Addicted to Jazz

Jazz legend began at South Bay landmark

Chet Baker, who started at the Lighthouse, lived in the area during his historic career.

By Eddie North-Hager
DAILY BREEZE
Dec 07, 2003

In the late 1940s and the '50s, the Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach was the jazz mecca of the West Coast. It drew top acts from all over, many choosing to stay for a while in sunny Southern California.

It was the perfect environment for a natural trumpet player who had almost no formal training to get a chance at stardom.

It was here that Chet Baker grew into a legend and was packaged as the James Dean of jazz. And it was here that Baker first delved into the addictions that would define him after his death in May 1988 at age 58, as much as his music did during his life.

The romanticism of Baker's lifelong and open drug addiction was always tied to his 200 records and acclaimed talents. But it seems to hamper his embrace by the public even 15 years after he fell from an Amsterdam hotel window.

"People don't want to be connected with someone who was a notorious drug addict," said Gil Galbreath, a retired computer technician.

The 71-year-old is the unofficial historian of area jazz musicians. He first caught Baker playing with Gerry Mulligan at The Hague in Los Angeles in 1952.

"That was the hot ticket in those days," Galbreath said. "He was just a natural musician. And in some ways a real genius."

Baker, an Oklahoma native, moved to Glendale in 1940, according to his memoirs, Chet Baker: As Though I Had Wings. His father, a guitar player, first bought him a trombone, but quickly replaced it with a trumpet. His mother worked for the discount department store W.T. Grant in Inglewood.

"The schools in California were so much easier they let me skip a half-grade," Baker wrote in his memoirs.

The family moved to north Redondo Beach about 1942 where he quickly lost interest in school while attending Redondo Union High School. He joined the band but couldn't read music.

Baker skipped most days to hang out and work on old cars.

"I became disenchanted with school during my junior year at Redondo High," Baker wrote. "I cut lots of classes and spent every day on the beach or along the cliffs of Palos Verdes diving for abalone."

So, at 16 he joined the Army and eventually the Army band.

When he returned to the South Bay two years later, his family had bought a house on 16th Street in Hermosa Beach overlooking Pacific Coast Highway.

The home is still there, but was remodeled in the 1980s and now has two stories.

Current owner Lee Grant said he heard a rumor that Baker once lived there, but wasn't too interested.

"I couldn't hum a tune (by Baker) but I know he was an icon in the jazz world," Grant said.

In 1949 Baker enrolled at El Camino College with a major in music and minor in English.

While playing at the High Seas in Hermosa Beach, he first started smoking marijuana, he wrote. But he also learned his style.

"It seems to me that most people are impressed with just three things: How fast you can play, how high you can play and how loud you can play," Baker said in his memoirs. "I find this a little exasperating, but I'm a lot more experienced now, and understand that less than 2 percent of the public can really hear. When I say hear, I mean follow a horn player through his ideas."

A year later he dropped out of El Camino after a teacher told him he'd never make it as a musician.

Drummer Bobby White remembers going to the house of Baker's girlfriend in Lynwood for a jam session.

"He hadn't worked with anybody yet and I was working with Vido Musso at the York Club," White said. "They liked him so much they hired him right there. "We became good friends. We would drive around in his car, go to the high school and flirt with girls."

That gig led to Baker teaming with Stan Getz. They often played together at Baker's home. He was then living in a servant's quarter on The Esplanade in Redondo Beach, according to Baker's memoirs.

And Baker's first recording, "Out of Nowhere" with Getz in March 1952, is little more than a jam session, said William Ruhlman of All Music, a Web site.

"He had such an ear for music," White said. "He could sit down and just sing a complicated arrangement like nothing. It just came natural."

And, of course, Baker played at the Lighthouse. White still plays there every Sunday afternoon.

"Hermosa Beach in the summer of '50 was jumping with hundreds of beautiful young things lying all over the place," Baker said in his memoirs. "But inside the Lighthouse on Sundays was the best, with the beautiful people coming in the swimsuits."

Baker got anointed by saxophonist Charlie "Bird" Parker in 1952. In one of the great moments of jazz, Bird called Baker out of a crowd after listening to several trumpeters try out for a spot in his band. Baker played a few songs and the auditions were over. Their collaborations were captured on "Live at the Trade Winds," an Inglewood club.

Baker and Bird would drive to the Palos Verdes Peninsula and San Pedro and watch the waves, Baker said in his memoirs. Bird tried to protect Baker from the vices that hounded many jazz players.

Still Baker was soon arrested for marijuana possession and moved on to harder stuff.

He was at the peak of his success at the time, recording his signature hit "My Funny Valentine" with sax player Gerry Mulligan in 1953.

White was there, playing on "This Time the Dream's on Me," "Made in Mexico" and others.

By 1957, Baker was hooked. He was arrested again and became a fugitive before going to jail for a time. He went to Europe where his addictions included prescription drugs. He served 15 months in jail for drugs, became a tabloid darling and starred in some films.

He returned to New York in 1963 and came back home to the South Bay in 1965.

But it wasn't a happy homecoming.

The Daily Breeze's only articles on file, besides an obituary, cover his arrests on charges of forging two narcotic prescriptions while living at the La Pacifica Apartments in north Redondo Beach. He was on his way to a gig at Shelly's Mannhole in Hollywood and had been appearing at several Hermosa Beach clubs. Two weeks later he was arrested at a Culver City pharmacy on the same charge. He was convicted in October 1966.

He was in San Francisco later that year. And this was probably White's last meeting with Baker.

"The last time I saw him he was at the Fairmont Hotel with Don Cunningham," White said. "He was playing a club Sunday afternoon and I walked in and I couldn't believe what he looked like. He looked like a skull. He came over and sat with me during intermission."

About this time his career nearly came to an end. His front teeth were knocked out, almost certain death for a trumpet career.

"He was coming back from a situation in the San Francisco area where he ran into some bad guys," said pianist Frank "Strazz" Strazzeri. "It had to do with money and they ended up knocking his teeth out of his mouth. He started painting houses to make a living.

"He came back here and I started working with him ever since, until he died."

Strazzeri, now 70 and playing three times a week in Toluca Lake's Chez Nous, was an up-and-coming jazz pianist who moved to Los Angeles in 1960. While living in Las Vegas, he met Baker, who came to Strazzeri's door looking for drugs.

Baker was out of commission for a few years because of his teeth. But Strazzeri was there for Baker's comeback concert at the Melody Room, now the Viper Room, in Hollywood. His official comeback album was "She Was Good to Me," released in 1974.

"He would sing mostly at the beginning because his chops weren't good," Strazzeri said. "He had one tooth in his mouth and would play off one tooth and gums."

Baker recorded constantly and spent most of the next two decades in Europe.

Strazzeri was the uncredited music supervisor for "Let's Get Lost," the movie about and starring Baker. It was released the year Baker died. And it portrayed Baker as a trumpet player who was unapologetic about his need for cocaine and heroin.

"He was always into drugs," Strazzeri said. "He never shook it. He never felt nothing wrong about that. People would say, 'Why are doing that? Why don't you stop?' And he would say, 'Because I like it.' "

But Strazzeri also remembers Baker as a great musician.

"He had great ears. He could hear things," Strazzeri said. "He could play something immediately. Others might take awhile to learn a tune. When he was young, before he started on the dope and was with (pianist) Russ Freeman, man . . . but when he was traveling somewhere along the line he started taking dope. I think that ended his trumpet playing days of like Dizzy Gillespie-power-trumpet playing."