Graeme Thomson

In Chet Baker’s albums you can hear America’s romantic self-image curdling

Doomed idealism and sublimated thuggery envelops even Baker’s most beautiful music

Beauty and the beast: Chet Baker in 1961 in Lucca. Credit: Archivio Cameraphoto Epoche / Getty Images

The thing to remember about Chet Baker, an old acquaintance says of the errant jazz musician in Deep In A Dream, James Gavin’s exemplary 2002 biography of Baker, is that ‘he can hurt people even after he’s dead’.

Baker could be dangerous but mostly he hurt himself. He died, squalidly, in 1988, and his music, at least, can still wound. In Baker’s oeuvre the ballads are deep blue and the up-tempo tunes are somehow tinted even darker.

The ‘jazz James Dean’, the ‘Prince of Cool’, Baker was extremely pretty in his younger days and made music that cast a similar enchantment. His trumpet style was lyrical, his singing voice light and seductive. He was also violent, disreputable and dishonest, a heroin addict for half his life and a bit of a bastard for most of it. It’s all there in his playing. Beneath the surface pep and languid glamour, not only Baker’s smoothed-out public persona but post-war America’s impossibly romanticised image of itself can be heard curdling.

A queasy air of doomed idealism and sublimated thuggery envelops even his most beautiful music

An unschooled Oklahoma boy who learned his trade in army bands, Baker made his way after moving to Los Angeles, serving an apprenticeship in the early 1950s with Charlie Parker and Gerry Mulligan. Aided by myth-minting portraits by photographer William Claxton, a few forgettable movies and his landmark 1954 album Chet Baker Sings, Baker was briefly a pin up, but something always seemed a little off. It would be fanciful to claim to be able to hear premonitions of his unceremonious end in his signature takes on ‘My Funny Valentine’ and ‘But Not For Me’, but a queasy air of doomed idealism and sublimated thuggery envelops even his most beautiful music.

Listen closely and its effortless lyricism seems not so effortless after all.

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