can ’ t make any commoner appeal than I can ”. In some respects , that was Chet Baker , too . He was the opposite of an esoteric avant-gardist . He wanted to make direct appeal to the greatest number of people . Gerry Mulligan said of him “ Chet just wanted to be loved . By everyone . He had a very unlovable way of going about it sometimes , but that was his thing .” Mulligan rarely spoke about his former trumpeter and friend without some pepper in the honey , but this verdict feels right as well as objective .
Perhaps inevitably , Chet didn ’ t fare well as a music student , absorbing little of harmonic theory , and nothing that added to his apparently instinctive musical understanding . His gift was a natural one , an ability to reproduce any tune once heard and to find new things to say with it . But such a gift has elements of curse about it . The artist who stands outside the normal disciplines of his craft is bound to follow a lonely path . If the “ young man with a horn ” had become an almost archetypal figure in American culture , reinforced by American wars at home and abroad , it was understood that the young man in question was a troubled figure and a figure of trouble . The term may not have started with her , but Young Man with a Horn was a 1938 novel by Dorothy Baker ; the coincidence of names is appealing . Dorothy Dodds was born in Montana , but joined the westward trail and was raised by her family in California . Though she remained married to her poet husband Howard Baker , Dorothy tended to identify herself as more male than female and showed a strong interest in same-sex relationships , a racier subject then than it seems now . Though often dismissed as not much more than pulp fiction , Young Man with a Horn is surprisingly perceptive in its account of the jazz life and its struggles . Though it carried the usual disclaimers , it has always been taken to be a version of the life of Bix Beiderbecke . Its value now is that , even without the more liberal values of
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