March 14, 2010

Contrary to what the overriding dreaminess of his music might suggest, Chet Baker, the legendary jazz trumpeter and vocalist, was not a nice person. He had zero respect for his instinctive musical gifts and would never, ever rehearse. Instead, he’d simply walk into whatever club had booked him, usually a couple hours late and looking like he just emerged from of a pile of shit, pick up his trumpet, and music would pour out. He couldn’t be bothered to practice, you see, because he was forever busy trying to score some more heroin. Like all junkies, that was his real vocation.

Baker ripped off friends, beat women, and ruined small record labels by repeatedly demanding advances that he had no intention of paying back. His signature tune may have been “My Funny Valentine,” but, as years of abuse etched canyons in his once angelic visage, he more closely resembled a sociopathic scarecrow than a moony love interest. He was also, by all accounts, whiny, and loved to blame his problems on everyone but his significantly sorry self.

I hope this information doesn’t ruin the next dinner party you attend that features Baker floating seductively in the background. Personally, I have trouble dealing with his artistry because of it, although I'll still listen to him on occasion, especially his recordings with Gerry Mulligan's storied pianoless quartet.

Nevertheless, Baker’s inability to grasp the concept that other people actually have feelings gave rise to one of my all-time favorite jazz anecdotes.

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This is Benito Mussolini.

How’s that for a segue? In case you didn’t show up for school the day they covered it, this guy was the leader of Fascist Italy during World War II, and I don’t mean he pushed hard for health care reform. Like his very bestest buddy, Adolf Hitler - if these two were around nowadays, they’d text all the time - he was a cold-blooded murderer who ruled his countrymen all by his lonesome, and sicced an army of uniformed thugs on anyone who stood in his way. He was not the type to say, “Let me see a show of hands.”

But it caught up with him eventually. The Italian masses, who had had their fill of the big blowhard for quite some time, finally executed him via firing squad near the end of the war, then hung his corpse in the street and allowed passersby to throw stones at it and beat it with sticks. They did this with such gusto I couldn’t find a photo of the event that wouldn’t elicit gags. Suffice it to say that, right there at the end, Mussolini was decidedly bruised fruit.

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This all comes back to Baker because, rather incredibly, Mussolini’s son, Romano, who was 11 years-old when his dad was finally taken out to the ballgame, was a major league pianist who would become one of the leading lights on the Italian jazz scene. Here’s a track he recorded some time in the 1970s, but he released a series of well-received records over the course of a 30-odd year career.

No joke— Romano could play. When he first started appearing in jazz clubs in the late Fifties and early Sixties, his relation to Il Duce was something of a public secret. For a while, he appeared under assumed names. But he finally went with the full Mussolini moniker when he gained the acceptance of his peers. Obviously, there wasn’t much he could do to control his dad’s monstrous behavior when he was a kid, so people never mentioned it. Everyone felt it was best to let the poor guy swing his ass off and leave him alone. Good taste, in other words, prevailed.

So, one evening, Chet Baker’s at an Italian nightclub and a mutual friend introduces him to the renowned pianist, Romano Mussolini. Baker shakes Mussolini’s hand and says, “Gee, it’s a drag about your old man.”

Paul Tatara