The Spirits #36: The Chet Baker

~ The Manhattan-Old Fashioned Rum Crossover Episode ~ Alone Together ~ What a drag about your old man ~ Neuroscience ~

ENJOYING THE SPIRITS? Join the ‘Cabinet’! Subscriptions really do help me keep this show on the road. The Cabinet is like the Spirits, but each mail will focus on a different ingredient as opposed to a different cocktail. First up (next week) GREEN CHARTREUSE. Sign up to receive!

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~ THE CHET BAKER ~

60ml dark rum
10ml Italian vermouth
5ml honey syrup
Dash Angostura bitters

Put on ‘Let’s Get Lost’. Place all the ingredients in an large whiskey glass with a jumbo-sized ice cube and stir, stir, stir away. Garnish with a strip of lemon or orange peel.

Some Chet Baker notes:

1) To make honey syrup, all you need to do is dissolve, ooh, three parts honey in one part hot water, just enough to loosen it and make it easier to pour (NB: this is a good way of using up honey that has crystallised). I used orange blossom honey from Tesco; but a fancier honey would lift this up a notch or two.

2) This will work with any other dark spirit - bourbon, obviously - but rum is especially good.

LET’S GET CROSSED off everybody’s lists. Some MUSIC… and yes indeed it is time for the Spirits. Nice.

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I am Richard Godwin and this is the Spirits. You will find instructions for making sugar syrup, grenadine, orgeat ice, etc here and my 10 RULES FOR MAKING COCKTAILS here. I have also assembled some bottle recommendations for a cabinet here - and this here is the full archive of weekly specials. Do please share the Spirits with anyone who might like it - and feel free to tag me with your creations on Instagram or Twitter. Also scroll to the bottom for what to get in for next week! 👇

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THERE was moment when I was half-regretting this week’s choice of cocktail. Wasn’t the weather too hot for a heavy after-dinner drink like this one? Oughtn’t I have chosen something that at least nods to the ongoing European Championships? It’s ENGLAND VS SCOTLAND tonight FFS! Aren’t journalists supposed to be if not topical than at least seasonal?

Then the pressure changed and those heavy grey clouds vibrated and burst and all was grey again. And what is Chet Baker but the sound of summer rain? How does he manage to sound so spritzy and carefree on I Fall in Love Too Easily… and yet so resigned, so despondent, so fragile? The trumpet is so insouciant and melodic, no unnecessary tricks, just petals in the breeze; but then there is his voice, always an eighth-tone flat, pulling everything back and down. A cold front blowing in. A reverse italic. His voice is often described as ‘nasal’; I can hear tear-ducts in their too. I always picture him flying down the Pacific Coast Highway in a convertible, ocean glistening, a beautiful woman on the passenger seat; and yet he is rushing away from the very idyll that frames him. Back to the blues.

That’s not so far off, perhaps. Back in the early ‘50s, Chet Baker was the James Dean of Jazz, a proto-hearthrob before that was fully codified thing, marketable in a way that, say, Charlie Parker wasn’t. But he messed up his own charmed life and the lives around him. By the time he died, falling out of an Amsterdam window in 1988, he was sometimes shooting cocaine every five minutes according to his biographer, James Gavin - and that wasn’t even his first choice of drug. But there were occasional glimmers of the talent that had been wasted. In 1987, he played a famous concert in Tokyo and, mindful the strict Japanese drug laws, kept to cognac and methedone. He played like THIS. It’s haunting. He was apparently cheerful and sociable too. One of his band pleaded with him at the airport: see how great life could be without heroin? "Yeah", he replied. "I can't wait to get to Paris and get fucked up."

Jazz pseuds have often been a little sniffy about Baker, particularly in the light of his long, druggy decline. It didn’t help that he was as dumb as a box of frogs and not a nice person at all. Miles Davis quite rightly resented how white players like Baker got all the credit for the ‘cool’ sound that he had invented. Bill Evans was appalled at his lack of theory or even basic musical knowledge; Baker couldn’t even read a chord chart but sort of tootled around the melody instead. "Baker, in my view, could not play jazz, and did not play it,” wrote one critic on his death in 2002. “He did torch songs on dead batteries.”

But jazz - like cocktails - attracts a dismayingly large number of devotees who are overlyfinicky about categories and performative with their scorn. (“HE MADE A MARTINI AND IT DIDN’T HAVE VERMOUTH IN IT!!”) It’s kind of funny sometimes… but also shouldn’t be taken too seriously. I find I don’t care much if it’s “jazz” - much as I don’t particularly care if you’ve used the authentic 1895 recipe! - as long as it creates the right sensation. As long as it stirs. Besides: Chet Baker patently could and did play jazz. Charlie Parker thought so. He selected Baker for his West Coast touring band. And listen to the way he combines with Gerry Mulligan here. Or here. As for his ballads: “Torch songs on dead batteries” - what’s not to like about that?

Maybe dumbness has its virtues too. Maybe that’s what that dead battery note in his voice is. Did you know that Benito Mussolini’s son, Romano, was a jazz pianist? On discovering that Romano was in the band accompanying him one night in an Italian club, Chet Baker went up to him and said: “What a drag about your old man.”

Anyway, the cocktail. It’s from Milk and Honey in New York, a crucial venue in the 2000s drinking revival that has since fallen prey to Coronavirus. There’s not a whole lot to say about it other than it’s sort of half way between a Manhattan and an Old Fashioned, only with dark rum. I’m not sure there’s much of a link with Baker but it tastes pretty good with his music.

The picture at the top is Baker with Liliane Rovère, by the way. They met at Birdland in New York in 1954 and had a two-year affair. Baker’s then-wife pulled a gun on her when she found out. These days she’s best known as Arlette in Call My Agent.

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PLAYLIST

Well I’m afraid there wasn’t much option but to go the full Chester.

THIS PLAYLIST UPDATES AUTOMATICALLY EACH WEEK. Here is an ongoing archive of past songs.

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THINGS TO READ

I interviewed the neuroscientist-psychiatrist-bioengineer Karl Deisseroth on his new book, Connections, which also reveals him to be a wonderful writer too. Deisseroth came up with a revolutionary new field of brain science called optogenetics and, later, figured out how to make brains transparent. And yet his entire scientific quest was prompted by his love of poetry and his fascination with where feelings come from. It’s a trip! (Guardian).

I also wrote this about, erm, picnics (The Times).

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Chet Baker, Jazz trumpeter, dies at 59 in a fall. (New York Times)

England vs Scotland… What has changed since 1996? (The Guardian)

Why it’s time to reclaim the word DAD (ES Magazine).

In defence of virtue signalling (The Times)

It is OBSCENE (Chimamanda.com)

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SHOPPING LIST

Gin, Campari, Italian vermouth, watermelon, mint.

🍉🌿🍉🌿🍉🌿🍉🌿🍉🌿🍉🌿