Jazzitude | Richard Twardzik with Chet Baker Europe, 1955 by Jack Chambers

Walking on Clouds
Richard Twardzik with Chet Baker in Europe 1955
by Jack Chambers

an excerpt from “Sad Walk,” Chapter 14 of Bouncin’ with Bartok: The Incomplete Works of Richard Twardzik by Jack Chambers © 2003. All rights reserved. Permission to quote must be obtained in writing from the author. Further details about the book may be found on http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~chambers/jazz.html. Comments and corrections are welcome at jack.chambers@utoronto.ca.

Prologue: In the summer of 1955, Chet Baker told the members of his quartet that he was planning to take them on an extended tour of Europe in the fall. Like Baker, the men in his rhythm section were Californians, either natives or residents, and as much as they enjoyed the success they were having in Baker’s band they all felt that they had already made personal sacrifices in moving with Baker to the east coast almost a year before. They were tired of living in hotels, and the prospect of acclimatizing themselves to a brand-new set of circumstances on foreign soil held little appeal. Besides, they knew that Baker’s zest for Europe had an ulterior motive, in pursuit of his French girlfriend, Liliane Cukier, who had to return home when her American visa expired. One by one, the sidemen quit. Bob Neel, the drummer, was first to go. Baker replaced him with a young drummer from Boston named Peter Littman. Not only was Littman inexperienced and unschooled, he was also a heroin addict, and his hiring actually made it easier for the other musicians to put an end to their long association with Baker. Bassist Carson Smith left next, and Baker replaced him with Bob Carter, a veteran bebop bassist, but Carter was formally studying composition and had no intention of going to Europe. So at the last minute, Baker hired Jimmy Bond from Philadelphia, a Juilliard graduate. Russ Freeman vacillated and finally quit for good, but he felt he was leaving Baker with a perfect replacement in young Richard Twardzik from Boston, an up-and-coming star with road experience in the bands of Serge Chaloff and Lionel Hampton. Freeman had supervised Twardzik’s first recordings as a leader for the Pacific Jazz label, and he believed that when the jazz world heard those recordings, there would be no holding him back. Unfortunately, as events unfolded, Twardzik would be dead before his record was released. He had had problems with heroin addiction before and, although he was clean when Baker hired him, he was using again soon after he got together with Littman, his old Boston running mate, in Baker’s band. This excerpt is the log of their European tour up to the time of Twardzik’s death.

Baker flew to Paris on Trans World Airlines, arriving on 5 September 1955. His three young sidemen boarded the Ile de France in New York Harbor and arrived about a week later. It was the first time any of them had traveled outside North America. Twardzik was 24, Bond was 22, Littman only 20—and Baker, for all his honors, was just 25 and, at that moment in his life, looked younger. They could hardly know that they were beginning what Bond would call “a really hairy trip” (Turner 1999: 172). This European tour was the first for all four musicians and would be the last for three of them. Only Baker would ever return.

Crystal Joy [Twardzik’s girlfriend] went to New York harbor to see them off. She was surprised to find a party already underway in Littman and Twardzik’s stateroom. “The room was supposed to be theirs but it was full of these groupie girls,” she says. She went away a bit dazed, and convinced that Twardzik was taking one of the groupies with him. “If you’re a musician, I guess you get a free pass on a girl,” she told me. There is no hint that Twardzik actually took a female companion with him, but for Crystal Joy that tinge of jealousy compounded her despair. “They were all so out-of-it that I had a feeling it was over for him,” she said.

On the crossing, Jimmy Bond seldom saw Littman and Twardzik. One time when he ran into Twardzik on the deck he found him “totally reserved” (Turner 1999: 172). Baker said, “I think now that Dick started getting high from that first night, but I was not to find out about this fact for some months” (1997: 69). Twardzik’s prolonged high may account for the absence of any letters to his parents or to Crystal Joy about the crossing. It seems odd, even ominous, knowing his pattern when he was on the road, that he made no attempt to share his adventures on the ocean liner that was carrying him to the birthplace of Ravel and Debussy.

Baker, an indefatigable driver and a fearless one, met them at Le Havre when they docked and drove them back to Paris. By the time they arrived, they were already too late for some bookings that had been arranged by Baker’s manager. To make matters worse, the September issue of Jazz Hot, which arrived on French newsstands around the same time Baker arrived at Orly airport, carried an announcement saying that Baker’s tour had been cancelled (Tercinet 1988). Baker had to get there in a hurry and make his presence known to the press, if his manager had any chance of salvaging the missed dates and making new ones.

The full itinerary may never be recovered, but the part of it that Twardzik participated in, as far as I have been able to reconstruct it (with help from the Swedish scholar Olle Lind and Chet Baker’s ghostwritten liner notes[1956]), appears to have been fairly open in September and busier in October, as news spread that Baker had really arrived. If the sidemen arrived in France on 15 September, Richard Twardzik would spend a total of 36 days in Europe up to the day he died, on 21 October. In those 36 days, Twardzik and the others played at least 18 concerts or club dates and two recording sessions at 18 different venues in 15 cities in six countries.

The band used Paris as home base, playing or recording there four different times at three venues. From Paris, they set out in various directions for engagements in the Netherlands, West Germany (as it was then), Switzerland, Belgium and England, scrambling for trains and taxis, digging out passports for immigration officers at international checkpoints (and keeping the drug paraphernalia safely stowed), shouting instructions at puzzled stage crews on strange stages and in small clubs, and testing the good will of small-time promoters, some of them just fans who took it on themselves to find a venue where the famous Chet Baker could play in their city.

Over the years, details have gradually emerged about the band’s adventures, and some of the music they played has come to light. There will be much more music made public eventually. For more than fifty years, European jazz enthusiasts have found ways of preserving the jazz music played in concerts and clubs by visiting Americans. National radio networks often contracted with them for concert broadcasts, and enterprising fans made private tapes, often from the audience but sometimes through the sound system. It began as a way of compensating for infrequent personal appearances; Parisians in 1948, for instance, understandably thought they might be seeing Dizzy Gillespie for the one and only time. As tours became common and expatriate jazz musicians grew in number, especially in the 1960s, recording practices, authorized or surreptitious, were so much a part of the European jazz tradition that they simply continued, unabated.

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