On May 13, 1988, I was just getting started. I was 15, finishing my Freshman year at an arts high school in Dallas, and I had just acquired my first steady girlfriend. She was Wiccan and took credit—through her powers--for good turns in my life that allowed me to stay in this amazing place after I nearly blew it by flubbing backwards arpeggios on my piano exam. Who was I to argue? I was just learning how to be a jazz musician, and one morning the director of the jazz program, one of the country’s best, heard me jamming with a group of upperclassmen in the morning and said he wanted me in one of his ensembles and figured out a way for me to stay. One of those upperclassmen was the trumpet player Roy Hargrove, already a big deal. He was the first great musician I ever knew. Roy would soon be off to a year at the Berklee School, then greatness. No one ever saw him practice. He just played, and it felt effortless. Every one else was scales, patterns, modes, but not Roy. It was just tunes and solos, and the solos had exquisite architecture. Melody, space, suggestion, recapitulation, space, space, space, breath. We also knew about his troubles with drugs, which eventually contributed to his death at 49. But then the feeling around him was joy. He had been discovered by Wynton Marsalis and had already played with Herbie Hancock. He grew up in South Oak Cliff, the roughest neighborhood in town, but the name of his street was Legendary Lane. He was a destiny, unfolding just like one of his solos.
May 13, 1988 was also the day Chet Baker died at 58, looking much older. He fell out of a window in Amsterdam, and the details remained sketchy, but he was an unrepentant junkie til the end. Everything came too easily for Chet. He started playing with Charlie Parker, then in a popular pianoless quartet with Gerry Mulligan, and this young man with chiseled features and an Elvis-like pompadour was also a natural singer. His voice sounded like a trumpet, really unlike anyone else, maybe because he didn’t sound like he was trying to sing. It sounded like a horn. It was more like breathing.
Life for any 15-year-old is filled with mixed messages. My girlfriend told me it was all emanating from the Goddess, and signed her love letters “Blessed Be.” My music teachers were telling me to practice, practice, practice. Then there was Roy who was better than anyone else—certainly better than his teachers—without practicing. Was the Goddess related to the muse? Was there some spiritual underground that led us to pure inspiration? Was it forbidden? Illegal? Deathly?
These thoughts I had a 15 seem absurd to me now, yet it is still hard to explain what made Roy such a natural, and what it was that led Chet Baker so effortlessly to the music as the strongest narcotic of all? In 1968, when Chet’s career had skidded as rock and roll stole the thunder, drug dealers sent thugs to beat him up and knocked out all of his teeth. The ones that weren’t knocked out were pulled, one by one. For a trumpet player, this is suicide. I saw Freddie Hubbard—a titan of the trumpet, who Roy credited as his greatest influence—try to play after he had inhaled on the wrong end of a crack pipe, and it was clearly all over with him. Chet had to pump gas for a while, but he eventually figured out a way to play with dentures. He never got over the habit, didn’t even seem to try, but he did work for a year at getting that embouchure back, and, miraculously, he did. He sounded more wounded, of course, but that was part of the theatre. This is the part of the story where you’d think he’d be grateful for his second chance.
The fashion photographer Bruce Weber filmed lots of footage of Chet shortly before he died, and his film, Let’s Get Lost, released posthumously, told a raw story but he made it look like a Guess ad. That weird Oklahoma twang sounded so hip , like he could barely bother. There was a circle of air around every utterance. At 15, I was obsessed with Chet. I loved that, like me, he couldn’t read music. (That’s what he told people anyway.) I loved all of his playing, but especially at the end. The more wrecked he became, the more fascinating he was, the closer he was to that thing we all wanted to get to, like Lester Young and Billie Holiday at the end. I was grateful to be going to that school, but many of those musicians were, you know, aggressive teenage boys, showing off technique, playing riffs plagiarized from a book by the jazz educator Jamey Aebsersold. I was limited by my lack of classical technique, but I tried to make up for in that deep, painful, fucked-up feeling, some of it in anticipation of later suffering. I didn’t do drugs and never would, but music was my drug, and the more unadulterated, the better. Some of the musicians were wonderful, and I enjoyed their company, but there was a kind of clinical musician who played by the rules, and that was the problem. The missing element, after originality, was breath. Oxygen. That was an essential quality to the genius of Miles Davis, another one of my teenage obsessions. My band director told us to play with the space of Chet, his idol, and Miles. There were steps for how to get there, and that was the problem, the steps. Chet had no steps. He had his chops, his ear, his access to that dark, daemonic place. You could hear it in the singing and the playing and all the air. And the dentures somehow made that voice sound even more otherworldly. He looked terrible at the end, but he was fascinating. He was a David Lynch movie that never got made.
May 13, 1988 was a reality that feels long extinguished. Chet’s luck ran out, and Roy was on his way to much beauty before it was all gone. I have been blessed and cursed many times over now, and, even as I am a lot less suggestible than I was at 15, I still don’t quite know where it all comes from. I am 49, the age Roy was when he left us. There is still a committee of muses I work for every day.
The last time I saw Roy play, in a club in Hollywood called Café Catalina, the muse was definitely there. For his final tune, he did something I saw him do in high school, but he wasn’t known for it—he sang. The song was Jay Livingston and Ray Evans’s “Never Let Me Go.” His voice was too rough for prime time, but just what we needed for last call. He sang it like a trumpet.
Never let me go,
Love me much too much,
If you let me go
Life would lose its touch.
What would I be without you?
There's no place for me without you!
The whole time I saw him singing it, I felt the desperation of the song, but also the balladic swing in the delivery. He was there, but he was also gone. He was going to a place the rest of us could admire without quite understanding. He was fully in it, and we knew that we could not hold on for too long.
We have no idea what’s going on, even if we think we do. But when someone is undeniably delivering something from some other world to the rest of us, we want to indulge them. On May 13, 1988, a window opened, and Chet Baker’s luck ran out. On November 2, 2018, Roy Hargrove died of cardiac arrest brought on by kidney failure after 14 years on and off of a dialysis machine. Did Chet really not know how to read music? Did Roy really just want us to think he was always playing, never practicing? When I think of Roy Hargrove, the first great musician I ever knew, I think of the way he immersed himself in an Afro-Cuban groove, in a breakneck hard bop tune, and that night in the city of fallen angels I when heard that raw, imperfect voice creating something that felt cursed and charmed, breathing in, breathing out, delivering us to a place that we would live in if we could, maybe in a better world than this one.
So wonderful. Thanks. I never saw Chet Live but I saw Roy there was no one like him.
Wonderful - thank you!