Chet Baker, Jazz Trumpeter, Dies at 59 in a Fall

By JON PARELES
Published: May 14, 1988 (New York Times)

Chet Baker, a jazz trumpet player who was also a whisper-voiced, romantic singer, died Friday after falling from the second-floor window of a hotel in Amsterdam. He was 59 years old.

Mr. Baker fell shortly after 3:10 A.M. and was found dead in the street by police, according to a spokesman for the Amsterdam police, who gave no information about what caused the fall.

Mr. Baker was known for his gentle, pensive trumpet playing – the epitome of West Coast ”cool jazz” – and for a difficult life that included battles with drug addiction, jailings and hard luck; in a 1968 beating most of his teeth were knocked out.

After he established a reputation in the early 1950’s, his career was erratic, a series of disappearances and comebacks. He was booked for a Netherlands tour at the time of his death.

The trumpeter was born Chesney Baker in Yale, Okla., in December 1929, and his family moved to California in 1940. He started playing trumpet as a teen-ager, and after he was drafted in 1946 he joined the 298th Army Band.

 He started sitting in at San Francisco be-bop jam sessions in 1950, while he was a member of the Presidio Army Band. In 1952, he moved to Los Angeles, where he worked with Charlie Parker and then joined the baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan in what became Mr. Mulligan’s celebrated pianoless quartet.

With a following drawn by his Miles Davis-like style and by his resemblance to James Dean, Mr. Baker won jazz polls in Metronome and Down Beat magazines, and started his own group in 1953. In 1954, after he released an album called ”Chet Baker Sings and Plays,” he emerged as the No. 4 male vocalist in Down Beat’s poll.

”I don’t know whether I’m a trumpet player who sings or a singer who plays the trumpet,” he told an interviewer.

In 1955, he made an eight-month European tour, the longest for an American jazz musician up to that date. But in the late 1950’s, heroin addiction began to take its toll on his career. He was arrested repeatedly through the late 1950’s and 1960’s on narcotics-related charges, both in the United States and in Europe; in the early 1960’s he was jailed for 16 months in Italy, and he was deported by Great Britain, Switzerland and Germany. Through most of the 1960’s, his recordings were disappointing as his addiction continued.

After the 1968 beating, which left him near death, he stopped performing for two years while recovering and turned to methadone. When he began performing again in the 1970’s, critics praised his firmer tone and more aggressive solos, and he toured through the 1970’s and 1980’s. Along with his own albums for various American and European labels, he sat in on Elvis Costello’s album ”Punch the Clock.”