Chet Baker
She Was Too Good to Me

The darkness steals the colors from the streets and carves shadows into the night, outlined at times by the intermittent glows of neon lights. Those of the Prins Hendrik Hotel in Amsterdam reveal a lifeless body sprawled on the sidewalk below.

From the edges of night beyond the boundaries of life.

The night of May 13, 1988, is one of those mild ones, those that have abandoned the cold blanket of the general winter to eagerly await the arrival of spring. The right night to fall in love, to bind lips to others, the night that forever separated those of Chet from the mouthpiece of his trumpet.

A man with his face glued to the asphalt, eyes staring into the void. And then the void. In the ether, a faint breath of notes blows, still suspended in the limbo between heaven and earth, propelled and projected towards infinity by the pistons orphaned of the enlightened fingers.

Legends, confused theories, rough and implausible reconstructions. Everything has been said about that tragic fall from the third floor of the dilapidated hotel. I like to think that Baker was sitting on the windowsill with his trumpet, as he often did, tracing fantastic trajectories in the night sky.

Chet loved and continuously challenged his life. Stages, travels, friends, hotels (almost always second-rate), and his inevitable demons, tireless roadies who followed him everywhere, walking side by side on the narrow walkway teetering between life and death.

Chet, his trumpet, alcohol, and heroin. Chet, alcohol, and heroin. Chet and heroin. Heroin.

"I'd like to laugh but nothing seems funny, now my world is a faded pastel."

The chilly lyrics rest on the gleaming brass, slowly dancing, locked in a deadly embrace with the phonemes of the magical instrument, before making room for other resigned words.

Chet blows into the trumpet to exorcise his anxieties. The darkness is just around the corner a couple of meters away or maybe less, but here on this stool, while his cheeks swell and deflate synchronously with the magic of sound, fears are very far away.

"So close she stood to me, everything seems so wrong now, she would have brought me the sun."

"She Was Too Good To Me" is one of the most significant episodes of Baker's tumultuous life. Resignation and hope are two sides of the same coin. Indeed, the same face. The imperfect pair that accompanies Baker throughout his existence. The former kills him, and the latter brings him back to life.

Resignation and hope.

Resignation... "What'll I do when you are far away and I am blue?" (What'll I Do)
and hope... "Life can't be that way, to wake me then break me" (My Future Just Passed),
up and down the three valves, straight to the bell and projected into the void.

That void measured in a handful of seconds one night in May. An infinite void. An unfillable void.