Chet Baker

Chet Baker looked like a movie star and played the trumpet like a man thinking out loud. His tone was soft, intimate, almost shy, and his lines unfolded slowly, melodically, with none of bebop’s fireworks. In the early 1950s, fronting the pianoless quartet of baritone player Gerry Mulligan and then leading his own groups, he became the face of West Coast cool.

Then he started to sing, and a second legend formed. His voice was thin, boyish, almost without vibrato – technically slight, emotionally enormous. “My Funny Valentine” in his fragile delivery became a signature, and a generation of listeners fell for the vulnerability of it.

The good looks and easy gift masked a hard road. Heroin addiction governed most of his adult life, costing him gigs, freedom, and eventually his front teeth, beaten out in a drug-related assault that forced him to relearn the trumpet from scratch. He did relearn it, which says something about the stubbornness under the softness.

He spent his later years mostly in Europe, playing beautifully on good nights, barely functioning on bad ones, the boyish face gone gaunt and lined. He died in 1988, falling from an Amsterdam hotel window. The recordings keep the other Chet alive – young, gifted, breaking your heart with a half-whispered ballad.