Some musical discoveries come early in life. Others wait patiently for decades.
For me, Chet Baker has been one of the great musical revelations of this year.
Last night, as part of the San Cassiano Festival in the hills above Bagni di Lucca, we attended a concert dedicated to the memory of Chet Baker. It turned out to be one of those magical evenings that remain in the memory long after the final applause has faded.
We arrived early and found ourselves sitting in the front row. Before us rose the magnificent Romanesque façade of the ancient church, its extraordinary medieval carvings softly illuminated by thousands of tiny fairy lights as twilight settled over the mountains. The evening air was cool, the setting almost dreamlike. It was difficult to imagine a more beautiful venue for music.
Then the quartet came on stage.
Giuseppe Nannini – trumpet
Damiano Calloni – piano
Federico Paoli – double bass
Vittorio Conti – drums
The musicians—devotees of Baker in every sense—understood exactly what made his music unique. Their programme alternated wonderfully between intimate ballads and lively, swinging jazz. The slow pieces seemed almost to suspend time; the faster numbers sparkled with wit, elegance and joy.
Naturally, they ended with My Funny Valentine. They also performed Almost Blue, Let’s Get Lost and other pieces forever associated with Baker. Every arrangement had been lovingly prepared.
One of the delights of living in Italy is that evenings of this quality are often offered almost as gifts to the community. Elsewhere, one might pay a substantial ticket price and find oneself somewhere in the back rows of a crowded concert hall. Here, we sat close to the musicians in a half-filled square before an ancient church, surrounded by mountains and silence. The musicians themselves seemed delighted—not by the size of the audience, but by its warmth and attentiveness. They had already enjoyed the famous tortelli from Santina’s bar next door, another reminder that music, friendship and good food belong naturally together in Tuscany.
I have never considered myself a great jazz expert. Some jazz leaves me completely cold, while other works have stayed with me throughout my life. I have long admired Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter’s The All Seeing Eye, McCoy Tyner’s magnificent piano playing, and many other great recordings.
But somehow Chet Baker had largely passed me by.
What a mistake that was.
Listening to him now, one understands immediately why, in the 1950s, people even suggested to Miles Davis that a young trumpeter named Chet Baker might become serious competition. Of course, history has room for both of them.
Miles Davis often seems to transport us into another universe, his playing visionary, mysterious and almost supernatural.
Chet Baker speaks directly to the heart.
His trumpet is lyrical, intimate and profoundly human. Every note seems to carry both beauty and vulnerability.
And then there is his singing.
I had never fully appreciated what an extraordinary vocalist he was. There is a recording of My Funny Valentine in which he sings with astonishing tenderness before seamlessly taking up the trumpet to complete the performance. It is one of the most moving musical experiences I have heard in years.
The concert also included film footage and interviews with Baker himself. That, perhaps, was the greatest revelation of all.
Here was no tortured genius wrapped in pretension.
Instead, he came across as gentle, modest, almost shy—a remarkably simple and likeable man whose entire life seemed centred on making beautiful music.
Knowing what happened to him makes the story all the more heartbreaking.
Heroin addiction nearly destroyed his career. It brought arrests, imprisonment and years of personal struggle. For us here in Lucca, his story has a special significance. In 1960 he was arrested in the city and spent around sixteen months in the old San Giorgio prison. Those were dark days but thanks to the local priest Chet was allowed to bring and play his trumpet in the prison. Local people still remember gathering outside the prison enclosure to hear the sound of his trumpet floating from his cell window over the ancient walls of Lucca.
Today we would probably regard him as someone in desperate need of medical help rather than punishment.
Yet the remarkable thing about Chet Baker is that he refused to surrender.
After his release from prison he recorded Chet Is Back!, one of the finest albums of his entire career. He rebuilt his life as a musician and, despite continuing struggles, spent many of his finest later years performing throughout Europe—and especially in Italy, the country that gradually became his second home.
His relationship with Italy was far deeper than that of a visiting American jazz star. From his first performances here in the late 1950s, Italian audiences instinctively understood the lyricism and melancholy that lay at the heart of his music. He worked with outstanding Italian musicians, recorded in Milan and Rome, collaborated with Ennio Morricone, and returned again and again to Italian concert halls, jazz clubs and festivals. He learned to speak some Italian, formed lasting friendships, and found in Italy an audience that loved him not only for his genius but also for his humanity.
There is, perhaps, an affinity between Baker’s music and the Italian temperament. His playing possesses the qualities Italians have always cherished in music: melody, lyricism, tenderness and emotional honesty. Even after his death, that affection has never faded. Across Italy, concerts, festivals and exhibitions continue to celebrate his life and music, and nowhere is that remembrance more poignant than in Lucca, where the city has come to embrace not simply the troubled prisoner of 1960, but the great artist whose trumpet once drifted over its ancient walls.
It is one of history’s beautiful ironies that the country in which he endured one of the darkest chapters of his life also became the country that loved him perhaps more faithfully than any other.
Towards the end of his career Baker once remarked, with characteristic modesty, that there was not much he could really do except sing and play the trumpet.
What an understatement.
He did those two things with a beauty that very few musicians in any genre have ever achieved.
Some discoveries arrive late.
But perhaps they arrive precisely when we are ready for them.
Better late than never.
Thank you, Chet Baker.
And thank you to the San Cassiano Festival for introducing me—at last—to one of the greatest jazz musicians I never knew.
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