In the summer of 1966, after a gig at the Trident club in Sausalito, across the bay from San Francisco, Chet Baker was attacked and beaten by a group of men. Shortly afterwards the British weekly Melody Maker reported that his attackers had broken off part of one of his teeth.
That was bad enough for a trumpet player. But Baker’s teeth were already rotten after years of heroin. Over the next two years they gave out, and by early 1969 his teeth had been pulled and he was wearing dentures.
When he first tried to play with them, he couldn’t get a sound out of the trumpet.
A star in free fall
Thirteen years earlier, he had been one of the most famous young musicians in jazz. In 1953, readers of DownBeat voted him their favourite trumpeter, ahead of Dizzy Gillespie. He had played in Gerry Mulligan‘s pianoless quartet, and Chet Baker Sings made him a singer as well.
Heroin took most of it away. In 1960 he was arrested in Lucca, Italy, for forging prescriptions, and spent around sixteen months in prison. He was then expelled from West Germany and from Britain, and in 1964 he was deported back to the United States.
The night at the Trident
Exactly what happened in Sausalito is hard to pin down, because the main source is Baker, and his version kept changing.
In one telling, five young men sent by a dealer he owed money to were waiting for him. In another, given in the documentary Let’s Get Lost, a would-be robber came back the next night with friends. In James Gavin’s biography, the likeliest explanation is that he had cheated a dealer, and Gavin notes that Baker once called the beating a “payoff”.
What is clear is that the attack didn’t destroy his mouth in one night. The damage was already done. Baker later said his teeth were so bad from drugs, and so painful, that he decided to have them all pulled. His old producer at Pacific Jazz, Dick Bock, paid for the dentures.
Not quite silent
The story is often told as if Baker vanished in 1966. In fact he kept recording for a while. In 1969 he made Albert’s House, a set of tunes written by the comedian and songwriter Steve Allen to help him out, and in 1970 he recorded Blood, Chet and Tears for Verve.
But from around 1968 or 1969 until 1973, he stopped playing in public. He was on a methadone programme as a condition of his release after a prescription-forgery arrest, and he and his family lived on welfare and food stamps at his mother’s house in San Jose.
By his own account he also pumped gas, up to sixteen hours a day, for almost two years. Like a lot of Baker’s stories, the details vary: in a 1980 Italian TV interview it was three years.
Learning to blow again
For a trumpeter, the embouchure (the way the lips meet and buzz against the mouthpiece) is everything. It depends on muscles built up over years and on the teeth behind the lips holding everything in place. Change the teeth and the whole set-up has to be rebuilt, almost as if learning a new instrument.
Baker described the process in a 1980s interview with Musician magazine. After the first failure he gave up, then tried again, searching for a new embouchure. “It took me two years,” he said.
His Dutch biographer Jeroen de Valk says that meant pure technical exercises, which Baker hated. For most of his life, playing had come to him easily.
A phone call from Dizzy
In 1973, on his way to New York, Baker stopped at a club in Denver to hear Dizzy Gillespie and told him what he was trying to do. According to Baker, Gillespie called a club in New York from his hotel and got him a two-week booking.
In July 1973 Baker played the Half Note in New York, his first gig in the city in years. By the summer of 1974 he had a contract with Creed Taylor’s CTI Records.
She Was Too Good to Me, recorded at Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in 1974, was the proof that he was back. Don Sebesky’s arrangements put strings and flutes around him, Ron Carter is on bass, and Paul Desmond adds alto saxophone to “Autumn Leaves”. Baker sings on several tracks, and his trumpet sounds unhurried and sure. It earns its place among the great comeback albums in jazz.
In November 1974 he joined Gerry Mulligan for a reunion concert at Carnegie Hall, which CTI also released.
The late sound
In the late 1970s Baker moved to Europe, and he recorded constantly, often for small labels. In 1979 alone he made 11 records.
The playing from those years is not the bright, quick trumpet of the 1950s. He used fewer notes, a softer attack and mostly the middle of the horn, and his singing voice dropped to little more than a murmur. Some listeners prefer it to anything he recorded in the 1950s.
The best example may be the concert he gave in Tokyo on 14 June 1987, with Harold Danko on piano, Hein van de Geyn on bass and John Engels on drums. His version of Elvis Costello’s “Almost Blue” takes nearly eight minutes at a very slow tempo, and much of its power is in the space he leaves between phrases.
That recording came out in September 1988 as Memories. Baker never heard the release. He was found dead in the early hours of 13 May 1988 on the pavement beneath his hotel window in Amsterdam, aged 58.
His last months, and the film made about him, are covered in our article on Let’s Get Lost. For the whole career, start at our Chet Baker page.
