# CD review: Chet Baker – If I Only Had A Job 2021: Video, CD cover

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2021/09/05/cd-review-chet-baker-if-i-only-had-a-job-2021-video-cd-cover/
- Published: 2021-09-05T23:16:41+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**In the middle 1950s, Chet Baker was the young [Lochinvar](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52300/lochinvar)
out of the West, the fair-haired boy of critics and laymen alike, riding in on his
golden trumpet. Rising to prominence with Gerry Mulligan’s pianoless quartet, as
the West Coast jazz movement began its popular sway, he won the New Star award in
DownBeat’s first International Jazz Critics Poll in 1953. Then Baker formed his 
own quartet and went on to win both the DownBeat and Metronome readers’ polls for
the next two years.**

Now, approximately 11 years after the first flush of success, he has returned to
the United States from a five-year European odyssey that included the sweet smell
of success—but only in whiffs. More often the odor was of creosote in jail.

From September 1955 to April 1956, Baker toured Iceland, England and the Continent
with a quartet. During that period his pianist, Dick Twardzik, died in Paris of 
an overdose of heroin. Baker came back to the U.S. As he tells it:

“When I came home, I started using drugs. I got busted several times, went to the
federal hospital in Lexington [Kentucky]—then I got busted in New York and did four
months on Riker’s Island, and I decided to leave the United States for a while.”

At the end of July 1959, Baker departed for Italy alone and upon his arrival formed
a quartet with local musicians. But if he had expected to find a more lenient attitude
toward drug use, he soon found he was mistaken.

For 17 months he languished in an Italian jail. While he was serving his sentence,
a film company from Rome approached him about bringing his life story to the screen.
Baker wrote the script, and the company worked out several different versions of
it but “couldn’t make up their minds,” according to Baker.

By the time he was released from prison, the prospect of his life story on film,
directed by a top-flight man—Dino DeLaurentis had been in at the beginning of the
idea—had evaporated. But another opportunity presented itself almost immediately.
A good friend of Baker’s had become owner of the Olympia, the largest night club
in Milan.

“He had a small room there that they didn’t use,” Baker related, “and he let me 
have that. He gave me a waiter and a bartender and put a sign outside: CHET BAKER
CLUB. It was very elegant—plush, upholstered chairs, wall-to-wall carpeting, columns
in the middle of the room, beautiful little bandstand, velvet drapes on the walls,
the lighting was beautiful and it seated about 80 people comfortably.”

Baker played there for a short time, but the official opening never took place.

“I went to play a concert in Munich,” Baker explained, “and I had trouble there.
Nothing happened, but there was a lot of publicity in the newspapers, and when I
got back to the Italian border, they wouldn’t let me in. I had signed a contract
with RCA Italiana and I lost that. And they tied a lot of my money up—about 3,000,000
lira.”

Baker had made some recording for the firm and said he was to do two more albums,
but these never came to pass. When he was refused re-entry to Italy, Baker went 
to Paris, where he worked at the Blue Note for three months.

Then he received an offer to do a movie in England with Susan Hayward and spent 
nine months there. “I was trying to wait out the one-year waiting period, so I could
join the union and work in England,” he said, “but I had trouble there and was deported.

“The movie was originally supposed to be called _Summer Flight_, but I think they
changed the name to _Stolen Hours_ or something. Susan Hayward, in the story, is
ill, and she’s going to die, and she throws a big party, which most of the story
is around. I’m the leader of the band at the party. I did a lot of the sound track
for the movie, and I believe the opening shot is a close-up right on the bell of
my horn.”

After England had sent him back to France, Baker worked at Paris’ Chat Qui Peche
for about eight months. It was here he teamed up with Melih Gürel, a Turkish-French
horn player who is a graduate of the Ankara Music Conservatory. From there, Baker
went to the Club Jamboree in Barcelona, Spain, as a single.

“It was a pitiful rhythm section,” Baker said. “Kenny Drew had been there just before
me, and he had walked out on the job and told them they shouldn’t even be playing.
He gave them a terrible complex, so when I got there, they were really scared to
death.”

After a month in Spain, Baker returned to France, where he received an offer to 
play at the Blue Note in Berlin. He played there one night and promptly was arrested.
He spent 40 days in a German hospital and then was deported, but this time it was
back to the U.S. on March 3, 1964.

Why, when there are several other musician-addicts in Europe, did a pattern of harassment
seem to follow Baker?

“I don’t know,” he said. “It just seemed like field day for the police department
whenever Chet Baker came to town. It seemed to be a tie-up between the police department
and the newspapers—the publicity bit—because I was always very cool. I never bothered
anybody. I never sold any drugs to anybody. Everything I did was for myself.

“I really believe it’s the fault of the journalists and the newspapers in those 
countries. For instance, you probably read about them finding me in a filling station.
Well, the true story about that is that at that time I was in a clinic. I had put
myself in a clinic in Lucca [Italy], and I was working in Viareggio … the doctor
would take me to work and bring me home.

“One day, I had to go into Viareggio in the afternoon—for a contract or to have 
some pictures taken—so he gave me the medicine I needed for that day. I had a little
Fiat that I rented and I started to get on the Autostrada—which was about a 30-minute
ride—and I wasn’t feeling very good, so I decided to stop in this gas station and
make an injection before I got on the Autostrada, because you can’t stop. So, I 
went in there—I had stopped there many times before—and I went into the men’s room,
but I had a lot of difficulty making the injection. I was in there about 35 minutes,
and there was a knock on the door. I had just finished and put everything away. 
It was the police. They said, ‘Come with us.’ I went to the police station, and 
they called the doctor. In 15 minutes I was gone.

“But that night when the newspapers came out, they said the Chet Baker had been 
found unconscious in the toilet of a filling station, that there was blood everywhere,
that the police had to break in the door—and none of this was true. Naturally, when
the people in the tribunale, the courts, read these things, they probably think,‘
The man is completely insane.’

**Tracks**
 01. Summertime 02. Once In A While 03. Autumn In New York 04. There’s
A Small Hotel 05. Tenderly 06. Alone Together 07. You Go To My Head 08. These Foolish
Things 09. Exitus 10. I’ll Remember April 11. Lover Man

![](https://i0.wp.com/www.dibpic.com/uploads/posts/2021-07/1627222034_folder.jpg?
resize=640%2C640&ssl=1)

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