Naturally, the biographer seeks the man behind the layered tales. Here Gavin circles a black hole, because Baker was, as one witness after another testifies, nearly completely unrevealing. He didn't read, or speak, or otherwise express: He was "cool." Longtime junkiedom only hardened this character trait into manipulative blankness. So Gavin looks at Baker's doting, pushy mother and his violent failure of a father, checks out Baker's high school beatings for being a pretty boy, intimates that Baker's brief and harsh version of heterosexual sex may have covered for repressed homosexuality, and links him to the waves of rejection, from the Beats as well as Hollywood types like Marlon Brando and James Dean, rippling the 1950s. It's suggestive, though not necessarily convincing, since unlike other jazzers--Davis and Charles Mingus, for instance--Baker had no real contact with or interest in other artistic subcultures.

Baker's critical reputation kept crashing after the Mulligan quartet disbanded in 1954, and his drug use continued to escalate after that time, when his heroin addiction began. By 1966, he had hit bottom: He was badly beaten, probably because he ripped off a San Francisco drug dealer, and his upper teeth had to be pulled. His embouchure wrecked, his career, already smoldering, looked like it was finally in ruins. He worked in a Redondo Beach gas station and applied for welfare. Against the odds, record-label head Bock bought him dentures, and for more than a year he worked--probably harder than he ever did before or after--to rebuild something of the limpid trumpet sound that once made girls shudder.

In 1959 he had relocated to Europe, where he stayed for the rest of his life (except for a couple of brief homecomings) to avoid prosecution for drug busts. Inevitably, he got busted in Europe instead. Gavin rightly notes that the Europeans, especially the Italians, adopted Baker as a damaged genius, an artist in need of understanding and patronage. It didn't help. His trajectory careened mostly down; upward bursts of musical lucidity flashed against a churn of mediocrities and an ever-more-snarled life. His talent languished: He never expanded his musical knowledge, nor did he really learn to arrange or compose or even lead a band. He relied on producers and agents to direct his musical life; he didn't bother conceptualizing his own creative frameworks. He always demanded cash payments--no contracts, no royalties--on his endless scramble to score. And as women revolved through his life or fought over him and were beaten by him, he tried a few bouts at detox but compressed even further into a junkie's two-dimensionality. By the time he died, most American jazz fans thought he was already dead.

For this last half of his book, Gavin, even buoyed by research, swims upstream against the cascading flow of a junkie's essential plot line. For decades Baker is mostly chasing drugs, screwing anyone within reach, tumbling downward creatively and personally, and alternating manipulatively between victim and abuser. Except as a voyeur it's hard to care, especially since, with exceptions I think even rarer than Gavin does, Baker's music was generally worthless. Junk didn't make him a musical superman; it simply drove him to make fast, sloppy recordings with under-rehearsed bands, playing horn that was so unpredictable in quality it could sound like an abysmal self-parody. Sympathetically balanced as he tries to be, even Gavin can only cite a handful of ex-sidemen as Baker's musical legacy of influence. Instead, he depicts Baker as a kind of cultural icon rather than a cultural force.

It is one of history's ironies that Baker was resurrected after his death by a film made shortly before it. Bruce Weber, a fashion photographer famed for his homoerotic Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren ads, has a sharp eye for the scandalous, and decided to make Let's Get Lost when he saw Baker at the trumpeter's brief fling at an American comeback in 1986. He fell for what an associate described as "beauty that looked kind of destroyed." Weber bought him a French beatnik wardrobe from a Paris designer, and paid him $12,500 for a performance that Gavin describes: "eyelids sagging, slurring his words, all but drooling.... Unless he got what he needed, [Weber's assistant] said, 'he wouldn't have sat still a minute for us.'" The documentary refired interest in Baker among boomers and Gen Xers, who responded to the bathetic junkie glamour of his apparent frailty, personal and artistic, just as their 1950s avatars had. Reissues of Baker's albums on CD have gathered mass and sales since.

Which leaves us with Baker's mysterious death, long haloed by a host of theories. Gavin rejects accident, reporting that "the window [of the hotel room] slid up only about fifteen inches, making it difficult, if not impossible, for a grown man to fall through accidentally." Dismissing speculation that Baker might have lost his room key and tried to climb the hotel's facade, Gavin says it's unlikely he could have gone unnoticed on such a busy thoroughfare. He dismisses homicide, as did Baker's remaining friends and the Dutch police, and concludes that Baker was shooting his favorite speedballs and committed a sort of passive-aggressive suicide by "opening a window and letting death come to him.... [He] had died willfully of a broken heart."

That's a pretty sentimental final fade for a hard-core character like Baker, who for all Gavin's determined nuance ultimately seems less rebel than junkie. Maybe Gavin should have pondered Naked Lunch. Then he might have ended his book with, say, Steve Allen's take, since Allen was one of the many Baker burned: "When Chet started out, he had everything. He was handsome, had a likable personality, a tremendous musical gift. He threw it all away for drugs. To me, the man started out as James Dean and ended up as Charles Manson."

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