Now, approximately 11 years after the first flush of success, he has returned to the United States from a five-year European odyssey that included the sweet smell of success--but only in whiffs. More often the odor was of creosote in jail.

From September 1955, to April 1956, Baker had toured Iceland, England, and the Continent with a quartet. During that period his pianist, Dick Twardzik, died in Paris of an overdose of heroin. Baker came back to the United States. As he tells it:

"When I came home, I started using drugs. I got busted several times, went to the federal hospital in Lexington [Ky.]--then I got busted in New York and did four months on Riker's Island, and I decided to leave the United States for a while."

At the end of July, 1959, Baker departed for Italy alone and on his arrival formed a quartet with local musicians. But if he had expected to find a more lenient attitude toward his drug addiction, he soon found he was mistaken.

For 17 months he languished in an Italian jail. While he was serving his sentence, a film company from Rome approached him about bringing his life story to the screen. Baker wrote the script, and the company worked out several different versions of it but "couldn't make up their minds," according to Baker.

By the time he was released from prison, the prospect of his life story on film, directed by a top-flight man--Dino DeLaurentis had been in at the beginning of the idea--had evaporated. But another opportunity presented itself almost immediately. A good friend of Baker's had become owner of the Olympia, the largest night club in Milan.

"He had a small room there that they didn't use," Baker related, "and he let me have that. HE gave me a waiter and a bartender and put a sign outside: CHET BAKER CLUB. It was very elegant--plush, upholstered chairs, wall-to-wall carpeting, columns in the middle of the room, beautiful little bandstand, velvet drapes on the walls, the lighting was beautiful, and it seated about 80 people comfortably."

Baker played there for a short time, but the official opening never took place.

"I went to play a concert in Munich," Baker explained, "and I had trouble there. Nothing happened, but there was a lot of publicity in the newspapers, and when I got back to the Italian border, they wouldn't let me in. I had signed a contract with RCA Italiana, and I lost that. And they tied a lot of my money up--about 3,000,000 lira."

Baker had made some recording for the firm and said he was to do two more albums, but these never came to pass. When he was refused re-entry to Italy, Baker went to Paris, where he worked at the Blue Note for three months.

Then he received an offer to do a movie in England with Susan Hayward and spent nine months there. "I was trying to wait out the one-year waiting period so I could join the union and work in England," he said, "but I had trouble there and was deported.

"The movie was originally supposed to be called Summer Flight, but I think they changed the name to Stolen Hours or something. Susan Hayward, in the story, is ill, and she's going to die, and she throws a big party, which most of the story is around. I'm the leader of the band at the party. I did a lot of the sound track for the movie, and I believe the opening shot is a close-up right on the bell of my horn."

After England had sent him back to France, Baker worked at Paris' Chat Qui Peche for about eight months. It was here he teamed up with Melih Gurel, a Turkish French horn play