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Mini Biography

Chet Baker started his career in the late forties. He become famous with the Gerry Mulligan Quartet in 1952. His solo in "My funny valentine" is a classic of the west coast jazz in the fifties. When Mulligan was arrested in 1953, Chet let the group until 1955, when he went to Europe. He also sang on many records. In Europe he recorded with many musicians in different countries. His career was interrupted many times for personal problems with drugs and he was arrested many times for his addiction. In 1974 he come back to music after three years in obscurity, playing in a concert in Carnegie Hall with his old friend, Gerry Mulligan. After this he started a "new career", but his problems with drugs were continuous. His Death today is a mystery, one possibilty is suicide but another says he was killed by trafficants in Amsterdam, Holland.

Mini Biography

Born Chesney Henry Baker, Jr. on 23 December 1929, in Yale, Oklahoma, he was the son of Vera and Chesney H. Baker, Sr. The family moved to California in about 1939. A couple of years later, around the time that the U.S. entered World War II, young Chet began playing the horn. Initially his father had given him a trombone, but it was too big for the boy, so that instrument was replaced with a trumpet. He listened to trumpet players on the radio, learning by ear to play like them, but he also played with his high school band. His high school music teacher is said to have told Baker he would never make it professionally.

Baker joined the U.S. Army in 1946 and was sent to Berlin, Germany, where he performed in a military band. While in the army, he listened to jazz on the Armed Forces radio Network and later said that his playing was transformed at that time by listening to trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie. When Baker returned to civilian life, he briefly attended El Camino College in California. He married Charlaine in 1950, but the marriage ended without producing any children. In 1952, he auditioned for jazz legend Charlie Parker in Los Angeles and played in his Band for a while. Later that same year, he joined the Gerry Mulligan Quartet and quickly became a star. Soon he was leading his own group. He recorded a great deal during the fifties-often singing in a seductive voice that complemented his good looks-as well as blowing the trumpet. He acted in a low budget War movie entitled "Hell's Horizon" in 1955. Many believe that, if not for his drug habit and its concomitant legal problems, he might have become a movie star. As it was, he only appeared in a few films, including a couple in Italy.

In 1956, he married Halema, a beautiful Pakistani woman who appears in some of the famous photographs of Baker taken by William Claxton. They had a son, Chesney Aftab Baker, in 1957. ("Aftab" is more or less equivalent to "Junior" in Halema's homeland.) In 1959, Baker went off to play a gig and left Halema and Chesney Aftab with American sculptor Peter Broome in Paris. The marriage May have continued for a while afterward, but Broome seems to have taken over parenting Chesney Aftab, who goes by the surname "Broome."

Baker met an English actress, Carol, in Italy around 1961. Married in 1964 and (although separated during the seventies) never divorced, they had two sons and a daughter, Dean, Paul, and Melissa (a.k.a. "Missy"). In later years, Baker was involved with a number of women, perhaps most lengthily, Diane Vavre and singer Ruth young.

Baker's personal life is often allowed to overshadow his professional one. He was extremely talented but self-involved, needy, and manipulative. His drug addiction ruined his reputation in the United States but earned him a degree of sympathy among many Europeans. This sympathy was not shared, however, by Europe's law enforcement community which had him banned from several countries during the sixties, only allowing him to return in the late seventies.

The greatest crisis, among so many in his life, was the physical assault by hoodlums in the late sixties that destroyed his teeth. After years of struggling to learn to blow the horn with dentures, Baker was finally able play on the same bill with his old colleague Gerry Mulligan in 1974.

There are differences of opinion about the ups and downs in the quality of his work, but everyone agrees that the fifties - especially the early part of the decade - were his heyday. The general assessment is that little of what he recorded as the sixties progressed was particularly good; however, while some think that he never recovered, many aficionados maintain that he actually improved during his last fourteen years of life when he came back after the loss of his teeth. He made a recording in Germany two weeks before he died.

On 13 May 1988, at approximately 3 a.m., Baker fell out of a hotel room window in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. His Death appears to have been accidental. Heroine was found in his blood stream, and both heroine and cocaine were found in his room, which was locked from the inside. His body was sent back to California and buried next to his father. He was survived by his mother, Vera, wife, Carol, and four children.

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Trivia

Jazz trumpeter

Inducted into the big band and Jazz Hall of Fame in 1987.

His father, Chesney Baker, Sr., played guitar in country & western bands.

Though it was said that he couldn't read music, he was actually semi-literate; he had a rudimentary ability to read music, but because he was so good at playing by ear, he never used or improved his music-reading ability.

Biography in: "The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives". Volume Two, 1986-1990, pages 53-55. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1999.

Chet Baker

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