GREAT MUSIC, GRUESOME HABITS

Anyone romantic enough to suppose that beauty is ennobling should sit down
with "Deep in a Dream" (Knopf, 430 pages, $26.95), James Gavin's eagerly
awaited biography of the jazz trumpeter Chet Baker.

From time to time, musicians with a twisted sense of humor play the
macabre game of choosing an all-star band composed solely of players who
are notorious for their self-destructive behavior; invariably, they pick
Baker as solo trumpet. According to Mr. Gavin, he was mad, bad and
dangerous to know -- yet he played and sang ballads like "My Funny
Valentine" and "She Was Too Good to Me" with a fragile tenderness and
delicacy that could wring tears from the toughest cynic.

When not actually making music, Baker spent most of his adult life either
getting high or scrounging drug money from friends, lovers and relatives.
"All the attempts through the years to get him off heroin -- he didn't want
to get off heroin," said the baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, in whose
quartet Baker first won fame a half-century ago.

Nobody knows for certain whether Baker fell, jumped or was pushed out of an
Amsterdam hotel window in 1988, though it is widely thought that an unpaid
dope dealer did him in. Similarly, many musicians believe that the persons
unknown who attacked Baker in San Francisco in 1966, smashing his mouth so
badly that his upper teeth had to be replaced with dentures, were paying
him back for much the same reason.

In addition to his being a dishonest wastrel, Baker was, as Mr. Gavin
suggests, a kind of idiot savant, unable to read even the simplest of lead
sheets -- he did it all by ear -- and uninterested in learning anything
about music beyond the basic knowledge needed to improvise technically
undemanding trumpet solos with a bare minimum of high notes.

"Maybe this rule stuff is all right for those who have no ear or creative
ability," he once told an interviewer. (So much for Louis Armstrong, who
could both read and write music, like the overwhelming majority of great
jazz musicians.) Yet at his not infrequent best, Baker could play jazz that
was both piercingly beautiful and in no way aesthetically naive. And while
his whispery singing was more controversial, inspiring praise and contempt
in equal measure, many listeners, this one included, find his tiny,
feather-light tenor voice to be almost unbearably poignant.

A half-educated hick from Oklahoma, Baker was all but incapable of
introspection and rarely had anything insightful to say about his work. Nor
is Mr. Gavin a trained musician, meaning that he can shed no analytic light
on Baker's playing. Of necessity, then, "Deep in a Dream" deals primarily
with the sordid life. Unlike most musical biographies written by
nonmusicians, however, this one works -- partly because Baker's life was so
appallingly eventful but mostly because Mr. Gavin has done his job with
scrupulous care, separating fact from rumor and facing up to the full
implications of Baker's despicable conduct.

Unlike Bruce Weber, the fashion photographer turned filmmaker whose 1989
documentary "Let's Get Lost" treated the handsome trumpeter as a
glamorously decadent object of desire, James Gavin has no illusions about
Chet Baker. Though he understands the perverse appeal of "the beautiful,
self-destructive rebel who lived on the run, avoiding responsibility,
rejecting convention," he treats Baker not as a pretty pin-up boy but as a
serious artist worthy of intelligent consideration.

The only thing wrong with "Deep in a Dream" is that Mr. Gavin is
occasionally taken in by the reverse racism of certain critics and
musicians who never managed to forgive Baker, who was white, for briefly
being more popular than Miles Davis, who was black.

Mr. Gavin says some misleading things about the alleged
over-intellectualism of West Coast jazz, the predominantly white style of
the 1950s with which Baker is identified. ("Jazzmen throughout L.A. tried
to make music with the same glossy perfection -- to show how smart they
were, how cool.") He also puts forward a few misguided ideas about Gerry
Mulligan, one of the most influential figures in postwar jazz. ("For him,
it seemed, music was about notes, not feeling.") Well-informed jazz
scholars, by contrast, no longer feel obliged to make excuses for Mulligan,
Baker or West Coast jazz in general -- quite the contrary -- and it is
disappointing that an otherwise thoughtful biographer should fail to follow
their lead.

Actually, there is one other thing wrong with Mr. Gavin's book, though it
is not his fault. The problem is that Baker's life, though interesting,
wasn't exactly edifying. He played music, shot dope and slept with foolish
women, and that's about the size of it. Reading about him is like watching
a 10-car pile-up on an ice-covered road: It's sickening, but you can't turn
away. In Baker's case, you keep trying to guess just how low he can
possibly sink, and he keeps surprising you. It wasn't until the last day of
his life that he finally hit bottom, cracking open his skull and bringing
to a long-deferred close a career that by all rights should have ended
years before.

Mr. Gavin tells us everything we could want to know about Baker, save for
the one unknowable thing that matters most. Where did all that beauty come
from? It is the highest tribute to Chet Baker's haunted art that after
reading "Deep in a Dream" we should still wonder.

Mr. Teachout, the music critic of Commentary, is the author of "The
Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken," forthcoming from HarperCollins.