50 great moments in jazz: Chet Baker and Gerry Mulligan's pianoless quartet

When Bruce Weber released Let's Get Lost in 1988, his documentary on the trumpeter Chet Baker, it joined the likes of Bertrand Tavernier's Round Midnight and Clint Eastwood's Bird in a group of late-1980s films that showed prominent jazz artists on the skids. A huge improvement from the years in which jazz movies were considered a joke, these documentaries also indicated how deeply attached writers and film-makers of a certain generation were to the tempting symmetry of saxophones, syringes, and stumbling idols kept upright only by music and devoted admirers. Chet Baker was a "doomed youth" who might have been made for Hollywood's idea of jazz. He perfectly suited the white, postwar myth of the gifted, self-destructive and marginalised artist. Looking like James Dean was the worst thing that ever happened to the trumpeter/singer. A charismatic and talented prince of cool jazz, Baker represented a seductive form of passive rebellion. If he was the romantic ballad-singer who was irresistible to women, and the trumpet lyricist who played by ear, then he was also the shambolic, alienated junkie, who would eventually be found dead on an Amsterdam street, at the age of 58. Back in the early 1950s, however, Baker was a rising star who had been recruited by Charlie Parker to inherit the mantle previously worn by Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis. Parker once described Baker as the boy from California who would "eat him up". He then went on to join baritone saxophonist and composer Gerry Mulligan, a key contributor to Davis's groundbreaking Birth of the Cool album. Mulligan played the cumbersome baritone sax as if it were a tenor, or even an alto, preserving its gruff and rugged sound, but giving it a melodic agility that resembled the fluency of Lester Young. But he was also a composer and arranger of harmonic sophistication and theme-weaving contrapuntal skill, who could write illuminatingly for big bands (he was a staff arranger for Stan Kenton ) and make small bands sound bigger than they were. Mulligan played The Haig, on Wiltshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, in 1952. The young Chet Baker began sitting in. Because the vibraphonist Red Norvo, a mainstay at the club, took a keyboard-player's role, the establishment had disposed of its piano. So Mulligan and Baker began thinking of how to work without one. An elegant, intertwining, low-key and ambiguously chord-free jazz evolved, and with it an increasingly enthusiastic audience. The heyday of this quartet (Mulligan and Baker, plus bass and drums) was in 1952-53, after which Mulligan was sent to prison on narcotics charges, and Baker became a solo star. But at that time, the "pianoless quartet" became one of the most distinctive sounds in jazz; the quintessence of the cool style and a model for innumerable ensembles to this day. Here's one of their all-time classics, Mulligan's composition Walking Shoes.