It remains a blessing for this writer to find publications that “get” him –and what I’m attempting with my ongoing project (the first installment, of course, being The Blackened Blues, released last summer), which will continue with the second installment, in 2023 (stay tuned for more details), and I continue to enjoy the support from Jerry Jazz Musician. This tribute the troubled, brilliant, beautiful Chet Baker concerns his effulgent contributions to the remarkable soundtrack to the film Smog.
Chet Baker’s Smog*
Playing tunes about L.A. while in Italy seems about right:
a metaphor on many levels for what jazz was (and it’s only
gotten worse for those who die keeping it alive, playing
themselves into a tapestry that records their efforts—
on records, for the record—graveyards of recycled bodies:
boys who answered the call, recalling Gabriel’s horn
bellowing chord changes baked into biblical text, or faceless
officers sounding the call to arms, the peculiar music
that dances on the edge of death, itself an old standard
handed down the line, centuries of the same scene, meant
to inspire anyone willing to perish so the song’s context
is secured; different in all ways from the improvisations
played by men in suits, juiced up or strung out or resigned
to their own rueful fates, never closer to something sublime
than when their burned offerings abscond the smoke, a signal
at battle’s end: alive but aware this relief is not sustainable).
(*In 1962, battling his heroin addiction and—like other jazz artists who had difficulty making a living through their music—decamped in Italy, Baker collaborated with the brilliant composer Piero Umiliani for the soundtrack to Franco Rossi’s film Smog.)
