"He always knows where to find the sweet notes, doesn't he?" Herb Ellis remarked one evening to Tal Farlow, listening to Chet Baker in a Canadian nightclub, in 1982. Baker was in severe decline by then, after a surprisingly long life of drug addiction and fast living, but, even on the downhill, Baker's diminished sound could envelop an audience in wistful romance.

A lyrical, self-taught improviser with a soft touch that seemed to kiss the notes as they flew by, Baker laid claim to Miles Davis' cool, laid-back approach early on and made it his, for life. With his wan, Hollywood good looks and bad-boy reputation, Baker became the posterboy for West Coast cool jazz. In a style that combined restraint with a certain nervous agitation and a strong dose of sentimentality, particularly on ballads, Baker captured the imagination not only of jazz lovers, but of a general public fascinated as much by his lifestyle as his music. Baker's high, whispered vocals, even more popular now than in his heyday, captured the same sleepy intimacy as his trumpet, particularly on such tunes as "I Fall in Love Too Easily," and "Everything Happens To Me."

Chesney Henry Baker Jr. was born Dec. 23, 1929 in Yale, Okla., and moved to California with his family in 1940. He began playing trumpet in junior high school, continuing his studies at El Camino College after a stint with the U.S. Army Band in Berlin. In 1950, while stationed at the Presidio, in San Francisco, Baker became a regular at Bop City. In 1952, back in Los Angeles he won an audition with Charlie Parker, then was recruited by Gerry Mulligan into his ground-breaking pianoless quartet, which held forth at the Haig, in Hollywood. Recordings by the quartet made Baker famous. He went solo, working again with Parker, then forming a succession of groups as a leader, first in the United States and, from 1955, in Europe.

Baker's prolonged heroin addiction, and his many subsequent arrests, ensured that his career, a large part of which he spent in Europe fleeing the authorities, was sadly uneven, though a methadone recovery program in the 1980s led to widespread touring. Just before he died -- on May 13, 1988, in Amsterdam, under mysterious circumstances, falling out of a second story window -- Baker played himself in a revealing documentary by Bruce Weber, Let's Get Lost. The beginning of an autobiography, As Though I Had Wings, appeared posthumously in 1997.

In 1989, Baker was elected by the Critics into the Down Beat Hall of Fame.