Clark Terry - An Appreciation

© -  Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“Virtuosity means different things to different people. Musicians worship it when they encounter it because they understand its elusive mystery and endless process. But critics sometimes distrust it as a distraction, suspicious that a veneer of well-practiced skill may be camouflaging an emotional or creative apathy. Consistency may be admirable, but inconsistency often makes a better story. Clark Terry's surprises were subtle and came in oblique miniatures, easy to overlook and often undervalued. He was just so consistently brilliant, the wonders he wrought were hidden in their familiarity.”

- John McDonough

"Every musician in the world who ever met Clark Terry is a better musician and person because of it. He now belongs to the ages."

- Christian McBride, bassist

“What is deeper than respect and love? That's what we felt: veneration."

- Wynton Marsalis, trumpeter, bandleader

For one of my 2015 Christmas treats, I put up this post about Clark Terry.

No other Jazz musician embodied the Christmas spirit of love, tolerance and generosity more than Clark. He was an inspiration to me and a constant reminder that above all, Jazz is about having fun.

As the years go along, moods of mellow melancolia seem to occur more frequently especially, when I look out on the many satisfying musical memories that Jazz has brought into my life.

One musician who was a constant source of such delight was Clark Terry and I wanted to spend some time with him again by reposting this feature with a CD changer full of his music playing in the background.

The following portrait of Clark by John McDonough which appeared in the May/2015 issue of Downbeat magazine will tell you more about why Clark was such a special human being and one who was beloved throughout the Jazz community.

“WHEN CLARK TERRY DIED ON FEB. 21 [2015] in Pine Bluff, Arkansas — eight days after moving from his home to a nearby hospice — the jazz world lost not only one of its greatest trumpeters, but also one of its finest ambassadors. Terry had been suffering for several years with failing health exacerbated by diabetes. He was 94.

Some of his recent activities (from 2010 to 2013) were documented by director Alan Hicks in the film Keep On Keepin On, which chronicled Terry's decline with an unflinching honesty as he faced, among other things, amputation procedures for both legs. Through the health crises, he continued to mentor his latest protege, pianist Justin Kauflin. Produced by Quincy Jones— another Terry protege from long ago — the film debuted to great acclaim in April 2014 at the Tribeca Film Festival. The soundtrack, released Feb. 24 on Varese Sarabande, features historic recordings of Terry performing with Count Basie, Duke Ellington and the Jazz at the Philharmonic All-Stars.

Most musicians — trumpet players in particular — foretell their demise through their horns: shorter solos, weakening intonation, the strained high note or imprecise phrase. Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis and even studio stalwarts like Harry Edison all buckled in their late years. Reluctant to give up the stage, they chose instead to devise ways of concealing and patching their weaknesses.

Clark Terry postponed that reckoning longer than nearly anyone, thanks to reserves of technique and an unquenchable optimism. Even as an octogenarian, he delivered masterful work. In 2005 I gave his recording of Porgy & Bess with Jeff Lindberg and the Chicago Jazz Orchestra a rare 5-star review in DownBeat. It was a virtually perfect performance.

I saw Terry perform around the same time at the Iridium in New York City and found that it was not a mirage of post-production trickery. Though walking with a cane, Terry still played with the effervescence and elegance I remembered as a 15-year-old fan sitting a few feet from the Duke Ellington Orchestra at Chicago's Blue Note club back in 1957. At the Iridium, as Terry's eyesight and legs were failing him, his sound, breath control and attack seemed beyond the reach of time.

In 2008 Terry retired from performing, ending a career that spanned more than 60 years. His sound and phrasing were impossible to mistake for anyone else's. It's a kind of exclusivity shared by only a few trumpet players — Armstrong certainly, Ruby Braff and perhaps Edison. One could add Bix Beiderbecke, Gillespie and Davis (who is said to have studied Terry), of course, but they all became "schools" unto themselves and spawned many imitators and talented disciples. Terry owned his style so completely and protected it with such an impenetrable and subtle virtuosity that no one was capable of infringing on his territory.

"He taught so many cats," Wynton Marsalis told me in Chicago just a week before Terry's death. "Everybody's been touched by him because he took his time with everybody. He carried the feeling of [jazz] with him, so when you were around him, you were around the feeling. He didn't have to explain a lot. He just had to be himself. I've known him since I was 14. He's the first person I heard who really was playing. It was the mid-'70's. Everybody was playing funk tunes. Miles was playing rock and funk, so nobody was playing jazz. But Clark Terry was playing. And no one played like CT."

Terry was so good, so unerring, for so long, that he suffered the penalties of perfection. He was taken for granted — probably because he was never caught climbing out of a cracked note, a clumsy turn of phrase or an indifferent 12 bars. His performances were a fizz of wit and urbanity, never anguish or indecision. He made it all look so easy.

If he was underestimated, the last several years saw a rush to correct the record. He was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 1991. Readers elected him to the DownBeat Hall of Fame in 2000. The Recording Academy recognized his lifetime achievement four years ago. He even scored a hometown star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame.

Virtuosity means different things to different people. Musicians worship it when they encounter it because they understand its elusive mystery and endless process. But critics sometimes distrust it as a distraction, suspicious that a veneer of well-practiced skill may be camouflaging an emotional or creative apathy. Consistency may be admirable, but inconsistency often makes a better story. Terry's surprises were subtle and came in oblique miniatures, easy to overlook and often undervalued. He was just so consistently brilliant, the wonders he wrought were hidden in their familiarity.

But musicians never overlooked him. One of the earliest to spot him was trumpeter Charlie Shavers, who had heard him playing in the late '40s with the George Hudson band, a regional orchestra in St. Louis, where Terry was born on Dec. 14, 1920. As musicians do, Shavers spread the word. While making A Song Is Born for Samuel Goldwyn in 1947, bandleader Charlie Barnet asked Shavers if he knew a good jazz trumpet player. He immediately recommended Terry, who had become so captivated by the trumpet as a 10-year-old that he made one of his own from a section of hose and a funnel.

Terry was not a player whose style grew and evolved in public view over the years. He hit the Barnet band fully formed and singularly distinct, becoming an instant soloist in a brass section that also included Jimmy Nottingham and a young Doc Severinsen.

"To have an opportunity at age 21 to work with guys like that was inspirational," Severinsen recalled after Terry's death. "Clark was like my big brother. Anything he played, I was going to try to play it, too. I was pretty well-trained, but I simply could not do some of the things he did. He could play these long lines, for instance, because he learned to take in air as he would play — circular breathing. Yet, Clark never used it in a way that wasn't good for the song. It was never a stunt. He was just a great trumpeter, period. He had a picture-perfect embouchure, which is why he was able to play as long as he wanted to."

On Terry's first record date with Barnet in September 1947, the trumpeter's arrangement of "Sleep" was already in the book, showcasing his long, glancing phrases and sudden flame-throwing dynamics. So was his wit. He tossed off casual references to Shavers and even Harry James. On "Budandy," his triple-tongue pirouettes contrasted sharply with Barnet's swaggering masculinity. But the best, most dazzling Terry work from the Barnet band was captured on its December 1947 Town Hall Jazz Concert, released by Columbia in the 1950's.

Terry's singing — he called it, more accurately, "mumbles" — was an explicit extension of his trumpet phrasing, a kind of rat-a-tat scat of double-talk: bubbling yet precise, with a bottled-up restraint that seemed itching to escape. Back then, his singing was less mumbles and more straight bebop. It was a small sideshow among his talents that Barnet never used on a commercial record and remained something of a secret until it became familiar to audiences via The Tonight Show in the 1960's. Terry's vocals didn't appear on a record until Oscar Peterson + One, released by Mercury in 1964. That album included a few Terry compositions, including "Mumbles."

Shortly after the 1947 Town Hall concert, Terry left Barnet for Count Basie's band. The timing could hardly have been worse. James Petrillo, head of the American Federation of Musicians, called a strike against the record companies, shutting down the entire industry through 1948. Bookings fell off, and one famous band after another shut down.

Terry stayed with Basie through 1949, but the records from the period are not memorable. One exception is "Normania" (a.k.a. "Blee Blop Blues") from Basie's final RCA session in August 1949. Terry etches a stunning solo, crowded with a dry pointillist precision that had no precedent in the Basie book. It was a kind of prickly virtuosity jazz had never encountered — fluid, contained and full of Haydenesque detail. But the band was in its final months and broke up on Jan. 8, 1950. For Terry, though, it would only be a brief layoff. He was back in a month, this time in a Basie combo that included clarinetist Buddy DeFranco.

It was a transitional interlude. Terry marked his time as Basie struggled to rebuild. His trumpet was the backbone of the octet, but he soloed rarely on the few sides it made for Columbia in 1950-'51. He remained with Basie through the beginnings of the New Testament band in the spring and summer of 1951. Then, Duke Ellington beckoned.

Terry joined Ellington on Nov. 11,1951. It had been a period of swift changes and recalibrations for the band. Alto saxophonist Johnny Hodges and drummer Sonny Greer had departed in February, taking with them two of the primary spectrums of the bands color scheme. Ellington might have tried a patch job. Instead, he bet on a reformation. Between March and November 1951, Terry and drummer Louie Bellson became a wind of modernity sweeping through the band.

Ellington presented Terry with what would be the first magnum opus of his career, a concert-size version of "Perdido," a piece that had been in the book since 1941. Terry polished it to a high gloss, making it a full-dress, eight-minute summary of his entire work Triple-tongued arcs flared like geysers, then leveled off, spreading into long, cool landscapes that rolled evenly across half a chorus without a breath. When he twisted a pitch or broke composure with a sudden spritz of schmaltz, it was always with a sardonic wink His playing flexed and bristled with an unforced passion wrapped in a strict sense of form and musical intelligence.

"Perdido" was recorded in July 1952, just in time for Columbia to add it to what would become Ellington’s first landmark album of the long-play era, Ellington Uptown. The band had stumbled into a new peak period, invigorated by Terry's crackling audacity and Bellson's barreling drive. For Terry, "Perdido" and Ellington Uptown were a career-making twosome that put him in the big time. But just as that album was released, the band moved to Capitol for an indifferent two-year period during which it was eclipsed by the sensational renaissance of Count Basie.

Then came the legendary performance at the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival (and subsequent concert album Ellington At Newport). Suddenly Ellington was back on top and on the cover of Time magazine. For the next three years, Terry would play to the largest audiences of his career and develop a fan base of his own. He became a fixture in a band of extraordinary fixtures: Hodges, Paul Gonsalves, Juan Tizol, Ray Nance, Britt Woodman, Harry Carney and Ellington himself.

After the 1956 Newport fest, Ellington grew more ambitious, and Terry was well represented in the flow of new works. He became one of the first musicians to bring the flugelhorn into the jazz scene with "Juniflip" (from Newport 1958). There were wonderful odds and ends, among them "Spacemen" (from The Cosmic Scene) and "Happy Anatomy" from his final Ellington project, Anatomy Of A Murder. Best remembered may be "Lady Mac" and "Up And Down, Up And Down" from 1957's Such Sweet Thunder.

As Terry rose on the Ellington tide, other opportunities opened. He moonlighted on sessions with Clifford Brown, Maynard Ferguson, Dinah Washington and Horace Silver on EmArcy Records. He joined Thelonious Monk for the landmark 1957 album Brilliant Corners (Riverside). Monk returned the courtesy, appearing on Terry's In Orbit (1958). And Hodges used him often on his Ellingtonian excursions on Verve.

Late in 1959 Terry left Ellington, worked on and off with Quincy Jones, then Gerry Mulligan and Bob Brookmeyer. But Terry's real quest was to get off the road and stay in New York The chance came in 1960 when the major networks, after years of pressure, finally began to integrate their staff orchestras. Terry became the first African American musician to join the NBC staff.

He may have settled down a bit, but the 1960’s would become his most productive decade. Nearly half the jazz recordings of his career would be done during that time.

It was also the decade in which Terry became widely known beyond the jazz world. When Johnny Carson took over The Tonight Show in October 1962, conductor Skitch Henderson brought Terry into the band, where he proved a natural showman with his "mumbles" scat singing. A regular feature of the show became "stump the band," in which Carson would invite audience members to make offbeat tune requests. No request was too obscure for Terry, who would raise his hand. "I think Clark has it," Carson would say. Terry would then mumble a made-up scat line as the other musicians nodded in mock recognition. He became the most famous sideman in America's most famous jazz band.

When The Tonight Show moved to Los Angeles in 1972, Terry remained in New York and became increasingly active with younger musicians through a growing network of jazz educators, often recording with various student bands. He toured with a big band of his own periodically, playing festivals, cruises and other venues. (Vanguard released Clark Terry's Big B-a-d Band Live At The Wichita Jazz Festival 1974).

Terry's most consistent recorded output through the '70s and '80s was on Pablo, where the label's famous founder, Norman Granz, regularly featured him with Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, Oscar Peterson and on his own leader projects. He recorded on smaller labels with endless pick-up groups as he traveled the world. But alongside the playful spirit and adroit craft lived a powerful blues player as well, never more so than on Abbey Lincoln's 1990 album, The World Is Falling Down.

On the bandstand, Terry combined his formidable instrumental skills with a strong sense of showmanship. "Being able to entertain is very important," he said in a June 1996 DownBeat cover story. "The real jazz fans may think that’s commercial — playing the horn upside-down or working with both horns at once. But the idea of playing music to an audience is to present it so they'll enjoy it. If you don't want to do that, you may as well rent a studio and play there. I try to pass on to young players the importance of remembering that when you're onstage, you're entertaining. Playing jazz is not heart surgery. You're there to vent your feelings and have fun. We don't work our instruments. We play them."

Among Terry's last sessions were Friendship (a collaboration with drummer Max Roach) and the Porgy and Bess project in 2003 with the Chicago Jazz Orchestra.

Terry also had an important impact as a pioneering jazz educator. In addition to conducting clinics and workshops, he had a long stint as an adjunct professor at William Paterson University in Wayne, New Jersey. He donated instruments, correspondence, print music and memorabilia to the university in 2004.

Clark Terry lived along life — with a coda that gave his many friends time to say their goodbyes. Some are movingly captured in Keep On Keepin On. But one special goodbye came last December. The entire Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra diverted from its tour route and played a birthday concert at Terry's hospital bedside. "We didn't want to stop," Marsalis later wrote on his Facebook page, "but it was time for all of us to go. But before that somber moment, we gathered around the bed and played 'Happy Birthday for him. When he went to blow out the candles, he broke down. Many of us joined him. We all said goodbye and he once again recognized each individual with a touch and some kind words.... And then it was that time. What is deeper than respect and love? That's what we felt: veneration."

On Feb. 23, bassist Christian McBride posted a tribute on his Facebook page in which he reflected on Terry's influence: "Every musician in the world who ever met Clark Terry is a better musician and person because of it. He now belongs to the ages." DB

Chet Baker - "The Musician Magazine Interview" by Jerome Reece

© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

Musician Magazine was in circulation from about 1976 to 1999 and, given the time frame, it published fewer features on Jazz relative to the musical interests of the general public.

It’s a shame, because judging from the following conversation between Chet Baker and Jerome Reece, the quality of the articles and interviews they did issue about Jazz were first rate.

Baker didn’t give a lot of interviews - another disappointment - because this one has a lot to commend it.

It is certainly revelatory regarding Chet’s take on his time with Charlie Parker [Bird] and Gerry Mulligan, the conditions that were prevalent when he first became a Jazz musician in the late 1940s/early 1950s, when and why he got into drugs, his life style, his lack of earnings from his recordings, his influences on trumpet, his relationship with Mulligan subsequent to their time together in the 1952-53 quartet, the subject of a reunion tour with Mulligan and why it never happened, his thoughts about the autobiographies of Art Pepper and Charlie Mingus, why he quit playing from 1969-73, how Dizzy Gillespie helped him get back into playing again, why he spends so much time in Europe, his thoughts about his current recordings and electronic instruments, on the effect on the audience of making playing the trumpet look effortless/too easy, the necessity of playing every night, on academic learning and Jazz, especially improvisation, on why he composes so rarely, his views on Don Cherry, Clifford Brown, Booker Little, Kenny Dorham and Lee Morgan, heroin usage then and now, smoking and what it does to his voice and where his career goes from here.

“PARIS [1984]

Another night , another club:

For Chet Baker it is the same story as yesterday, as tomorrow, as twenty-five years ago. A set, a break, another set, sweat. Science fiction lighting adds to the haziness of time and period; everywhere, in the inevitable mirrors and even in the floor, one can contemplate one's image, without a microphone the sounds flowing from his trumpet would be but a murmur barely more perceptible than his voice — a voice so much softer than the profoundly marked face that only opens enough to let it filter out.

It is hard to believe that he was once called the James Dean of jazz. Chet Baker's face, which bears an eerie resemblance to Antonin Artaud's in the last part of his life, is now but a fascinating mask sculpted by the trials of life and creation.

Without his glasses he seems even farther away, lost in an opaque fog. Chet sees little, but enough to instinctively piece together the listening forms and shadows. Enough in any case to guess, night after night, the other side of the spectacle: the bartender shaking a cocktail, the waitress moving back and forth in front of the stage, the noisy silhouettes leaning on tables.

Even when he's not playing, Chet grips his trumpet like a weapon; he continually licks the embouchure and his elastic face invents new wrinkles. And if he gets up to sing, his hand keeps looking for imaginary pistons on the microphone. Mysteriously, time and tobacco have only polished his voice, with its imperceptible falsetto that plays every register of feeling. Virtuoso instrumentalist and tightrope singer, Chet has arrived at an extraordinary osmosis of two forms of musical expression, comparable to the great blues singers/harmonica players.

Chet Baker has been a star in Europe for almost thirty years. He has spent the major portion of his career there, beginning with his first, triumphant visit to Paris in 1955. He'd grown up in California; his father had played banjo and guitar in various swing bands. A few cursory lessons in junior high school comprised the whole of Chet's formal musical training; later, as a member of an army band, he learned to sight-read by picking up marches by ear and then transposing what he'd heard to the printed sheets before him. Discharged in 1948, he flunked his theory classes at El Camino College in L.A., then reenlisted to join the Presidio army-band station in San Francisco, and not coincidentally, join the nightly jam sessions at Bop City with the likes of Dexter Gordon, Paul Desmond, and Hampton Hawes. By 1952 he was playing West Coast dates with Charlie Parker. The following year he joined the Gerry Mulligan quartet, where the chemistry between Mulligan's probing baritone and Baker's light, lilting trumpet thrust both toward international prominence. By 1953, the year he began recording under his own name, Baker had already won the Down Beat poll as the best trumpet player in jazz. He was twenty-four years old.

With its lyrical West Coast sound, the Mulligan-Baker quartet dominated jazz in the early and mid-fifties. Baker's fresh, openly romantic style hasn't really changed much over the years, but his subsequent experiences have given his sound an edge that's intensely melancholic and bitter-sweet. His problems began almost before he had a chance to savor success—first a gum disease that threatened to destroy his health and career, then a lengthy bout with heroin that effectively accomplished the same end. Arrests and prison stretches in Europe commenced with a drug bust in Italy in 1959; in 1968, in San Francisco, Baker suffered a mugging that ultimately resulted in the loss of his teeth. He stopped playing for two years, began a slow recovery from his addiction through methadone, and culminated his comeback with a reunion concert with Mulligan and several club dates around New York City in 1974-75. Then he migrated back to Europe. But, as with Miles Davis, whose muted blue tone Baker's own has long resembled, fate's scars have only deepened the inexpressible beauty of his art. lf, as it has been said, Miles sounds like a man walking on eggshells, Chet sounds like Goethe's Werther singing to himself on the edge of a precipice. Along with a handful of others, he remains one of the last great jazz musicians in an ever-shrinking world where few recall what that "jazz" ever meant — though perhaps (ironically) Baker's exquisite solo on Elvis Costello's "Shipbuilding" might broaden the chance of his discovery by another generation of fans.

It's four A.M. The magical intimacy inside the club has dissipated with the last encore. Covered with sweat, Chet timidly holds his trumpet case like a junior executive with a briefcase. l ask him, stupidly enough, how he can stand all these nights in claustrophobic, smokey basements. He smiles slightly: "Lots of practice." For years he has refused interviews — this time, and who knows why — he says yes.

Several days later we meet at the country home of one of his musicians. Chet sits up on his bed, then for hours lies there with his eyes closed, sucking on candy after candy and cigarette after cigarette. At the end he gets up and, with a malicious smile, shows me his trumpet, telling me it's a student model. The music is in him, no matter what object. As I ready to leave he puts a Walkman over my ears. He smiles, always a rare moment, and gives me the cassette as a good-bye present.

MUSICIAN: You call yourself a loner. Have you ever tried to settle down?

BAKER: A couple times. Once in 1974 in upstate New York, with my wife and children. But when the people in the neighborhood found out who I was — through some-thing about me on the local TV station — they started bothering my children, breaking my windows. Calling me "drug addict" in the street. The civilized world we live in is a lot of crap. l tried again a little later on Long Island and that didn't work either. People think l'm some kind of scum, so I just gave up the whole idea. Yeah, we moved out. My kids are grown up now. l don't have to worry about them. None of them are musicians.

MUSICIAN: Are you happy about that?

BAKER: Yeah, I'm happy about that. Yes I am. The odd against a talented musician being successful are so great....

MUSICIAN: And how do you feel about your music now.

BAKER: It's just my way of improvising and of bouncing off what the other musicians are playing. I respond very much to what is going on around me, since I play a hundred percent by ear. The conditions I grew up in don't exist anymore. I think I'm part of a dying breed. Yeah, it's kind of sad in a way, but that's progress, I guess.

MUSICIAN: The end of a certain jazz.

BAKER A certain kind of jazz, a very personal kind of jazz. There aren't too many groups anymore like the trio I have, especially without drums. It makes it more like a chamber trio. I'd prefer to play completely acoustic. The louder the music is, it seems the more people talk. But in many places people do listen. In some clubs in Paris you can hear a pin drop.

MUSICIAN: Speaking of progress, don't you think conditions are better now than for, say, Charlie Parker in the 1940s?

BAKER: I think Charlie Parker had a very happy life. He had tremendous success, was loved and adored by so many people. He was the king, the same as the king of a country. Playing with Bird was the very greatest experience I ever had. But I was too young and too stupid to get as much out of it as I should have. I did get to spend a lot of time with Bird — on the stand and off. I would drive him around, go to the beach ... we got to be good friends. He certainly told me to stay away from drugs, and he kept certain people away from me who would have tried to give me things. I was twenty-two at the time, and I didn't start taking drugs until I was twenty-seven. Although people seem to think that I started much earlier.

MUSICIAN: It's hard to believe you. You were playing with users like Gerry Mulligan, Dick Twardzick, Art Pepper...

BAKER: I know, but I was totally elean. As clean as a whistle. Dick's overdose [while on tour with Baker in 1955] totally destroyed me. Destroyed me. Dick's parents felt it was my fault, even though I was completely unaware of this situation.

MUSICIAN: So why did you start at twenty-seven?

BAKER: Because I had to find out about it. I'd been fascinated for a long time, but I'd managed to fight it off. Then I started, in the States. I had gotten married a second time, which was a great mistake. She was a wonderful person, but...

MUSICIAN: And you were less popular than you had been in the early fifties....

BAKER: That could have been a reason, too ... could have been. It's not because of the "jazz world." It depends on the person. Some musicians were afraid to try drugs because they had a certain success and didn't want to jeopardize it. I'm not like that. I've been up and down so many times.... I have no property, no bank account, no money, and I probably will die broke — which is fine because that's the way I came into the world. I don't get any money from all those records I made. Just the advance. I've been cheated out of my record royalties by almost every company. I have no idea how many records I sell.

MUSICIAN: So, for you, do drugs have anything to do with the way a musician plays?

BAKER: No, I could have played just as well without it. I don't think it hurt it, but I don't think it did it any good. It gets in the way when you're strung out and have to play sick on the stand. I don't need drugs for inspiration. The music comes from inside, and is pushed out by outside influences from the musicians I'm playing with. I love to play, and I think it's the only reason I was put here on this earth.

MUSICIAN: You say that in a religious sense.

BAKER: Yes. But I don't believe there is a God. It's a beautiful story, but ... I was put here through thousands of years of people having children and it finally got to me. And my father was a good musician, he had a good ear, good time.

MUSICIAN: So you really feel you were put here to be a jazz musician?

BAKER: Yeah, I really do. If I'd played another kind of music, I would have been more successful and wouldn't be playing anymore. I'd be retired by now.

MUSICIAN: And it all started when your father gave you a trumpet, at thirteen.

BAKER: Well, my father wanted me to play trombone, since he liked Jack Teagarden very much. But I was too small physically to be able to play it. I was rather small for my age. So my father got me a trumpet.

MUSICIAN In California?

BAKER: Yeah, we'd moved from Oklahoma. I'd been playing about six months when a rock hit me in the left front tooth, chipping it. And I played that way for about twenty-five years. That, of course, made me invent my own technique of playing the trumpet, having that tooth missing.

MUSICIAN: It's assumed — erroneously, I think — that you were influenced by Miles Davis. You were both growing up at the same time, and none of the trumpet players were playing in the style you both developed. It was Roy Eldridge and then Dizzy Gillespie.

BAKER: It's a style that I evolved myself. Yes. Yes.

MUSICIAN: But who were you listening to in your youth?

BAKER: I listened to a lot of saxophone players. Quite a bit of Lester Young. Wardell Gray and Dexter Gordon. Wardell and Dexter lived in California. The trumpet players I knew were very young, like myself. Jack Sheldon, Pete and Conte Candoli. Also Art Farmer. We were influencing each other, and influenced by the saxophone players in L.A. at the time: Art Pepper, Lennie Niehaus, Joe Maini, Bill Perkins, Richie Kamuca.

MUSICIAN: Were you listening to singers?

BAKER: Not really. I admired Frank Sinatra and Mel Torme, Tony Bennett, and Steve Lawrence also.

MUSICIAN : You made your first record as a singer in 1954 for World Pacific [Chet Baker Sings]. Had you been singing since childhood?

BAKER: Yes. My mother made me enter talent contests as a singer in the L.A. area. I'd compete against girl accordion players, tap dancers, etc. I never won, but I came in second once. I'd sing songs like "That Old Black Magic" and "I Had the Craziest Dream." It was a lot of fun, and good experience. In 1954 Dick Bock, the owner of World Pacific, suggested that I make a record as a singer. He'd heard me sing a few times in clubs — I'd sing maybe a tune a set. I never sang when I was with Gerry Mulligan. Only on our recording of "My Funny Valentine," in the studio in 1953, People really loved it or they hated it.

MUSICIAN. Another question about your childhood. Is it true that you smoked marijuana with your parents when you were growing up?

BAKER: No. And I don't know how that story got invented and circulated. My father would smoke with other musicians a few times a week at the house, but I was very young at the time. I never smoked with my family. What a ridiculous story — my mother was very strict and she was against all that.

MUSICIAN: And now since we've come to that period in your life, the early Fifties, the inevitable question about Gerry Mulligan ...

BAKER: Playing again with Gerry is out of the question. He just doesn't want to have anything to do with me. He's so pissed off. Because I've been able to make it on my own, without him. He can't hack that. I was supposed to be his trumpet player for life, I guess. And at ridiculous wages. Which is why I left him in the first place. He wouldn't give me a raise, and I'd just been voted the best trumpet player in the world.

MUSICIAN: You did make that CTI live reunion album together in 1974....

BAKER: We did that just for old times' sake. You can imagine how many people come up to him and ask him when he and I will play together again. It just drives him out of his mind. It's so stupid, because even if we only got together for only one year, for a world tour, it could be fantastic economically. But he won't do it.

MUSICIAN: In 1965 you made that nice Plays Billie Holiday album. Did you listen to a lot of Billie Holiday, especially her last years?

BAKER. I never listened to anyone a lot.

MUSICIAN: That fascinated me in Art Pepper's book [Straight Life], and in Charles Mingus's book, too [Beneath the Underdog); they hardly ever talk about music or other musicians.

BAKER: I found Art Pepper's book kind of disgusting. All that shit about how good-looking he was, his peeping into bathroom windows ... masturbating. Art was really a loner, but not in the same way I am. It was very difficult to get to know him. People like Pepper and Mingus were a little too preoccupied with their genitals. I realized at a very tender age that there just isn't time or opportunity enough to screw every beautiful woman in the world. It's better to just be cool — if that is possible — and to be selective and wait for the opportunity. I can't really comment on Art because I never really knew him, never got high with him, not even once. I was always rather disappointed with Art's playing when we recorded in the 1950s. He wasn't completing any ideas — things were broken up into fragments. There were no long lines. But I never got to hear him live. I heard that in the 1970s his playing was twice as good as it had ever been.

MUSICIAN: What did you do between 1969 and 1973 when you quit playing?

BAKER: I had my other front tooth knocked out in 1969. My teeth were in bad shape anyway from all the drugs; I had so much pain that I decided to have them all pulled out. I got a denture, and when I tried to play again I couldn't even get a sound out of the trumpet. So I quit playing. I worked in a gas station sixteen hours a day for almost two years. Then I tried again, looking for a new embouchure. It took me two years. By the summer of 1973 I felt I was ready to try to go back to work. So I was driving to New York and stopped in a club in Denver to hear Dizzy Gillespie. I told him what I was doing and he called a club in New York from his hotel and I was hired for a two-week gig in New York. And that's how I started playing again. Then I went to Europe, and found the audiences very receptive. And now I find myself working in Europe seventy-five percent of the time.

MUSICIAN: Why do you spend so much time in Europe?

BAKER: It's very difficult to work regularly in the States. In New York if you work in a club you can't play in a club in New York before or after for a least a month — it's in the contract. So you have to travel. It's a lot easier to travel in Europe. And the level of comprehension is much higher than in the States. The average listener in the States has the mentality of a twelve-year-old.

MUSICIAN: You've made a lot of records over the years. Are you happy with them, or were a lot of them for the money?

BAKER: I always need the money. I'm fairly happy with the results. I would say seventy percent of the records are worthwhile musically. Of the recent ones, Broken Wing (Inner City] is very nice. Two a Day (Steeplechase) is nice. I've recorded a lot recently, mostly live club dates. In 1982 I did one in New York, which I like a lot, I wish it would come out, but the producer — a guy in the garment industry — is having problems. There's Kenny Barron, James Newton, Charlie Haden, Howard Johnson, and Ben Riley.

MUSICIAN: You recently recorded with Elvis Costello ("Shipbuilding," on Punch the Clock for Columbia), ffow'd that come about?

BAKER: I'd never heard of him. I was working in London and he contacted me. He is a very nice man. He is the only person not from the jazz world who has contacted me so far for a record date.

MUSICIAN: He added some nice little electronic touches to your solo. Does working more with electronics interest you?

BAKER: Not really. It would be fun to try to do it. But most jazz record companies don't seem to be interested in that. They want me to keep it ... simple. For my public.

MUSICIAN: You've always loved Miles. What do you think of his electronic playing, as of 1969?

BAKER. I think Miles enjoys doing things that upset people. I prefer his playing of twenty years ago, but I find what he's doing now just as valid.

MUSICIAN: Do you hear many young trumpet players you like? Musicians influenced by you?

BAKER: Yes, I think my style of trumpet playing is coming back a little. After all, how fast can you play? It's much more musical and certainly more — in my way of thinking anyway — difficult to play in a style where you play less notes and leave more open spaces and choose the notes you play very carefully. Playing a beautiful ballad is very difficult.

MUSICIAN: More difficult than playing a fast bebop tune?

BAKER: Well, of course, some of the bop tunes are very complicated, and if you try to play them at bright tempos, you triple the difficulty, and you get to the point where it's so difficult that it's no fun anymore — just a lot of hard work. And most people listening can't follow you anyway.

MUSICIAN: Your music is often so pretty that people may not realize just how complex it really is.

BAKER: I've been thinking about that a lot. It does look like it's a little too easy. I'm just sitting in a chair with my legs crossed. That's part of the problem. I'll have to make it look a lot more difficult somehow. But, you know, I've been playing for forty years. Why does it have to look so difficult? It's difficult to do, anyway. But this, of course, is a problem because people can't relate to that; if it doesn't look hard, then it must be easy to do. And if it's easy, then it can't be much.

MUSICIAN: There's a definite singing quality to your trumpet playing. Do you hear the notes that way in your head?

BAKER: Oh yeah. All the time. Anything I play on the horn I can sing. I think of every note I play. Once in a while I'll play something that's rather cliche-ish, because there are only a certain number of ways to get through a chord progression of a standard unless you really want to take it out.

MUSICIAN: How do you keep your lip in such good shape?

BAKER: Oh, the main thing is to play every night. I can play about two to three hours a night before I get tired. I don't practice at all, so even if there's one night in the week I don't play, the next night I notice it in my playing at first. I have to play every night.

MUSICIAN: You play so much, aren't you sick of playing?

BAKER Right now I enjoy playing. It means a lot that I have musicians with me that I have good vibrations with. It makes me feel like giving everything I have. It's not always that way — sometimes I find myself in cities with musicians that I don't like and I really don't want to play.

MUSICIAN: When are you going to stop?

BAKER: Within five years. And if I ever teach I'd like to get kids not to depend so much on the music on the paper. Look at Berklee, that's a good example of the problem. There are shortcuts you can show kids that could give them a different insight into music that would save them a lot of time. To make them understand that improvising is a complete separate art in itself, outside the mechanics of the knowledge of chords, etc.

MUSICIAN: You don't compose much. Your piece, "Blue Gilles," on the Broken Wing album is beautiful.

BAKER: It's hard for me to compose. By the time I notate it, I've already thought of five other ways it could be. By the end I'm frustrated with the way it sounds — it could always be better. The way it could have been. Since I play by ear I do it all in my head, but someday I hope to have a place and piano. Then maybe it would be easier to get things done. I'd like to write a few things before I give up for good.

MUSICIAN: Could we talk a bit about other trumpet players? Don Cherry, for instance.

BAKER: I knew him from way back at jam sessions in California in the mid-fifties. I liked Don's playing with Ornette later, but it's not my taste at all.

MUSICIAN: Clifford Brown?

BAKER: [a big smile] Now, that was a sweet man. There was no race problem with him at all. I had the chance to hear him live. Trumpet playing would be different today if he were still alive. He was another man who was put here to play trumpet.

MUSICIAN: Booker Little?

BAKER: [another big smile] Oh yeah! I liked him very much. And Blue Mitchell and Kenny Dorham.

MUSICIAN: You used to run around with Lee Morgan.

BAKER: I didn't like him as a person, so it was hard for me to care about his playing. Morgan and I used to go up to Harlem together to cop and to get high, and if you turned your back for a second, he'd shoot up all the stuff. If I don't like someone, I won't be able to like his music.

MUSICIAN: Yeah, but even Charlie Parker had a rough reputation....

BAKER: He never did anything bad to me. Though I do know that he would borrow instruments from people and then pawn them. It's a terrible thing to do. But I don't think that Bird would ever have done anything like that to me. I used to go up to Harlem a lot. At one point I knew everybody. I could go alone anytime at night and walk down the street and everybody would say, "Hey" ... you know. But not now, all those people are gone.

MUSICIAN: So, do you think heroin is as present in jazz now as it was before?

BAKER: No, I think it's pretty much a part of the past. One reason is that it becomes so expensive so quickly. And if you're depending on jazz to make money — hah — you can't earn enough money. And if you like cocaine to make speedballs, then you need to earn twice that to mix the two together. And you need to find all that money every day. Drugs were much cheaper in the fifties, and the quality was much better. You could buy really good heroin for three dollars. It's so expensive now, no one can afford it. Which is good, I guess.

MUSICIAN: Speaking of drugs, you smoke way too much tobacco. You don't do anything for your voice and yet it sounds great. Every time I hear you sing your voice is different.

BAKER. I do smoke too much, but I don't know why my voice changes the way it does. I just have to learn each night how to get around my voice. I have noticed in the past few weeks that the people who come to hear me react especially well to the numbers in the set when I sing.

MUSICIAN. Art Pepper told me a year before his death that every time he played he was playing as if it were the last time.

BAKER Yeah, I play every set as though it could be my last set, too. It's been like that for several years now. Because I don't have a lot of time left and I want to show the musicians playing with me — more than anybody else - that I'm giving it all I have. I don't want anyone holding back.”

Chet Baker died on May 13, 1988, about 5 years after this interview.