than one might suppose and California took to bebop like every other part of the country where modern jazz was promulgated .
Chet would ever after be defined as a musician that had moved in a direction supposedly opposite to bop , an epitome of the cool , lyrical West Coast jazz that was held up , somewhat unconvincingly given the evidence , as the antitype of East Coast jazz . Wherever the future led , it was in the company of the great Charlie Parker that Chet made his first noted appearances and earned his problematic reputation as “ the white Miles Davis ”.
The “ race question ” only surfaces rather incidentally in discussion of Chet Baker and his career , often only in the context of that too-easy soubriquet . We know that his relationship with African-American musicians was a rivalrous one and never easy . More than one of his associates has attested that Chet had a chip on his shoulder regarding his ethnicity , recognising that critics and fans , of whatever colour , judged his work in some way according to his skin colour . Authenticity in jazz and the blues was associated with black skin . It was a historical given . Jazz ’ s origins were not questioned , but its evolution and dissemination had been astonishingly rapid , perhaps more so than any other cultural phenomenon before the internet . Within a few years of the first jazz recordings , and the appearance in Europe of the first jazz-tinged touring bands , the music had spread to every inhabited continent and major city , naturalising in all of them . However problematically in some instances for different cultural reasons , Russian jazz , German jazz , British jazz , Polish jazz , Brazilian jazz were all a reality that seemed to stand in awkward relationship to the music ’ s origins . Though the term is relatively
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