Pop & Jazz: As though he had wings Chet Baker's drug addiction destroyed his
looks and his life. Yet thro ugh it all, he created the most moving music.

He's Bjork's favourite singer. Johnny Depp, Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio
were all keen to portray him in a biopic, and it was reported recently that
DiCaprio has now signed for the role. He was perhaps the original
inspiration for "heroin chic", and survived as an addict for 30 years before
the less-than-chic lifestyle finally did him in, when he fell, or was
pushed, from an Amsterdam hotel window in 1988.

More than 10 years after his death at the age of 58, the jazz trumpeter and
vocalist Chet Baker's legend lives on, and as well as the film, a biography
is on the way. A recent CD box-set collection of Baker's first and most
affecting recordings will also help to ensure that his music continues to
attract new listeners whether the
Hollywood movie gets made or not, for it contains some of the most beautiful
music ever produced.

It's also some of the most melancholy, which is part and parcel of its
appeal. Professor Lewis Wolpert's recent definition of depression as a kind
of "malignant sadness" suits Chet Baker's art to a T. It's even possible to
see him as the forerunner for a whole genre of introspective,
clinically-depressed music that includes not only Leonard Cohen, but also
Nick Drake, Tim Buckley, Jackson Browne and a swathe of sad, self-regarding
singer-
songwriters. That Baker didn't write his own songs, but re-interpreted the
"standards" that have nourished jazz for most of the century, only makes the
appeal of his performances all the more timeless.

The planned film of Baker's life is to be based on his own "lost" memoir,
entitled, after a line from the song "Like Someone In Love" (which Bjork
covered on her Debut album as a notable act of homage), As Though I Had
Wings. The manuscript of this very slim volume, which was published in the
United States by St Martin's Press in 1997, and here by Indigo in 1998, was
discovered by the US magazine Spin, and then sent to Baker's widow, Carol,
who authenticated it.

Baker's alarmingly changeable handwriting records, in a very fragmentary
style, episodes from his life up to 1963, including reminiscences of his
time in London in 1962, when he was prescribed heroin and cocaine by the
society doctor Lady Isabella Frankau. Some of the details in Baker's story
seem a little unreliable, however: could anyone go through 100 grams of
cocaine in an afternoon's binge with just a couple of friends? Even for so
hardened an addict as Baker, this still seems rather excessive.

All the same, Baker did love his medicine with a passion that eclipsed the
regard he held for his many female companions, or even his equally numerous
sports cars. When an earnest reporter once asked him what was the main
problem with drugs, Baker replied: "The price." As he recalled for the
camera in Bruce Weber's fascinating documentary on his life, Let's Get
Lost, Baker's injection of choice was a "speedball", a cocktail of heroin
and cocaine that is notoriously unstable. Given his preferences, the wonder
is not that Baker died so relatively young, but that he continued to live so
long.

In Weber's film, not even Baker's mother has a good word to say about him,
but the combination of his less-is-more trumpet style, his seemingly artless
but ineffably moving singing voice, and the many unconsciously
homo-erotic photographs by William Claxton portraying a young Chet as the
James Dean of jazz, are sufficient to keep his flame alive for a good while yet.

Baker's addiction was, given his trade, almost institutional. For many
American jazz musicians in the Fifties, dependence on heroin wasn't just an
occupational hazard: it was both a rite of passage and badge of honour.
Although Baker was clean when he was chosen by Charlie Parker, at the
precocious age of 23, as his trumpeter for a West Coast tour, soon
afterwards he was supplementing his enjoyment of pot by frequent "chipping"
- - the
occasional, non-dependent, use of heroin. After he joined the famous
piano-less quartet of Gerry Mulligan - the group that was to make him a
star - Baker gradually followed Mulligan on the path to fully-fledged addiction.

You could almost say it came with the turf, and that the consequent
tragedies were therefore inevitable. In 1955, on Baker's first visit to
Europe with his own group, his pianist Dick Twardzik died from an overdose
as the rest of the band waited for him in a recording studio. Later, he
claimed to have had all of his teeth knocked out in a squabble with
dealers, something of a setback for a trumpet player.

The last 30 years of Baker's life were spent largely in Europe, especially
in Italy, where he appeared in films and was adopted as a star.
Criss-crossing borders in a series of Alfa Romeo sports cars in order to
retrieve his medicine, he perfected a kind of hip, improvised version of
life-on-the-run, playing gigs and making albums with local rhythm sections
in order to finance the next connection.

Incredibly, given the circumstances, almost everything he recorded is worth
hearing. However flawed the band, hackneyed the material, or stoned the
soloist, Baker's gift remained with him until he died. Even near the end of
his life, as in Bruce Weber's film, when the once-gorgeous beauty of his
face had become a contour map of wrinkled lines like a death-mask of WH
Auden, he still had something. In what was billed, posthumously, as his last
concert (and there are many supposed "last" recordings), on a date with a
Danish Big Band, he sings and plays two versions of "My Funny Valentine"
that are not only incredibly moving, but also technically superb.

However, the best of Chet still remains the early recordings that he made
for the Pacific Jazz label in Los Angeles in the mid-1950s, and which have
now been collected in the box-set released by EMI. Although Baker's singing
began as a commercial gimmick intended to cash in on the success of Nat
"King" Cole, and he remained a trumpeter who occasionally sang rather than
being a dedicated vocalist, his tremulous, vulnerable-sounding
voice helped to project a little boy lost quality that chimed with the times.

In an era when masculinity in America appeared to be in crisis, and when the
voices of artists as diverse as Johnny Ray, Frank Sinatra, and the
rockabilly singer Charlie Feathers all seemed to be choking with tears,
Chet's smacked-out, emotionally deadened, high tenor struck a powerful
chord. On "Someone to Watch Over Me", Chet is that little boy lost in the
wood; his creamy crooning of the corny sentiments of "My Buddy" make it into
an unintentional gay anthem, and when he sings "Let's Get Lost", the
listener is transported into a kind of dreamy, narcotic haze. Like heroin,
it's powerful stuff.

Despite having more albums in print than any other jazz artist, alive or
dead, Chet Baker has never been given the credit that he deserves by
hardcore jazz critics and fans, for whom almost all vocalists are disdained as
unreconstructed softies. It's a matter of sexual politics as much as music.
While he was alive, Baker's androgynous voice, recessive trumpet style and
dreamboat looks all seemed too feminine to count as "real" jazz for macho
commentators. Even today, his entry in the reference work, Jazz: the Rough
Guide, is derisively short for such an important figure.

The lack of respect also seems wilfully wrong-headed. In his prime, Baker
was a killer trumpeter whose lack of interest in creating impossibly high
notes or show-boating speed-of-light runs, was a mark of taste rather than
any kind of technical deficiency. He could also play a ballad better than
anyone else, with an ability to communicate the meaning of a care-worn tune
or lovelorn lyric that should count as among the highest achievements in
any art during this century. And then, almost as an afterthought, he sang.
Thirty years later, we are still crying in response, and rather enjoying the
experience.

The 3-CD Box-Set, 'Chet Baker: Romance' is out now at mid-price on EMI's
Pacific Jazz label