figure captivating on stage was just a shadow of the young born December 23, 1929 in Oklahoma, low profile and a face to what James Dean, which immediately drew the attention of Charlie Parker for his style as a trumpeter and his delicate voice as a singer.
But throughout his life, Baker never had music as a priority; always mixed the intermittence of drugs, women and daily visits to police stations. A few years ago, the former wife of Baker published some letters where Chet try something like an account of his life titled As if on wings; kind of memories that are lost in a incredible vulgarity, limited to their problems and pleasures with syringes and veins that he "disappeared" his dark time in the army and the many women who came to his car. But little, very little music, actually. In these autobiographical notes, Chet himself acknowledges his admiration for Parker, but not so much for its quality as a musician, but Bird had resistance to taking drugs of any kind "without any effect will occur."
In early May 1988, days after a presentation in Hannover Funkhaus, body worn Chet Baker crashing to the asphalt of a Dutch village after falling from a second floor. Never knew the truth about the death of Baker. There was talk of suicide, an argument with a dealer for an old debt and wanting a slip back to his room at the hotel where he had forgotten his trumpet. By then, Baker's face was transmuted into a map full of wrinkles, jaw paying the price of a beating favored by smugglers who fell all the teeth in 1964. Famous and recognized, Baker tried to then avoid the maze of drugs and find peace working in a service station for a few months until the owner of the place took pity and paid the arrangement of the teeth. That man "owner of a small voice that women tend to like" as (un) qualified jazzy critic Leonard Feather.
