Seeking to understand the figure of Chet Baker through the reading and narration offered by the author of a book devoted to him, combined with carefully selected listening sessions highlighting the various musical phases of his career, can become a holistic and all-encompassing experience—an immersion into the folds of a character with infinite facets. The encounter with the history and music of Chet Baker will take place on December 21, starting at 5:30 pm, at the Teatro Comunale in the historic center of Montegabbione, under the patronage of the Municipality, with free admission while seats last.
Chet Baker can be loved or hated. He was a unicum, a kind of “take it or leave it,” whose music—together with a concert and recording activity often fragmented and driven by necessity, amounting to nearly two hundred albums—bore the shocks, inconsistencies, and unforeseen turns of a dissolute life lived on the razor’s edge, far from reason and clouded by alcohol and drugs. And yet his music, no less than his voice with its elegiac singing, often became a powerful instrument of mass seduction. Dense with pathos, immediate sentimentalism, and suffering—real or carefully constructed as a functional stance—the performances of the Oklahoma trumpeter have always divided audiences, even among fellow musicians, into two opposing camps.
On one side stand the supporters, easily captivated by that precise, polished phrasing, always sheltered within a kind of comfort zone that rarely ventured into excessive technical digressions, at least when measured against the evolutionary canons of the African-American vernacular. This modus operandi, moreover, left a long trail of followers, especially among European musicians, many of them in Italy. On the other side are the detractors, who have consistently regarded him as marginal to the historical developments that, from the 1950s and 1960s onward, many white—but above all African-American—colleagues impressed upon the jazz idiom, pushing it toward contemporaneity. Many among them—including musicologists, critics, scholars, and jazz historians—have repeatedly labeled him an occasional composer and a modest connoisseur of harmony, who used the jazz vernacular much like a repository of standards to draw from, and who was particularly adept at ensnaring white audiences. As so often happens, the truth likely lies somewhere in between.
At the Montegabbione (TR) event, Francesco Cataldo Verrina, an unaligned author, will present his own view of the trumpeter, recounting his life and the most significant moments of his discography—certainly not in accordance with the often standardized narrative propagated over the years by the media and many publications, especially in Europe. The very title of the book, “Chet Baker, I Lived for Art, I Lived for Love,” while pertinent—and the author will explain why—lends itself to multiple interpretations. The story of the Oklahoma musician, for reasons of editorial convenience long associated with West Coast Jazz, will be presented with rigorous realism, free from rhetoric, academic tribute, or nostalgia.
At the same time, the music revisited by the Baker Street Trio / Memories Of Chet (Diego Ruvidotti, trumpet and flugelhorn; Luca Grassi, double bass; Marco Pellegrini, drums) will create the most fitting atmosphere for the author’s storytelling. Verrina will intersperse his commentary with the performances selected for the event, placing them within their proper historical and spatio-temporal context. The musical program will highlight several variables of Chet Baker’s modus operandi: from the young, promising musician admired even by Charlie Parker, compared to movie stars and adopted as a model by fashion magazines, to the drug addict driven into flight across Europe, forced into a wandering life of expedients among Germany, France, England, the Scandinavian countries, and Italy (a country that played a decisive role in his life); through the apatrid bohemian, uncontrollable, repeatedly caught in the nets of justice, irascible and deceitful, disparaging American colleagues, upending the lives of those around him, at times violent toward women, but above all enslaved by drugs and crushed by a chaotic way of living at the very edge of legality; and finally to the terminal phase of an existential and artistic parabola always marked by unpredictability and precariousness, in which the trumpeter—aware that his time was running out—produced several masterpieces, aligning himself with various European labels and with authors able to grasp his mood and identify with him, before his death—still shrouded in mystery—brought an end to the existential torment of one who can, without fear of contradiction, be defined as the greatest jazz entertainer of the twentieth century.