Back from the Dark Side

Chet Baker had $1.25 in his pocket when ,he came home from Europe last month. He scuffled around Manhattan for three weeks before he found his first night's work; he spent the time rounding up haircut money and finding out how few friends he had left. Ten years ago, when Chet was clean, neat and 24, he was the most popular trumpet player in jazz. Since then, he has traversed the dark side, and it has made him a different and deeper player than he was in those golden days. Now Chet Baker is down and out.

A Shot of Miles. Chet had been around some already when the jazz world first discovered him in 1953.

He had toured with a clarinetist named Freddy ("Schnicklefritz") Fischer, whose idea of jazz was to stand barefoot on a mat of falsies and tell dirty jokes; he played a spell with Charlie (Bird) Parker. But it was not until he joined a quartet led by Baritone Saxophonist Gerry Mulligan that the buffs tuned in to Chefs frail trumpet. His thin, clear tone became the very definition of "the cool school," and the restrained, softly swinging sound of the cool soon became the dominant voice in jazz.

His playing then was no more than a shot of Miles Davis in a pint of ginger ale, but Chet won all the popularity polls anyway. His recording of My Funny Valentine was among the first modern jazz records to become a best seller. On the strength of his brooding good looks, he even became a successful singer of quiet jazz ballads and a nervous actor in a well-named movie, Hell's Horizon. In 1955-56, he spent eight months playing Europe. Then he came home and found heroin.

Meditative Months. Chet diagnoses his fall as a self-destructive gesture prompted by guilt over the great young pianist Dick Twardzik, who was playing in Baker's quartet in Paris when he died of a heart attack. Whatever the cause, Baker was hooked. After a number of arrests, he left for Europe. "I have a medical problem," he announced, "and there they treat it like a medical problem." In Italy, they treated it by giving him 16 months in jail as an addict. He was later forced to abandon a car, his wardrobe and The Chet Baker Club in Milan. Switzerland, Britain and Germany also gave Baker the boot.

Free of his habit after two months in a Berlin clinic and another on the street, Baker claims his cure is permanent. He has said that before. But his music today sounds as if he brought something back from the dark side. He spent eight meditative months last year playing at a Paris bistro, and his horn acquired a firmer voice. He still has a relaxed, softly inflected tone, but his playing is more fluent and far more adventurous than it was when he was the trumpet's young king.

Last week, for his first New York audience in five years, Baker played at a Long Island nightclub called the Cork 'n Bib. He was-cursed with a sleepy drummer, an eccentric pianist, and the abiding worry that he may have to speak to Manhattan from the suburbs for some time to come: New York City is notoriously loath to permit ex-addicts the "cabaret card" they need to perform in its nightclubs. But the welcome Chet won was as enthusiastic as it was deserved. He looked pained when he played and downright wounded when he sang, but his music had a bright, aggressive gusto to it that made better jazz than the music his fans remembered. Having marinated his art in misery, he seemed at last on a better road than the one he lost.

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