by Dave Hickey
By abandoning the prevailing rhetoric of spontaneity for a thoughtful kind of subversive premeditation. Baker’s improvisational strategy spoke less of fashionable attitudes than it did of a new way of doing things, a new ethos of living into the world—one that, a few years later, would characterize the works of Edward Ruscha, another Oklahoma boy gone California. It was a reversal of priorities. It devalued the quest for instantaneous epiphany in favor of an ongoing temporal discourse. Looking back on it now, I know I learned to write prose (or how I wanted prose to sound) by listening to the long, lapidary lines on that record. Because that is what Baker is always doing: transforming the tight, forme fixé of pop music into this sensuous, elegant, paratactic prose—sotto voce—full of silences and recursive turns.
I also learned about the ideological imperatives of criticism by trying to figure out why most jazz critics failed to share my enthusiasm for Baker’s music. From a distance, of course, I can see that those critics (Leonard Feather, Nat Hentoff, et. al.) afforded me my first exposure to “high modernism” with its cult of “originality” and masculine “self expression.” Thus, Baker’s playing was constantly derided as being derivative of Miles Davis, despite the fact that it wasn’t. They were both, admittedly, children of Clifford Brown, whose manner they purged of vibrato and invested with breath—with the bluesy sexiness of saxophone. But Miles, being the classic abstract-expressionist horn player, “developed” in aggressive ways that a modernist could understand, apparently leaving Baker “behind.” Thus, the liner notes of Baker’s albums were always protesting that he could, when he wanted to, play “hard” and “tough.” Because “butch” was important, then. This also explains, if it doesn’t excuse, why a critic like Feather would call Baker’s singing “weak voiced, but appealing to feminine audiences.” (Yikes! Girl stuff! Say no more!)
With a little historical distance, it’s clear that what Chet Baker did with Chet Baker Sings is not unlike what the Ramones did with their first album: simply turned every contemporary expectation on its head. As Warhol would say, just a few years later, he “got it exactly wrong.” Most importantly, Baker reintroduced the text into jazz music as a pivot of expression. He sang those great sentimental lyrics by Larry Hart, Johnny Mercer, and Ira Gershwin (previously considered suitable only for female vocalists), but he sang them at one remove, cool and plain, acknowledging the sentiment without buying into it—glancing at it over his shoulder, as through the window of a door closed behind him—so that what we get is not the feeling but the memory of it. In contemporary terms, Baker does not so much “perform” these songs as “simulate” them—appropriating their complete content to his own intentions while leaving the song itself with its formal integrity unmolested. To this end (unlike most jazz renditions at that time, which tend to appropriate, at most, the melodic release), Baker plays the whole song, including the verses, in sequence, never abandoning the contrapuntal presence of the melody in his improvisation.
So, while most jazz albums of the period include, at best, five long instrumentals, Chet Baker Sings is made up of eighteen two-and-one-half-minute cuts—played and sung without any of the popular signifiers of “jazz expression.” There is no vibrato, no “beautiful” singing and no “strong” statement. There are no extended solos, no range dynamics, no volume dynamics, no tempo dynamics, no expressive timbre shifts, no suppression of extant melodics, no harmonic meandering, no virtuoso high-speed scales, and, in fact, very few sixteenth notes—none of the stuff, in short, that told jazz critics of the time what the player was doing and how “good” he was at it. All you got was the song—dispassionately articulated with lots of spaces—swinging to be sure, but played mid-tempo and mid-range, shot through with melodic and rhythmic nuance that defied notation or interpretation. Baker’s album, then, was a totally other form of expression for its time. Its only contemporary aesthetic analogy was in the cool economy and intellectual athletics of long-board surfing—another lost art of living in real time that may be coming back.
On the morning of May 13, 1988, the body of Chesney H. Baker, 58, was found in the street beneath the window of his hotel room in Amsterdam. Clearly he had either fallen, jumped, or was pushed, and certainly he had died as he lived—under suspicious circumstances. Suicide was ruled out by those who knew him—first, because Baker’s was a temperament strikingly free of envy, theatrical disappointment, and self-pity, and second, because, even if he had been prone to these artistic vices, he had been, for the past three or four years, in good spirits. More than welcome in clubs all over Europe, he had been playing well, recording regularly, working often, and even, occasionally, getting paid for doing it.
Just prior to his death. Baker played a triumphant solo concert in Paris, with full orchestra, to a full house. After the concert, he thanked the musicians and promoters for their support, signed a few autographs and, pocketing the check, strolled out into the night. He was last seen tossing his horn case into the back of his battered Alfa and buzzing off into the Parisian traffic, alone, on his way to the next gig. On the evening of the morning he was found dead in the street, he was scheduled to play a gig in Amsterdam. He was, by all accounts, looking forward to it.
Narcotics were suspected in his death. They always were. Since 1957, when Baker effectively wrecked what was always referred to as “a promising career” by getting sick on heroin, it was generally assumed (with some justification) that any altercation involving Baker was narcotics related. It seems strange now, but looking back at the press clippings and album notes that chart Baker’s career, it is clear that, even though he was far from the only jazz musician of his generation to use junk, he was the only one who was famous for it—which is to say, he was the only one who ever lost a movie role because of it.
At the time he got sick and let everybody down, Baker was twenty-seven years old, the product of rural Oklahoma, Glendale Junior High School, the Presidio Army Band, and the University of the Night, where he studied with Charlie Parker. He had topped the Downbeat polls as a trumpet player and a vocalist at twenty-four, and what’s more, he had a hit single—with Gerry Mulligan (“My Funny Valentine”)—an unheard of achievement for any jazz musician who wasn’t Louis Armstrong or Nat King Cole. So he was an icon-in-progress—the “next big thing,” the “beautiful boy,” the “great white hope,” the next James Dean, for Christ’s sake—of American pop culture: He was being considered for the role Robert Wagner would ultimately play in All the Fine Young Cannibals.
But he got sick, and for some reason the idea that this serious musician, this gifted player, this protégé of Charlie Parker, would submarine a movie career—would blow the chance to be a “fine young cannibal”—really pissed people off. It was a repudiation of everything the nineteen fifties were about. Baker was made to pay for this transgression. For twenty years, he was hounded by journalists anxious to be there when he overdosed, and narcs anxious to bust him for trying. The narcs got a better return for their time, and Baker ended up doing some in Italy in the early nineteen sixties.
All the while, the minions and mavens of the “serious jazz world” stood on the sidelines, exasperated on the one hand that Baker refused to do something “historical,” like Miles, that they could write about and teach in their college courses, and annoyed on the other hand that he continued to play so beautifully, that he refused to quit and be the bum they wished he was. “It really pissed them off,” Lowell George told me once, “that they couldn’t learn anything from Chet’s playing, not anything they could teach. All they could learn was that he could do it, and they couldn’t. It was all about thinking and breathing in real time, and they couldn’t grasp that. It had too much to do with life, with how you live in time.”
So Baker didn’t have a “career,” or make any of the noises that signify musical “history,” but he kept on playing. Then, in 1967 in San Francisco, six junkies jumped him up for his stash and beat his teeth out—a death blow for a trumpet player. But Baker pumped gas for two years,
entered a methadone program, got some new teeth and taught himself to play again. He continued to play, mostly in Europe, on the horse and off it, for the rest of his life. Still, his obituaries and posthumous liner notes inevitably speak of “wasted talent,” “problems with drugs,” and “lost opportunities” (to be a cannibal, one assumes).
Even today, the aura of romantic ruin will not go away. When an American ducks the gold ring rather than grabbing it, there has got to be a pathological explanation, and drugs were it. Baker would have understood this, I think, since he so casually reversed the priorities of artistic mythmaking in our culture. He wanted people to understand what he played; he didn’t care a damn if they understood how he lived. Further, all the crocodile tears on the occasion of his death betray a certain level of resentment on the part of the jazz establishment at Baker’s continuing musical credibility. He had, after all, continued to play and find new listeners, in private, in Europe, while all their fusion gods were playing pop sessions, writing rap charts, or teaching theory in ivy-covered colleges.
Thus, in the days immediately following his death, a good deal was made of the “tragic” implications of a dope rig found in Baker’s room. When an autopsy revealed that Baker was completely clean at the time of his death, the police pronounced themselves baffled—which is understandable, since fewer policemen than you would think have ever been junkies. They would be baffled as well by the fact that I carry around in my luggage a four-gram bottle with the crud still caked in the bottom—as a reminder that there is no statute of limitation on stupidity.
During the past few years, however, with the embarrassment of Baker’s sly, resilient presence out of the way, his music has suffered a major comeback—as has his “image” (see Chris Isaacs). It would be nice if this amounted to a serious reevaluation of Baker’s endeavor, but I don’t think this is the case. The music is still good; it always has been. It’s just now that Baker is dead, he can be assumed to have paid his debt to society for refusing to worship the twin gods of Stardom and Historical Development. In the popular ethos, his life is “really” tragic now—meaning, he doesn’t get paid for the record you buy.
In fact, Baker’s life was in no sense a tragic one, nor was his talent wasted or unappreciated. Given the opportunity, I’m sure that he would say of himself, as he said of Charlie Parker: “He had a very happy life.” He lived fifty-eight years, recorded sixty albums, played ten thousand gigs for millions of people, and died with gigs left to play, thus deserving the freelancer’s ultimate epitaph: “If This Dude Wasn’t Dead, He Could Still Get Work.” Finally, by refusing to have a career or to make history, he managed to do both, and in the end achieved that rarest of prizes. He had a life in the arts . . . in real time.
But there is more to it than that, because Baker’s music and his way of making music has had its influence beyond the parochial world of high-modernist jazz theory. It provides the classic model for a new tradition of steady-state, postmodern popular music which is probably best exemplified by Lowell George’s Little Feat and Lou Reed’s Velvet Underground. These bands operated on Baker’s premise: that the song plays the music and the music plays the player and that, consequently, the song, as played, is not a showcase for the player’s originality, but a momentary acoustic community in which the players breathe and think together in real time, adding to the song’s history, without detracting from its integrity, leaving it intact to be played again. “The thing you learn,” Lou Reed told me in an interview, “is that popular music is easy. The song will play itself. So all you need to do is make it sing a little, make it human, and not fuck it up.”
MY WEIMAR
In the nightmare version of my life, I spend twenty-five years as the third personat this interminable dinner party at an Eastside restaurant. My fellow diners are Karl Marx and Count Montesquieu, who, in this nightmare, are very comfortable, companionable, and well-dressed. Karl, by this time, is a distinguished professor at Duke, pulling down something in the low six figures, just for showing up in his beard. The Count is not doing quite so well, but he has his MacArthur and a stipend from the French government to keep the wolf from his lacquered door. So they are having a wonderful time at this dinner, wading heartily through course after course of delectable goodies and slurping bottle after bottle of primo bubbly. As they eat and drink, they talk endlessly about art and what it meant and could mean, about why it doesn’t mean that anymore, and can’t, on account of mercantile society—the banality of it all. From time to time, they toast the coming apocalypse and launch witticisms at the vulgarity of “people in trade”—glancing in my direction as they do.
I am sitting off to the side, cracking breadsticks, sipping mineral water, and making notes on the tablecloth. Karl and the Count know, of course, that I am a petit-bourgeois tradesperson. They know that, in order to buy more breadsticks, I must go home that night and write something I can sell. My money grubbing disgusts them. So in this dream I wonder: Is this why they are speaking so volubly, why they are lingering so late over the remains of their repast? Is this why I am worrying about the check? Will I be stuck with it again? Do these guys always get to walk? Is this how they afford their wonderful shoes? I don’t know; but this is my nightmare, and barring the unlikely event of something millennial happening at the millennium, it promises to continue unabated.
There is nothing to be done about it. In an elite culture in which failure signifies injustice, the pleasures and contingencies of commerce cannot be defended, nor can any point upon which radicals and snobs agree be seriously contested. So lately, I have contented myself with trying to understand how I could have come to see things so differently—how my own experience in commercial culture could have been so different—how that culture could have afforded me and so many of my co-conspirators refuge from the very injustices that are regularly attributed to it. After giving it some thought, I have decided to blame it all on my old professor Walther Volbach, who was the greatest of many gifts the Third Reich bestowed upon my youth.
Herr Volbach was a refugee professor. By the time I signed up for his seminar in Weimar Theater, he had been one for nearly twenty years, but, to his credit, he was still pissed about it—pissed about being a refugee, pissed about being stuck in Texas, and pissed, most of all, about being a professor. Because Walther Volbach was a theater guy—a third generation, hard-nosed, German Jew theater guy with a very low tolerance for misty bullshit. To me, he was a messenger from another world—an older world, redolent with unfamiliar textures, with brighter brights and darker darks. Through him I could glimpse the harsh, antique modernity of the Weimar winter—because Herr Volbach was that world. From the cut of his prewar suits, to the crisp, military cadence of his speech, to the angular vocabulary of his body language (which made him look like a Max Beckmann vivant), he embodied it—sharp, disdainful, and irrevocably embedded in the thickness of the past.
Volbach’s father had conducted the first performance of Verdi’s Falstaff, and Volbach himself had taken piano lessons as a child from Richard Strauss, whose hand, in the process of instruction, had strayed all too regularly onto young Walther’s knee. As a youth, Volbach had worked the cabarets, acting and playing the piano. Later, he had directed for Max Reinhardt and collaborated with Piscator. So, not surprisingly, Volbach’s idea of art was something flexed and rigorous, full of edges and bright lights—something smart that made your pants crackle. And he was such a tough old bird! Mean as a snake when aroused, but you couldn’t hate him for it. He treated you like you were supposed to get out there and do something. He told me I was a callow redneck with all the spirituality of a toilet-seat—that I could possibly cure the former but would probably have to live with the latter—but that was great! Nobody had ever told me I was anything before, so I took it to heart.
I mean, Jesus, he was the real thing, and he had all this stuff! He would bring it to class in cardboard boxes: drawings (some by Gordon Craig), blocking diagrams, posters, account books, prompt scripts, ph
otographs. I remember this brown snapshot of Volbach, Otto Dix, and two other men standing in some dingy street. I was shocked that they were wearing suits and vests. (“Dix was a pig,” Volbach muttered.) And I remember the day he opened a cardboard box, reached in and pulled out a large, semi-automatic pistol. For a moment, he just held it in his old hand, and gazed down at it, as if surprised to find it there. Then he laid the pistol on the table. “Dangerous times,” he murmured, and continued rummaging. The pistol lay there on the table throughout the afternoon. About halfway through class, however, Volbach noticed that the muzzle was pointed in our direction. He shook his head, as if to reprove himself for his carelessness. Then he reached down and carefully turned the weapon so the muzzle pointed out the window—and that was just perfect.
It was a piece of theater, of course. Volbach taught his Weimar seminar every year, so he could hardly have been surprised to find that pistol in the box. Still, I don’t think we cared or even noticed, because it was such great theater—that ominous German firearm in that beige American classroom. It gave you the idea of art for high stakes, and I cannot think of Weimar today without calling up the image of that gun. The physical fact of that pistol on the table opened a window onto a world of unimaginable glamour and evil that I would not rediscover until I wandered into Warhol’s Factory one afternoon, looking to cop some speed.