Deep in a Dream: The Long Night of Chet Baker (James Gavin)

August 2011

James Gavin’s book about Chet Baker, the jazz singer and trumpeter who first gained fame in the early fifties and who, only a few years later—and for the rest of his life—was better known as a heroin addict as unregenerate as any in the history of the music, was first published in 2002, fourteen years after Baker’s death in Amsterdam, at fifty-eight, almost certainly by suicide; it has only now appeared in paperback. This long lag is hard to fathom. As evidenced most strikingly in the portraits of Baker in Geoff Dyer’s 1995 But Beautiful and Dave Hickey’s 1997 Air Guitar, and in the response to Bruce Weber’s 1988 documentary film Let’s Get Lost, released just after Baker’s death, and screened in a restored version at the Cannes film festival only three years ago, there has always been a Chet Baker cult.