ʒamol of ʒeardum…

When I was living in an attic on Via dei Pepi one of my flatmates lent me a cassette tape recording of Stan Getz and Chet Baker’s Stockholm concerts from 1983. A rare thing, she told me, that these two antagonists briefly played together, and that someone had the foresight to record it. Getz was repelled by Baker, part out of jealousy of his genius, part disgust at his physical degradation through a life of doing bird and drugs, and ejected him from the band before half of the concerts had been performed. I bootlegged that tape and for about a decade until smartphones appeared it had pride of place on the series of music shelves that accompanied me along the nomadic existence I was leading at the time. A little later my choice of morning alarm was Dear Old Stockholm, one of the numbers in the set, so that the first thing I would hear each day was Getz’s sax filling the tipsy opening bars, the local audience’s appreciative clapping, infusing my dreamscape while I snoozed.

A video of one the concerts is easily found online. They are both in jeans; Getz, corpulent but looking good value for a man in his 50s, is in a red sweater, Baker, gaunt and greasily coiffed, in blue. While the saxophonist is just doing another gig, prompting the band from number to number, Baker seems to inhabit the music. When he sings My Funny Valentine, his face crumples in agony as he distills the words such that they seem to lose their form and become pure feeling. He sits down to play the trumpet and the camera uses the instrument to frame the onlooking Getz’s impassive gaze. Getz himself contributes a sublime solo but only after he had whispered to Baker to let him take over. Baker exhales exhausted and looks ahead with unseeing eyes. He had taken a flippant and playful Sinatra staple and transformed it into an aching appeal to another universe.

Chet Baker was two years Getz’s junior but in Stockholm wore the contours of an emaciated corpse. Five years later he defenestrated himself from a hotel in Amsterdam. Remarkably Getz only barely outlived him, dying of cancer in 1991.