Chet Baker Suite Part One
The music of Chet Baker has been a big influence on me, and maybe my favorite work of my own, is a 20 minute piece called "The Chet Baker Suite."
It includes: "Everything Comes Easy to Me", "Few Came to See Chet Baker", "Somewhere West", "The Music Mattered" and two sound collage interludes.
After I finished college I lived in Portland, Maine. I played the local music circuit there and wrote many of the songs that became my first album. My first love was from Cape Elizabeth, Maine and that was the real reason I was there. She was a poet with long blond hair, moody and troubled. That is another story, but she was certainly my first muse and gave me plenty to write about. Ah, the inevitable heartbreak of the first time around. Are we ever that vulnerable again? There is an outtake track on my first album called "Katie's Mood" inspired by her.
Around that time I met a singer-songwriter named Jeff Rice. I was 23 and he 27. How old that seemed to me then. He was the one who first played Chet Baker's music for me. Jeff was a great songwriter and taught me all the complicated jazz chords that worked their way into my writing. Prior to that, Neil Young songs were as complex as I got. Not that his songs aren't great, they are. Nothing better than Neil's songs "Sugar Mountain", "A Man Needs a Maid", and a lot more.
There was a jazz scene in Portland and they brought Chet up for a show, probably to play with a group that they'd assembled. He was heavy into heroin and he looked like death warmed over, but what a sound he created, both in his singing and trumpet playing.
When I first came on the scene in Los Angeles, I realized I would have to up my game in all areas, my songwriting, my guitar playing and my singing, as I was suddenly in the arena with the world's best musicians. My vocal coaches all seemed to want me to sing like Steve Perry from Journey. He has a great sound but Chet in some way gave me permission to sing in a very quiet way that better suited my personality.
Fast forward a few years and I found myself touring all over Holland. At one point, I ended up with 4 or 5 days off in Amsterdam. I found a Dutch biography of Chet and became fully engrossed in his story. I walked past the hotel where he had fallen from the window and died. Some say he was pushed, though no one really knows. He certainly had a lot of drug dealer enemies that he owed money to, and didn't care or maybe even know, how famous he was.
This was my first experience with the touring lifestyle. I could understand how he felt. Anything you want is made available to you, drugs, money, women, anything, and all you have to do is show up for your 90 minute show at night. In fact, maybe if you don't show, that would even further enhance your reputation. The Europeans seemed to like the wild Americans. Poetically self destructive artists are always in season. Bring in "le cowboy" for the rodeo and then send them back home. It's a bit cynical for me to present it that way. In truth Europe has always been more appreciative of American jazz artists and more, than they were appreciated at home in the States.
I began to understand how Chet might have felt. There were two choices, go home, or never go home. My son was just born and I went home, but Chet did not. In the last years of his life he was making $30,000. a month, much of it spent on his drug habit, and none of it going home to his 4 children, ex wife and mother, who were starving in Oklahoma. Were they not capable of working to support themselves, well, that is not for me to say. I'm sure after Chet died the royalties went to them. I know that because one of the people who collects my royalties for me, also collects for Chet's body of work.
I was living in New York at that point in my life and found other books that detailed Chet's life story. The New York jazz scene is in constant transport to Europe for live shows. The flights leave JFK in the evening and you wake up in London, Amsterdam, Paris etc. in the morning. I was working with a jazz guitarist named Leni Stern. I had written the songs for, and produced her album "Black Guitar." I played in Leni's band at the legendary 55 Bar. We would be there until 3 or 4 in the morning and I could walk home to my apartment on King Street.
Jazz music is complex and Leni is a master of jazz theory. I learned a lot from her. In the end, I am likely more in the singer-songwriter category, but I certainly borrow from the jazz genre. All the New York jazz musicians would come to the 55 Bar after their own shows elsewhere in the city. One night the avant-garde pianist Cecil Taylor complimented me on my guitar playing, an honor I treasure.
One night there, at 3 am or so, a song came on the radio called "You Won't Forget Me" sung by Shirley Horn, featuring Miles Davis. I had to write something in that beautiful dark, slow mood, and I wrote the song "Everything Comes Easy to Me" in which I portray Chet's life story with a mix of autobiography.
"Flower petals on the sidewalks of New York
Flown in fresh from Amsterdam each day
Me I'm a horn player with a history
They fly me to The Netherlands to sing and play
In my dreams the girls I've known they all blend into one
Man it's crazy how the time flies by so fast
Don't ask me why the house is sold out every night
They've come in case the show tonight might be my last
Everything comes easy to me Money, love and all the rest
Call me lucky, I guess
Because, everything comes easy to me
Once I bought a brand new Alfa in Milan
I met a girl we drove to Paris for a few days
We had a fight she stole the car and all my money too
Easy come, easy go I always say
Everything comes easy to me...
I'm out late walking and this guy, he stops me for a light
I recognize a certain coldness in his eyes
He says "Don't you remember the deal we made, for every note to every song, you must pay"
So, leaning on my windowsill
As high as a kite
As though my soul had wings I took flight
Everything comes easy to me...
Chet meets the devil on the street and must repay his debt. Mustn't we all. I was just in Amsterdam again (March 2024) for a few shows and my daughter's 22nd birthday. She too, has fallen in love with that magical city. My biggest vice now, is buying vinyl at the Concerto record store there. Too bad there is a 23kg weight limit on suitcases at the airport. There is a famous live music club there, perhaps infamous, called Maloe Melo. Apparently, Chet stayed there in the last few months of his life, sleeping in a room just behind the stage. I stopped by there one night and sat anonymously at the bar, imagining Chet there at the bar with me. I hope to play there on my next tour, and hope to get to speak with the owner, who must have a few stories to tell.
Chet Baker with his wife Carol.