American Decades
As Though I Had Wings: The Lost Memoir
Autobiography
By: Chet Baker
Date: 1997
Source: Baker, Chet. As Though I Had Wings: The Lost Memoir. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997, 6–9, 13–15, 56.
About the Artist: Chesney Henry ("Chet") Baker (1929–1988) was a musician whose playing came to epitomize the West Coast "cool jazz" style. He was born in Yale, Oklahoma, and began playing the trumpet at age 13. In the 1950s he performed with other jazz greats such as Charlie Parker and Sonny Rollins. He became popular as a vocalist, singing love ballads that, combined with his youthful good looks, made him enormously appealing to fans of both sexes. Baker's music career nearly ended in the 1960s when he had his front teeth knocked out after a botched drug deal. He died in Amsterdam, and in the early twenty-first century is considered a cult jazz figure.
Introduction
Baker's father, Chesney Henry...
[The entire page is 2731 words long]
1950's The Arts Primary Sources
- Isamu Noguchi's Sculpture
- Larry Rivers and Frank O'Hara
- Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy
- Pianist Glenn Gould
- Art and Life of Lee Krasner
- "On a Book Entitled Lolita"
- "Choreography and the Dance"
- Everything and Nothing: The Dorothy Dandridge Tragedy
- "Why I Wrote The Crucible"
- Maria Tallchief: America's Prima Ballerina
- As Though I Had Wings: The Lost Memoir
- "Ivan Moffat: The Making of Giant"
- Copyright Page
- Acknowledgments
