Born to Be Blue: Ethan Hawke as Chet Baker

Born to be Blue, a Canadian film directed by Robert Budreau, with Ethan Hawke as jazz trumpeter Chet Baker (1929-1988)

I was introduced to jazz and blues in my teens in the early 1940s via half a dozen 78RPM boogie-woogie records left behind by my older brother Billy, who had joined the WW II U. S. Navy. By 1947, age seventeen, I had amassed a collection of some 500 discs, in the process widening my musical tastes— from Meade Lux Lewis, Albert Ammons, and other classic boogie woogie pianists, King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Earl Hines, Bix Beiderbecke, the Chicago and New York scenes of Eddie Condon, Pee Wee Russell, and Wild Bill Davison, and the 1940s New Orleans Revival —to include Swing Era big bands and combos, Art Tatum, the Nat King Cole Trio, and Jazz at the Philharmonic, which had in its ranks Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and other pioneers of bebop. At some point in the early 1950s, I became aware of and began to like the West Coast Cool Jazz of Gerry Mulligan, Dave Brubeck, Paul Desmond, and Chet Baker.

Over the years, I caught in action some of those alluded to above—e.g., Pops, The Fatha, some members of the Condon Gang, Dizzy, Gerry, Dave— but three decades would go by before I found myself at a performance of Chet Baker, in 1981, several years after I had become the Washington Post’s jazz writer. 

Arriving in time to review the 10 p.m. first set (we reviewers had to meet a 1 a.m. deadline—in this pre-cell-phone era, I called my 200 or so words in from a pay phone), I jotted down some first impressions and then, upon his arrival, assessed Chet Baker’s performance.

“It was all sixes and sevens at the One Step Down Friday night as, first, a substitute bassist arrived unheralded and then word came that a missed train connection in New York had delayed the headliner, trumpeter Chet Baker. But it was worth the wait when the former Gerry Mulligan sideman finally mounted the bandstand ’round about midnight on ‘Broken Wing,’ a brooding instrumental on which he stayed in the lower ranges of his horn, with bassist Tommy Cecil and pianist Armen Donelian.” I went on to observe that Chet played “softly down in the darker octaves, only occasionally ascending for brief flurries of bright notes executed with speed and precision. His singing, largely scatting, as on ‘Just Friends,’ was light and airy, as against his somber and haunting horn. The combination was an effective balance of optimism and despair.”

Chet Baker had not much been on my mind since then when, a year or so ago, I was reading, with much enjoyment, Elvis Costello’s autobiography Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink (Blue Rider Press) and came upon the author’s encounter with Chet, in 1983. Costello wanted a trumpet solo for “Shipbuilding” on his album Punch the Clock. As it turned out, Chet, whom Costello had never before met (and Chet had never heard of him), had a gig at the Canteen, “a rather unpromising venue in Covent Gardens,” so Costello dropped by and between sets asked Chet if he could record a solo. Prepared to pay “anything he wanted,” Costello asked what he would charge and was astonished to be told, “Oh, scale.” He offered double scale and Chet agreed to cut the solo that week. “Chet then asked me those things that junkies ask near strangers. When I told him I had no such intelligence, those matters were never spoken between us again.”

Another connection with Chet was my meeting William Claxton (1927-2008), who shot iconic photographs of Chet in the 1950s. Bill and I met in 1999 at his Govinda Gallery, D.C., book signing, at which we traded inscribed copies of my Swing Era New York: The Jazz Photographs of Charles Peterson for his Jazz Seen. He wrote me a few weeks later, saying, “Dear, Royal, I finally got around to really reading your book. What a terrific piece of jazz history. Although most of the bands were a bit before my time, it truly is the era that I enjoy most . . . the entire big band scene . . . . I’m envious of you and this great book. Thank you so much for sharing it with me. My book seems boring by comparison!” Okay, that’s not much of a connection. I just wanted to ensure that Bill’s nice words of praise saw permanence.

Born to be Blue with Ethan Hawke as jazz trumpeter Chet Baker (1929-1988) is a Canadian film directed by Robert Budreau, who has made some award-winning short films. Described as a re-imagining of Baker's musical comeback in the late-1960s, the film thus takes place a decade and a half before I caught him at the One Step Down.

The film makes many good uses of flashbacks, for example, from a gig in New York (organized for him by Dizzy Gillespie) to a 1954 scene at Birdland (Miles Davis back then advising Baker to “go back to the beach”). With both Dizzy and Miles in the audience at the later gig (which in reality was at the Half Note, not the film’s Birdland), Chet says to himself, “Hello, Dizzy, hello, Miles. There’s a little white cat on the West Coast gonna eat you up.”

I was moved by the film’s inexorable decline from an insistently proclaimed (by the trumpeter and his management) “clean” Chet on methadone to his inevitable and repeated return to the needle for the real thing. There are many forceful, even gripping, scenes, for instance, a 1960s drug-related street beating that so damaged his mouth and teeth that it deprived him of his embouchure (until he mastered playing with upper dentures), with Jane (Carmen Ejogo as a composite for Baker’s many women) looking on, in horrified helplessness.
Although far from a happy story, Born to Be Blue is, in the words of Australian critic Tony Mitchell, “a welcome reminder of the subtle, muted power of a man who was called the James Dean of jazz.”

Still a junkie living from one fix to the next, Chet Baker spent the final several decades of his life wandering Europe, playing and recording there, only occasionally visiting the U.S. for gigs. French writer Philippe Adler wrote, in 1988, “The European public is stricken with a profound sensitive and respectful love for this eternal wanderer, this voyager without any baggage except his trumpet case.”

In 1988, the 1950s jazz star was found dead in the street below his Amsterdam hotel window. Baker biographer (Deep in a Dream: The Long Night of Chet Baker, 2002) James Gavin speculates that Baker was high on dope and took his own life, “opening a window and letting death come to him,” dying “willfully of a broken heart.”

Women in Jazz: Some Observations Regarding the Ongoing Discrimination in Performance and Journalism

The presence of women instrumentalists in jazz at best making incremental progress — albeit almost totally so in combos and bands that they themselves are leaders of (and in which one finds many, and sometimes mostly, men) — it is clear that there should be no let-up in the effort to bring an end to this blatant form of discrimination in the jazz world. Women belong, and deserve to be, in the mainstream of the art form. That they are not is shameful. In fact, jazz is far behind not only American society but behind all other performing arts and all other musical genres in demolishing gender discrimination.

One of the most heartwarming expressions of concern about this salient issue was Nat Hentoff's Last Chorus column in the June 2001 JazzTimes. Titling his piece “Testosterone Is Not An Instrument,” Nat alluded to Lara Pellegrinelli's “scorching . . . indictment” of Wynton Marsalis’ Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra for excluding female instrumentalists from its ranks. Lara’s broadside originally appeared in the November 2000 Village Voice and reappeared in an updated version in the March 2001 JazzTimes. Titled, respectively, “Dig Boy Dig: Jazz at Lincoln Center Breaks New Ground, But Where Are the Women?” and “I Guess I Would Notice. But That Doesn’t Mean You Shouldn’t,” the VV article can be read online at villagevoice.com and the JT one at jazztimes.com. The Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra remains all-male as of this essay's posting in March 2004.

Nat Hentoff quoted Billy Taylor as a strong supporter of women instrumentalists. “Time won't do it,” said Dr. Taylor. “There has to be an effort.” In a trenchant follow-up Letter to the Editor in the September 2001 JazzTimes, British jazz author Mike Hennessey commended Nat “for his condemnation of the pernicious and persistent discrimination to which female musicians have been subjected for decades.”

Nat also wrote, in the November 2003 issue of JazzTimes, a wonderful column on Diva. “If there were still big band cutting contests,” he said, “[Diva] would swing a lot of the remaining big bands out of the place.” (Nat’s columns can be found on line at jazztimes.com but the magazine's website does not run its Letters to the Editor column, so the published hard-copy issue itself will have to be sought for Mike's letter.)

Another splendid article is Monique Buzzarté, “View from New York: J@LC — Notice Something Missing?” on Newmusicbox.org. Buzzarté, a trombonist living in New York,specializes in new music. An author and educator as well as a performer, her advocacy efforts for women in music led to the integration of women into the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in 1997. Buzzarté’s article has some arresting links, e.g., “Orchestrating Impartiality: The Impact of 'Blind' Auditions on Female Musicians,” a study by Claudia Goldin and Cecilia Rouse published in the September 2000 issue of the American Economic Review, showed that the adoption of screened auditions in symphony orchestras resulted in an astonishing 50 percent greater rate of advancement for women from the preliminary to the semi- final audition rounds, and much greater likelihood that they would win in the final round.

Perhaps it's time to again mount the battlements. Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, which receives federal funding, still has no women in its ranks. (Anybody out there for a class action suit?) A wonderfully ironic commentary on all of this was provided by the recent occurrence of a "Jazz and Democracy Symposium" at the Walter Reade Theater, Lincoln Center, New York, on December 10, 2003. I haven't seen a transcript of the discussion so I don't know whether the absence of women in the LCJ Orchestra was cited as constituting a glaring contradiction of the symposium’s theme. One hopes that there was at least one gadfly in the audience who put the question to Wynton, “Where is the other fifty per cent of the populace in your ‘democratic’ orchestra?” (For some wonderful photographs of the event by Enid Farber, log onto www.jazzhouse.org and scroll down to Jazz Photos in the Gallery and then to “The Jazz & Democracy Symposium.”)

Two of my own books contain profiles dealing with this issue. In The Jazz Scene (Oxford University Press, 1991), Baltimore-based flutist Paula Hatcher discusses the status of women jazz instrumentalists as of 1990. In my Living the Jazz Life (Oxford University Press, 2000), Washington-area multi-reed and woodwind player Leigh Pilzer updates the scene a decade later. In the former book I “ghettoized” women in a dozen pages of the final, “Contemporary Scene,” chapter. Chided for so doing, I spread women throughout Living the Jazz Life. I take pride in the fact that, of the forty musicians profiled in the latter, eleven are women instrumentalists. My forthcoming (January 2005) Growing Up With Jazz (Oxford University Press) also contains profiles of some women instrumentalists from here and abroad.

Another issue that should be of concern to those who wish to see the elimination of gender discrimination in jazz is the ongoing, and flagrant, bias against women as critics of the music. Examine the mastheads of the leading U.S. jazz magazines and take note of the ratio of men to women writers and photographers. Down Beat has four women among the total of 58 contributors named, JazzTimes five of 61, Jazziz seven of 48.

Several years ago I was examining the list of those who voted that year in the annual Down Beat International Critics Poll and noted that only three women were among the 103 critics listed. This number of women has remained steady since then.

I might note that, about five years ago when I first counted the total critics involved in the Down Beat International Critics Poll, the number stood at 103. Last year's 113 indicates that, while the total has increased, those added have not changed the representation of women in the list. There were three in the 2003 list. I ask you, why did Down Beat not add ten women instead of swelling the male contingent?

The virtual absence of women among the critics for the Down Beat annual poll is a very serious, issue that should be addressed in an aggressive manner, not waiting for women to approach the magazine. I would conjecture that most women jazz writers would hesitate to do so, having already concluded that the Down Beat editorial staff and its contributing writers is pretty much a male preserve. Not a happy image in this day and time, eh?"