Chet Baker's Unsung Swansong
Vocal and Acoustic Guitar - David Wilcox
Flugelhorn - Randy Brecker
Fretless Bass - Marc Egan
My old addiction
Changed the wiring in my brain
So that when it turns the
switches
And I am not the same
So like the flowers toward the Sun
I will follow 
Stretch myself out thin
Like there's a part of me that's
already buried
Sends me out in to this window
My old addiction
Is a flood upon the land 
This tiny lifeboat
Can keep me dry
But my weight is all that it can
stand
So when I try to lean just a little
With just a splash to cool my feet
Ah, that trickle turns out fickle
Fills my boat up five miles deep... 
My old addiction
Lets me crave only what is best
Like these just-this-morning song
birds
Craning upward from the nest
These tiny birds outside my window 
Take my hand to be their mom
These open mouths would trust and
swallow
Anything that came along
Like My old addiction
Now the other side of day
As the springtime of my lifestime 
Turns the other way
If a swan can have a song
I think I know that tune
But the page is only scrawled
And I am gone this afternoon
The page is only scrawled
And I am gone this afternoon... 
Chet Baker's Unsung Swansong.
sung by David Wilcox
off the CD "Home Again"
"Chet Baker was a great trumpet
player and singer.
No, I didn't see the movie, but
I read about him in the liner notes. Before he went out that window
in Amsterdam, he may have had some last thoughts on how his life had been
and why.
Here, he sees his life reflected
in the springtime images around him as the "tiny boat" of his recovery
sinks one last time."
David Wilcox
Biography
© Fantasy, Inc. 1998. All Rights Reserved.
Few musicians have embodied the romantic,
and ultimately tragic, jazz figure as totally as Chesney "Chet" Baker
(1929-88). Unschooled yet eloquent in his music, and a fast liver
who somehow managed to survive for nearly six decades, the Baker
mystique has only reinforced one of the most haunting trumpet styles and
ingenuous approaches to jazz singing.
Baker, who never learned to read music,
got his training in army bands, where he developed a spare and introverted
voice on the horn. The Oklahoma native gravitated to Los Angeles
after his discharge, and beat out all of the local competition in an
audition for a short tour with Charlie Parker in 1952. Later that year,
he began working with Gerry Mulligan in a quartet that established
an instant personality through the absence of a piano and the intriguing
counterpoint between trumpet and baritone sax. An early recording
of "My Funny Valentine" by the Mulligan quartet caused a national
sensation and made the fragile sound of Baker's horn emblematic of
an entire "cool" attitude.
In 1953, Baker began a recording and performing relationship with pianist Russ Freeman that solidified his status as a major jazz star. One key to this success was Baker's singing, which sustained the wistful vulnerability of his trumpet work. Baker's good looks and growing reputation for high living also fed his notoriety, although a growing frequency of drug incidents (including one that claimed the life of pianist Richard Twardzik during a 1955 European tour by Baker's quartet) soon began to overshadow Baker's playing. Yet somehow, in this period as later in his career, Baker was able to keep his music under control, and to incorporate any technical lapses into the fabric of his image.
While the cool label became a Baker trademark, he was in fact a modern trumpeter who could play with the hardest boppers, as several recordings made in New York during the late Fifties demonstrate. By decade's end, Baker was living in Europe, where he hoped to pursue a film career as well as music; but further drug problems led to a prison sentence in Italy and set Baker upon the peripatetic lifestyle that he pursued for the next quarter century. He returned to the U.S. in 1964, where he made several fine albums with George Coleman and Kirk Lightsey. Then his career seemed permanently ended in 1968, when Baker lost his teeth in an altercation with other junkies in San Francisco. He stopped playing for two years, then resurfaced again in New York in 1973, where he renewed his recording career. Much of his final decade was spent in Europe, often working with a trio completed by guitar and bass. Always in need of money to support his addictions, and still widely popular, Baker became one of the most voluminously documented jazz artists in history during the 1980s.
Prior to his mysterious death in Amsterdam, where he fell out of a hotel window, Baker was the subject of Bruce Weber's film Let's Get Lost, a fascinating study of hero worship and self-destruction.
"Movie Magazine International" Review
(Air Date: 1988)
By Monica Sullivan
"Let's Get Lost" was nominated for an Oscar and "The Thin Blue Line wasn't". As callous as it sounds, that may be because at least the Academy members knew who the late Chet Baker was, unlike Randall Dale Allan. Twenty minutes into Bruce Weber's sluggish study of a jazz artist in decline, our question was not "What's going to happen next?" but "Do we have to watch all this?", a fatal response to a documentary that will drag on for over two long hours.
Will it keep you on the edge of your seat to observe that a man of 57 with a history of drug and alcohol abuse does not look 24-years-old? It seems to come as news to Bruce Weber: "Do you know how much it hurts me to see you looking like this?" he asks the star of his film. "Well, Bruce", Baker drawls, "I AM 57 years old." Weber started out as a fashion photographer and it's obvious from the images he chooses: See Chet looking great. See Chet looking like hell. He even "casts" young Chet Baker lookalikes in his "documentary": See what Chet would look like if...
Who cares but Weber? And the rest of his documentary choices play like raw filler for the tabloids. We hear from no less than one mother, three children, one ex-wife and three past and present girlfriends, all of whom bicker about their relationship with Chet Baker. Weber to Baker's mother: "Did he disappoint you as a son?" Vera Baker doesn't want to answer but is too polite to tell the man with the camera to buzz off. "Yes", she says finally. "But don't let's go into that". If Vera Baker won't come across with the dirt, Weber asks Baker himself about the time he was beat up and lost his teeth. Then he cuts to a girlfriend. ("Chet lied about the way that happened.")
When an ex-wife tells Weber that Baker's girlfriend is evil and then asks him to cut something out, he leaves everything in, including her request. Unsurprisingly, the Baker family could no longer stand Weber by the time of the film's release. What happens in "Let's Get Lost" is that we learn more about Bruce Weber than Chet Baker. Thirty to forty minutes could be edited from this picture with no harm done, but we'd still be stuck with Weber's vision of Chet Baker as well as his one-of-a-kind insight that a great trumpet player could be a real creep. If you want to know the trumpet player, listen to Baker's Complete Pacific Jazz Live Recordings from 1953-1957 and skip "Let's Get Lost".
Copyright 1988 Monica Sullivan
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