Chet Baker, I Get Along Without You Very Well by Hoagy Carmichael
Chet Baker was a mess, even by the lubricious standards of jazz, where lives are often more difficult than they need be. ‘The Prince of Cool’, he was called, for the elegant spareness of his trumpet, but there is nothing cool about a drug habit, or alcoholism, however much those weaknesses may burnish the image of a tormented outsider.
When he died in Amsterdam in 1988 at the age of 58 Baker wore the addled features of a man 20 years older. No more the pretty boy, he was a burnt-out case, leaving admirers to ponder those sad words: ‘it might have been’.
In the bebop world of post-war America the kid from Oklahoma followed a singular path. Not for him the way worn bare by Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Freddie Hubbard and Donald Byrd. Baker’s sound was more lyrical; romantic, even. A kind of soured romanticism, which brought to mind Charles Rosen’s observation that Johannes Brahms composed music out of a profound regret that he hadn’t been born a generation earlier.
He played ballads, and sang them, maintaining a tradition of horn vocalists which began with Louis Armstrong. In the ears of many good judges, Tony Bennett among them, Armstrong was the single most significant singer in popular music because he was demotic. He showed the world you didn’t need a ‘proper’ voice in order to sell a song.
Armstrong was sui generis. He was the first man to stand in front of the band, and therefore he was the principal instrumentalist in jazz. He was to the art form what WG Grace was to cricket. As Philip Larkin wrote, Armstrong and Duke Ellington were the Chaucer and Shakespeare of jazz. One man invented the language, from a variety of sources. The other elevated it to a Himalayan peak.
Satchmo’s singing was a bonus. To catch him at his finest listen to the performance of Summertime with Ella Fitzgerald. Two supreme black artists accept the gift of a song composed by two white New Yorkers, and transform it into bars of gold. Neither George nor Ira Gershwin had set foot in South Carolina! So much for cultural appropriation. If truth be told, which increasingly it is not, artists who borrow from others make the world a better place.
Bunny Berigan was another singing trumpeter. His 1936 recording of I Can’t Get Started, by Vernon Duke and Ira Gershwin, is an early classic. Everybody has had a go at that song, and many have succeeded. Gershwin’s wit always makes people smile. ‘I’ve been consulted by Franklin D/Greta Garbo has had me to tea’. But it’s good to go back to Berigan, with his ‘untrained’ voice and ringing trumpet.
Hoagy Carmichael, the songwriter, often gets overlooked in reflections on the popular song. But look at his catalogue: Stardust, Georgia on my Mind, The Nearness of You, Lazybones, and My Resistance is Low, which gave Robin Sarstedt an unlikely hit in the summer of 1976, as the punks were ripping up their leather jackets.
Carmichael was born in Bloomington, Indiana, the state which also gave us Cole Porter. He was a sophisticate, Porter, not really a ‘Hoosier’ at all. As an adult he felt at home in Manhattan and Paris, writing both words and music. The supreme all-rounder. Carmichael, who gravitated to the other coast, was more of an outsider. Lazybones, with words by Johnny Mercer, another provincial, is not the kind of song that came easily to Porter or Larry Hart.
It was Mercer who supplied the words for Skylark, which showed composer and lyricist at their finest. The story goes that Carmichael played Mercer the tune, and expected a swift response. For a year he heard nothing. Then one morning Mercer phoned to say he had found words that suited the melody. The wait, as Carmichael knew, was worth it.
I Get Along Without You Very Well also had an unusual birth. Carmichael was handed a poem one day in 1939, at Indiana University. Who had written it, it nobody was quite sure. The initials said only ‘JB’. Many years later the poet was revealed to be a lady called Jane Brown Thompson.
The song begins with the title, an apparently confident declaration of life after a separation buttressed by the affirmation, ‘of course I do’. Except…ah, there’s the rub. When soft rains fall, when someone laughs, or at any time at all. It’s one of those ‘pity me’ songs that falls short of self-pity, and therefore achieves a kind of nobility.
Frank Sinatra, on the rebound from Ava Gardner, has given the most sensitive performance. Baker, who recorded it a year later, in 1956, is a shade more wistful. His tenor tone lent fragility to everything he sang. At times he sounded so fragile that you fear the song might snap. But it is that quality which makes his performance of Carmichael’s classic such a winner.
Three decades later Baker’s trumpet was heard to good effect on another mournful song, Shipbuilding, by Elvis Costello, written during the Falklands conflict of 1982. He was washed up by then, a ship without a sail, to borrow a line from Rodgers and Hart.
Of course I do. Baker, like all addicts, could never get along without the crutches he relied upon to support his rickety life. Neither is playing nor his singing could conceal the pain that existed beneath that shell of indifference. But that pain yielded the occasional jewel, and Carmichael’s standard was his precious stone.
Hendo’s Dozen so far:
Ella Fitzgerald: It Never Entered My Mind, by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart
Frank Sinatra, Ill Wind by Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler
Judy Garland, Do It Again by George Gershwin and Buddy Da Sylva
Bobby Darin: Once Upon A Time, by Charles Strouse and Lee Adams.
Fred Astaire: I’m Old Fashioned; Jerome Kern and Johnny Mercer.
Lena Horne: It Could Happen to You; Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke.
Tony Bennett: I Walk A Little Faster; Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh.
Peggy Lee: Then I’ll Be Tired of You; Arthur Schwartz and Yip Harburg.
Lovely piece. One of my favourite songs and Chet Baker does it beautifully.