No one has ever claimed the music business is fair, least of all the old school jazz musicians who seemed to attract rather more in the way of life's challenges than the rest of us. These creatures of the night lead complicated lives, and it is only in recent times with the advent of the university educated jazz musician, many of whom look for all the world like a graduate in Business Studies (and often play like one), that jazz concerts have begun to start and finish on time.
In the past, jazz seemed to be populated with "characters", survivors of a lifetime spent in the twilight world of urban America's night spots whose life experiences were reflected in the individuality of their music. Yet of all these larger than life figures, none came more romantically packaged than trumpeter Chet Baker.
An autodidact who had a great talent for playing jazz, Baker's career began to phenomenal acclaim in the early 1950s when he joined the Gerry Mulligan Quartet. He was voted "Best Trumpet Player" in jazz magazine reader polls, his records sold well and he played to standing-room-only crowds. He seemed destined for a remarkable career. But his gift had come too easily and was abused. While most jazz musicians start at the bottom and struggle against the odds to reach to the top, Baker started at the top and struggled to reach rock bottom. He almost succeeded. Although he lasted longer than most heroin- smashed musicians, for a long while it seemed as if nothing he did to himself, or what the police of several countries did to him, could still the lyricism of his playing.
His good looks, his little-boy-lost trumpet sound and his androgynous vocal ballads provided him with a passport through life, and his style, simultaneously moving and unsettling, was a musical confessional that was as honest as his life was corrupt. A taker and manipulator, particularly of women, his fecklessness simply added to his mystique. James Gavin's new biography charts this unusual career in unrelenting detail, an unvarying theme of playing gigs, scoring with drugs and with women interspersed with an occasional interlude in prison.
Gavin is not a jazz writer and so, like Laurence Bergreen's 1997 Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant Life, there are a few boners that come with someone not entirely familiar with the territory. Even so, the weight of Gavin's research is presented coherently and the book is well written, refraining from any pseudo-psychoanalytical temptations that a life as flawed as Baker's presents. It was a career that took flight after he left the Army, where he had begun playing the trumpet in earnest, and was paralleled by a career in substance abuse that saw his first bust in December 1952. After nine more offences he was sentenced to a six month sentence in New York's Penitentiary in 1959.
As the drug busts mount, so does Gavin's impatience with his subject. You almost sense him falling out of love with Baker. His research draws on previous biographer Jeroen de Valk's Chet Baker to unravel the mystery of Baker's tragic end (did he fall or was he pushed?) and he ultimately succeeds in demystifying a legend. But it is at the expense of Baker's music, the one thing that made him unique. A New Yorker, he subscribes to the view that "Jazz out of the East was heavy and black and out of the West light and white."
This view is bound up in American political correctness that is too complex to explore here, but it places Gavin in something of a dichotomy since the subject of his biography was not only white but one of the leading West Coast musicians of his day. He squares the circle by remaining at arms length about Baker's music which, at his best, such as the 1953-4 quartet recordings for Pacific Jazz with pianist Russ Freeman, offers some explanation of why Charlie Parker rated him highly. For a guide to Baker's music we must turn to de Valk's biography.
Even so, Deep In A Dream provides a fascinating insight into perhaps the most conspicuous victim in jazz of that well known euphemism, "personal problems". The much-photographed boyish good looks of the 1950s, when he was mentioned in the same breath as James Dean, had, in the final years of his life, disappeared, to be replaced by a deeply lined face that reflected the ravages of his lifestyle. He once quipped to fellow trumpeter Jack Sheldon that they were laugh lines. "Nothing in life is that funny," responded Sheldon.
Stuart Nicholson is an author and journalist
Deep In A Dream: The Long Night of Chet Baker. By James Gavin, Chatto & Windus, £20 sterling