Deep in a Dream: The Long Night of Chet Baker [Hardcover] Review

While this book will certainly make compelling reading for any Chet Baker fan, or any follower of the 1950s-60s jazz scene, be prepared for a frigid treatment of the subject. Mr. Gavin may have a knack for writing about jazz musicians, but he neither understands nor appreciates the music itself one whit. There was a definite gap in the Chet Baker bio market, and Gavin has filled it. Unfortunately, he has not only taken the same angle that the tabloids always did, covering the drugs-and-domestic-violence aspect of Chet Baker, but he has gone them one better--to suit his theme he paints Baker not as a hip musician, which he was, but as a bumbling Okie square, who could never keep up with the music's 'advances'. Baker's conservative opinions of free jazz and fusion, to name just one example, are held up to ridicule. He is dismissed as being 'incapable' of such 'catharsis', as if his opinion were formed out of jealousy or open-mouthed incomprehension. In fact, Miles Davis, who is repeatedly held up as an example of what a great musician is made of so Baker can pale in comparison, despised free jazz. For that matter, many very hip black jazz musicians hated free jazz, and fusion as well. Louis Armstrong thought bebop itself was a joke. All the usual jazz cliches are resurrected here: white jazz is intellectual and precise but lacks feeling, while black jazz is earthy, charged with life and dripping with soul, etc.Except for frequent put-downs of Baker's music for its alleged "lack of feeling" (what, if not feeling, is Baker's music known for?) Gavin barely mentions any of Baker's recorded legacy, aside from occasional session details which always involved Chet's forgetting the date because he was stoned, and his subsequent lack of blowing power when finally coaxed into the studio. His quiet, intimate music is repeatedly dismissed as 'cold' or 'dead', either because Gavin apparently cannot understand feeling unless it is loud, sweaty and intense, or because any other analysis would complicate his single-minded theme. History features no shortage of creeps, louses or idiot savants who packed their music with feeling--Mozart anyone? Charlie Parker? Miles? Then what's all the fuss about? Why do we listen to this man's music 30, 40 and 50 years after it's been recorded? Why aren't we listening to Abbey Lincoln's or Albert Ayler's or any of the other cathartic free jazz or fusion that Gavin holds up as supreme examples of hip? If you didn't know before reading the book, you won't know after.

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