Chet Baker

Biography Early years Baker was born December 23, 1929, in Yale, Oklahoma, and raised in a musical household. Baker said that owing to the Great Depression, his father, though talented, had to quit as a musician and take a regular job. In 1940, when Baker was 10, his family relocated to Glendale, California.

Baker began his musical career singing in a church choir. His father, a fan of Jack Teagarden, gave him a trombone, before switching to the trumpet at the age of 13 when the trombone proved to be too large for him. His mother said that he had begun to memorize tunes on the radio before he was given an instrument. After "falling in love" with the trumpet, he improved noticeably in two weeks. Peers called Baker a natural musician to whom playing came effortlessly. He dropped out during his second year to re-enlist. He became a member of the Sixth Army Band at the Presidio in San Francisco, He was discharged from the Army in 1951 and proceeded to pursue a career in music.

Career Baker (right) and Stan Getz in 1983. The two collaborated for over 25 years.Baker performed with Vido Musso and Stan Getz before being chosen by Charlie Parker for a series of West Coast engagements.

In 1952, Baker joined the Gerry Mulligan Quartet and attracted considerable attention. Rather than playing identical melody lines in unison like Parker and Gillespie, Baker and Mulligan complemented each other with counterpoint and anticipating what the other would play next. "My Funny Valentine," with a solo by Baker, became a hit and was associated with Baker for the rest of his career. With the quartet, Baker was a regular performer at Los Angeles jazz clubs such as The Haig and the Tiffany Club. While there, he also recorded a rare accompaniment for another vocalist: Caterina Valente playing guitar and singing "I'll Remember April" and "Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye".

One month into the tour, pianist Dick Twardzik died of a heroin overdose. Despite this, Baker continued the tour, employing local pianists. However, author Jeroen de Valk and pianist Russ Freeman said that Baker started heroin in the early 1950s. Freeman was Baker's musical director after Baker left the Mulligan quartet. Sometimes Baker pawned his instruments to buy drugs.

In late 1959, Baker returned to Europe, recording in Italy what became known as the Milano sessions with arranger and conductor Ezio Leoni (Len Mercer) and his orchestra. Baker appeared as himself in the musicarello film, Howlers in the Dock. Tabloids reviled Baker for his drug habit and reckless womanizing and infidelity. This forced Leoni to communicate through the prison warden to coordinate arrangements with Baker as they prepared for recording.

Baker spent nearly a year and a half in jail, and was later arrested in West Germany and expelled to Switzerland, then France, later moving to England in August 1962. He appeared as himself in the film Stolen Hours, which was released in 1963. He was deported from England to France, because of a drug offense, in March 1963. He lived in Paris and performed there and in Spain over the next year, but after being arrested again, he was deported to the U.S. from Germany. He settled in Milpitas, California, performing in San Francisco and San Jose between jail terms for prescription fraud.

Baker's first release in 1962, after his Italian prison sentence, was Chet Is Back! for RCA, balancing ballads with energetic bop. That same year, Baker collaborated with Ennio Morricone in Rome for a series of orchestral pop records, recording four original songs that he had composed during his prison sentence: "Chetty's Lullaby", "So che ti perderò", "Motivo su raggio di luna", and "Il mio domani". Throughout most of the 1960s, Baker played flugelhorn, and recorded music that could be classified as West Coast jazz.

Baker fell behind on jazz's latest innovations. after performing at The Trident in Sausalito. In the film Let's Get Lost, Baker said an acquaintance attempted to rob him, but backed off, only to return the next night with a group of men who chased him. He entered a car and was surrounded. Instead of rescuing him, the people inside the car pushed him back out onto the street, where the chase continued. He received cuts and several of his teeth were knocked out. This incident has been often misdated or otherwise said to be exaggerated partly because of his own unreliable testimony on the matter. Biographer Jeroen de Valk notes that Baker was still musically active after 1966, performing and occasionally recording. In April 1968, he provided flugelhorn for Bud Shank's Magical Mystery album.

From that point on, Baker recorded a prolific amount of material. In 1979, Baker made 11 records; the following year, he made 10. They were released by small jazz labels such as Circle, SteepleChase, and Sandra.

During the early 1980s, Baker began to associate himself with musicians with whom he meshed well, such as guitarist Philip Catherine, bassist Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen, and pianist Michel Graillier.

Later in his career, Baker preferred to play in ensembles without drums. He detested playing at loud venues to inattentive audiences. At gigs in lively French and American clubs, he would sometimes wait for over half an hour for noise to die down before beginning to perform, and he would pause his performance if he thought the audience was too noisy.

In 1983, British singer Elvis Costello, a longtime fan of Baker, hired the trumpeter to play a solo on his song "Shipbuilding" for the album Punch the Clock. The song exposed Baker's music to a new audience. Later, Baker often featured Costello's song "Almost Blue" (in turn inspired by Baker's version of "The Thrill Is Gone") in his concert sets.

In 1985, five years after meeting Brazilian pianist/composer Rique Pantoja in a club in Paris, Baker was invited by Pantoja to perform at the Free Jazz Festival in Rio de Janeiro. While in Brazil, Baker recorded trumpet and vocals for their duet album Rique Pantoja & Chet Baker, as well as Lizzy Mercier Descloux's album, One for the Soul.

In 1986, Chet Baker: Live at Ronnie Scott's London presented Baker in an intimate stage performance filmed with Elvis Costello and Van Morrison as he performed a set of standards and classics, including "Just Friends", "My Ideal", and "Shifting Down". Augmenting the music, Baker spoke one-on-one with friend and colleague Costello about his childhood, career, and struggle with drugs.

Baker recorded the live album Chet Baker in Tokyo with his quartet featuring pianist Harold Danko, bassist Hein Van de Geyn, and drummer . Released eleven months before his death, John Vinocur named it "a glorious moment in Chet Baker's twilight."

In the winter of 1986, at a club in New York City, Baker met fashion photographer Bruce Weber. Weber convinced him to do a photo shoot for what was originally going to be only a three-minute film. When Baker started opening up to Weber, Weber convinced him to work on a longer film about his life. Filming began in January 1987. The finished film, Let's Get Lost, is a highly acclaimed and stylized documentary that explores Baker's talent and charm, the glamour of his youth now withered into a derelict state, and his turbulent, sensational romantic and family life. It was released in September 1988, four months after his death that May. Two accompanying soundtrack albums, one compiling highlights from the height of his fame and one featuring new material that Baker recorded during the filming of the documentary, were released in 1989. In November 2025, Swimming by Moonlight, a double album of previously unreleased songs, music, and spoken dialogue and live concert recordings from Let's Get Lost was compiled and released by Bruce Weber and John Leftwich.

Death Early on May 13, 1988, Baker was found dead on the street below his room in Hotel Prins Hendrik, Amsterdam, with serious wounds to his head, apparently having fallen from the second-story window. Heroin and cocaine were found in his room and in his body. No evidence of a struggle was found, and the death was ruled an accident. According to another account, he inadvertently locked himself out of his room and fell while attempting to cross from the balcony of the vacant room adjacent to his own. A plaque was placed outside the hotel in his memory.

Baker is buried at the Inglewood Park Cemetery in Inglewood, California, next to his father.

Personal life Chet Baker's personal life was tumultuous, partly owing to a decades-long drug addiction which began in the 1950s and a nomadic lifestyle caused by touring. In 1980, he referred to his life as "1/3 in a car, 1/3 sleeping, and 1/3 playing music."

In a scandal heavily scrutinized by Italian tabloids, Halema was sent to prison for smuggling jetrium from Germany to Italy for her husband, though she claimed that she was unaware that she was breaking the law. To his wife's humiliation, by the time of the trial, Baker had already started publicly dating Carol Jackson, a showgirl from Surrey. After being detained for six months, Chet dedicated his 1985 album Diane to Vavra, covering the familiar jazz standard "Diane." For a time, Vavra took refuge at a women's shelter due to Baker's behavior.

Baker enjoyed driving and sports cars. What writing exists is scant and idiosyncratic, and focuses mainly on his time in the army and his drug use.

Compositions

Baker's notable compositions include "Chetty's Lullaby", "Freeway", "Early Morning Mood", "Two a Day", "So che ti perderò" ("I Know I Will Lose You"), "Il mio domani" ("My Tomorrow"), "Motivo su raggio di luna" ("Contemplate on a Moonbeam"), "The Route", "Skidaddlin'", "New Morning Blues" (with Duke Jordan), "Blue Gilles", "Dessert", "Anticipated Blues", "Blues for a Reason", "We Know It's Love", and "Looking Good Tonight".

Legacy

Baker was photographed by William Claxton for his book Young Chet: The Young Chet Baker. An Academy Award-nominated 1988 documentary about Baker, Let's Get Lost, portrays him as a cultural icon of the 1950s while juxtaposing this with his later image as a drug addict. The film, directed by fashion photographer Bruce Weber, was shot in black-and-white, and includes a series of interviews with friends, family (including his three children by third wife Carol Baker), musical associates, and female friends, interspersed with footage from Baker's earlier life, and interviews with Baker in his last years. In Chet Baker, His Life and Music, author Jeroen de Valk and others criticize the film for presenting Baker as a "washed-up" musician in his later years. The film was shot during the first half of 1987, the year before Baker's death, ending in Cannes in May 1987, just prior to Baker's June 14, 1987, Tokyo concert, released on Chet Baker in Tokyo. It premiered four months after Baker's death.

Time after Time: The Chet Baker Project, written by playwright James O'Reilly, toured Canada in 2001.

Jeroen de Valk has written a biography of Baker; Chet Baker: His Life and Music is the English translation. Other biographies of him include James Gavin's Deep in a Dream—The Long Night of Chet Baker, and Matthew Ruddick's Funny Valentine. Baker's "lost memoirs" are available in the book As Though I Had Wings, which includes an introduction by Carol Baker. Steve Wall plays Baker in the 2018 film My Foolish Heart.

American singer/songwriter David Wilcox included the tender biographical portrait Chet Baker's Unsung Swan Song on his 1991 album Home Again. Vocalist Luciana Souza recorded The Book of Chet in 2012 as a tribute. Brazilian jazz pianist Eliane Elias dedicated her 2013 album I Thought About You to Chet Baker.

Australian musician Nick Murphy chose "Chet Faker" as his stage name as a tribute to Baker. Murphy said, "I listened to a lot of jazz and I was a big fan of ... the way he sang, when he moved into mainstream singing. He had this really fragile vocal style—this really, broken, close-up, and intimate style. The name is kind of just an ode to Chet Baker and the mood of music he used to play—something I would like to at least pay homage to in my own music."

In 2023, Rolling Stone ranked Baker at number 116 on its list of the 200 Greatest Singers of All Time.

Awards and honours Big Band and Jazz Hall of Fame induction, 1987 DownBeat magazine Jazz Hall of Fame, 1989 Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame, 1991 Grammy Hall of Fame Award for Chet Baker Sings (1956), inducted 2001 Chet Baker Day proclaimed by Oklahoma Governor Brad Henry and the Oklahoma House of Representatives, 2005 Chet Baker Jazz Festival in his honor in Yale, Oklahoma, October 10, 2015 Forlì Jazz Festival in honor of Chet Baker (30 years after his death), in Forlì, Italy, May 2–19, 2018

Discography

Filmography (1955) Hell's Horizon, by Tom Gries: actor (1959) Audace colpo dei soliti ignoti, by Nanni Loy: music (1960) Howlers in the Dock, by Lucio Fulci: actor (1963) Ore rubate ["stolen hours"], by Daniel Petrie: music (1963) Tromba Fredda, by Enzo Nasso: actor and music (1963) Le concerto de la peur, by José Bénazéraf: music (1964) L'enfer dans la peau, by José Bénazéraf: music (1964) Nudi per vivere, by Elio Petri, Giuliano Montaldo and Giulio Questi: music (1988) Let's Get Lost, by Bruce Weber: music