A glorious moment in Chet Baker's twilight

By John Vinocur
First Published: February 22, 2008

Twenty years ago this spring, when Chet Baker fell to his death from the window of an Amsterdam hotel room, an afterlife began that, in terms of the sordid and dismal, almost matched the real thing.

Recordings came out sounding like they were lifted from $29.95 Dictaphones, and sold, flub on top of half-hearted solo, as souvenirs of Chet Baker's decline, authenticated splinters straight from the coffin of the junkie trumpeter.

The macabre jostled the maudlin. Because the police ruled Baker's death an accident, but without a definitive explanation of his fall, a Dutch television producer brought a team of clairvoyants to the hotel room to feel out the real story. Their eyes shut, hands to foreheads, the world beyond beamed them messages of violence, a struggle, a woman.

If you liked Baker's music, you could laugh or you could throw up.

This was the grim excess, rather than his talent, that almost always dominated the story about Chet.

As a young player of really exceptional melodic gifts, it was surely his moody handsomeness and softly sleek singing voice that made him famous. Years later, when his playing deepened, and became remarkable for its cloudbursts of lyricism and emotionality, what stuck was his drug addict's imploded face, his jail time, his slipping dentures, his edge-of-destruction wandering among what remained of Europe's jazz clubs.

Twenty years on since his death on May 13, 1988, at 58, you could say stop and enough. This biweekly space, which is about enjoyment in full roar (or melancholy's pleasures) wants to make the case that there is a Chet Baker double CD and DVD brilliant enough to muffle the tales of the freak show.

The album, with a quartet, is called "Chet Baker in Tokyo," and the DVD, containing two additional tracks, "Chet Baker: The Complete Tokyo Concert."

The material was recorded live in June 1987, about 11 months before his death.

The performances are remarkable because they take in, at the highest level, everything that people said Chet could do - play ballads with almost painful, poetic eloquence - and what many said he could not: blow hard and tough enough so as to make the trumpet sound its essence.

That meant, using a phrase from Art Farmer, a contemporary fairly dismissive of Baker, "you're supposed to play it like you're calling out the troops."

On "Four," a Miles Davis tune, or "Arborway," by the Brazilian musician Rique Pantoja, Baker, moving effortlessly in and out of double-time, plays runs of increasing intensity and originality that portray him as a gutty hard-bopper.

On Elvis Costello's "Almost Blue," Baker captures its yearning by holding tight to the melody almost as if he were reading sheet music. With his sound and pace, the track distills what Charlie Parker said of "that little white cat" who blew "sweet, gentle, yet direct and honest."

On "My Funny Valentine," Baker's trademark tune, and the best track, the emotion and velvet is there in the brief vocal, but in contrast, so are chorus after chorus of tough, in-your-face trumpeting.

It's not calling out the troops, but jazz in its great power. It is Baker's two voices superimposed. It is as if Chet, pushing aside the years of wreckage, said: Here's the musician I am.

The Tokyo Concert has fascinated and moved me the same way that Miles Davis, on the way down, was able to on "Time After Time," or Stan Getz, not long before his death, did on his "Serenity" and "Anniversary" albums with Kenny Barron.

They are performances in musical remission. They are performances of such quality and sincerity that they have a sense of contentment and finality.

For Baker, who never defeated (or really fought) his addiction, how did this happen?

I asked both Harold Danko, Chet's piano player on the session and now chairman of the jazz studies department at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, and Hein van de Geyn, the fine Dutch musician who was Baker's bassist at the time.

Danko, who played superb solos and backing, said it had something to do with the band's feeling as a unit and Baker's confidence and comfort in it, rather than the usual pickup rhythm sections of local unknowns Baker often fronted.

This was a million miles, Danko said, from the recording sessions where a producer would order up a sing-and-play album, somebody would listen to a Sinatra record, and then write down the words for Chet to sing 10 minutes later. Or a record date with two 50-minute sides on order where Chet would check his watch and then stop in the middle of chorus because he had counted off 103.

The fact was also - no getting away from it - that during the three weeks Baker toured Japan he was on methadone, out of respect both for Japan's extremely rigorous narcotics laws and the certain difficulty of obtaining heroin.

I watched part of the concert DVD with Van de Geyn at his place on a canal in Dordrecht, near Rotterdam. As Baker played long fluent lines, and kept going and going, Van de Geyn grinned and stretched his arms wide.

The music was immense.

"Japan was something completely different," he said. "He had color in his face. He actually ate. He drank a little Cognac. He was talkative. It was the best I ever saw him."

For Danko, Baker found himself, for once, not playing to people secretly waiting for him to screw up. "It was something fresh. Something flowed all the time."

No social worker's moral inserts itself here. A wonderful, mostly miserable, legendary musician simply got it together for an ultimate but not terribly well known moment that is alive and shining.

Baker, of course, was fatally true to himself. At the airport before leaving Tokyo, as the story goes, Peter Huijts, the quartet's road manager, raved about the tour and what it promised. Chet replied he couldn't wait "to get back to Paris and" - beware of the euphemism - "get messed up."

I asked Van de Geyn about that. "Sounds absolutely right," he said.

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