The Long Night of Chet Baker.

By James Gavin.

Illustrated. 430 pp. New York:

Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95.

In the realm of ''cool,'' the class system of American youth culture, the young Chet Baker set an enduring standard. Gorgeously boyish and sullen, he had distant, chilling eyes, and he played an ethereal kind of jazz with intuitive grace. Countless other men on and off the bandstand started modeling themselves on Baker when he emerged nearly 50 years ago as a leader of the West Coast jazz scene, and their grandsons are still at it. As James Gavin points out in ''Deep in a Dream,'' the first major biography of the trumpeter, a whole class of contemporary Hollywood males -- Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio, Johnny Depp, Matt Damon (who imitated Baker explicitly in ''The Talented Mr. Ripley''), among others -- have drawn to some degree from the Chet Baker model.

He neither invented cool nor embodied it in its purest form. The tenor saxophonist Lester Young, the stylish mysterioso of the Count Basie band, defined the elements of the cool style years before Baker and other white musicians in California codified it as a school. (Young, who spoke in a hipster patois of his own invention, is said to have given the word ''cool'' its new definition in the first place.) Miles Davis, who recorded ''The Birth of the Cool'' while Baker was just learning his instrument, brought the cynical surety, intellectualism and controlled sensuality of coolness to a level of perfection. Yet Chet Baker was born with what it took to popularize the phenomenon among the notoriously influential young whites of the postwar years: he was one of them, an Oklahoma boy who was playing an elementally African-American and urban music, employing a black aesthetic without the liability of actual blackness. In his youth, Baker was described as ''the James Dean of jazz,'' but he was really its Elvis.

How has Baker remained the object of such fascination -- from the early 1950's, when he was No. 1 in the jazz magazine reader polls (outranking Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie and other superior trumpeters), until the end of his long descent in 1988, when he died (unrecognized) on the sidewalk outside a seedy Amsterdam hotel? Was he, with his plaintive musical style and his expressionless face (originally a mannequin head and later a monster mask), simply an empty vessel, a reflection of his fans' overimagined projections? ''He was . . . so mysterious,'' according to one of his pianists in the 80's, Enrico Pieranunzi. ''Somehow he was able to express the question mark of life with so few notes.''

No, Gavin demonstrates in hundreds of pages of almost unbearably vivid evidence: Baker was anything but empty; he nearly oozed avarice, contempt and rage from a dark, slimy core. ''Forget any concept of Chet Baker as a romantic figure,'' the record producer Orrin Keepnews told Gavin. ''He was an evil junkie and a whining, devious young man.'' Therein lay much of his appeal, especially in his later years. Baker's early bandmate, the composer and baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, said: ''It was a case of worshiping the self-destructive artist. . . . It's a Christlike image of self-immolation.''

Much to his credit, Gavin casts light on the Baker mythology without submitting to it or exploiting it for trendy theorizing. ''Deep in a Dream'' has no evident agenda beyond journalistic veracity. Gavin, a New York-based music writer and author of ''Intimate Nights,'' a good serious book on the history of Manhattan cabaret, has constructed a meticulous account of Baker's life in and out of music, and he lets the facts fall where they may. Baker abused everything and everyone in his life, most notably his art and himself. Gavin takes no pleasure in guiding us through the circles of hell that Baker traveled with his countless lovers, wives and bandmates, but he has mapped the route, and the trip passes efficiently.

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Musically, Chet Baker was never much more than an acolyte of Miles Davis. A natural improviser, Baker could barely read musical notation and never understood the rudiments of the harmonic theories underlying bebop. (Davis, who attended Juilliard, knew exactly what he was doing and what he wasn't.) His vibratoless tone sounds cerebral and detached, impelling hipsters of the Beat era to take his music as a comment on the existential futility of life or some such. He wavered off key and improvised in halting, broken lines, which his enthusiasts took as expressions of angst, while he was generally too stoned to play better. Inevitably for an artist triumphant in a style that is all style, Baker inspired innumerable mimics who mistook the highly demanding discipline of jazz for something anyone could do with the right attitude and clothes.

When he took up singing and found a larger audience with his quiet, fragile reading of ''My Funny Valentine'' (establishing a then-obscure old Rodgers and Hart song as a vocal standard), the Baker imitators multiplied exponentially, and they're still haunting airport hotel piano bars everywhere. Just a few months ago, I went to hear a promising young singer in a Manhattan club. Her boyfriend was sitting near me. She sang about half the set in tune and the other half uniformly flat. ''I have to get her some new CD's,'' the fellow said. ''She's learning too much from Chet Baker records.''

Baker's most enduring legacy, however, may well be his looks: that face or, more accurately, the two irreconcilable faces of his young and old selves, which Gavin commendably resists describing as ''Dorian Gray'' (though he uses a few too many other clichés). ''As much as any recording,'' he notes, the moodily erotic black-and-white portraits of Baker by the photographer William Claxton ''created the Baker image.'' Gavin is so attentive to this key aspect of Baker's appeal that he interviewed the trumpeter's haberdasher, one Charlie Davidson, who takes a knowingly cynical view of his client's popularity. ''Half of it was physical attraction,'' Davidson said. ''I mean, what right did he have to be winning Down Beat polls over Miles and Dizzy and Clifford Brown? Everything was getting so out of proportion.'' Many of Baker's most enthusiastic early fans, Gavin explains, were titillated young women -- and gay men.

The author is fearless in his exploration of the mixed sexuality at play in Baker's life, work and career. When ''Chettie'' was a tot, we learn, his favorite toys were a baby doll and a Tinker Toy car, and his mother taught him songs of girlish yearning. That photogenic youthful face of his was boyishly pretty, like his singing voice, which was often mistaken for a woman's or derided as ''fey'' and ''effete.'' Even in his final years, when the fashion photographer Bruce Weber made the documentary ''Let's Get Lost,'' Baker seemed to have taken on the mystique of a tragic gay icon, a jazz Camille.

I saw Chet Baker perform once during his last decade, at Fat Tuesday's in 1981. Over time, the evening has blurred in my mind with a memory of seeing a ''submission'' wrestling match at Madison Square Garden in the late 70's. The latter event, which had no relationship to the adolescent pop Kabuki of the World Wrestling Federation, was a genuinely sadomasochistic competition to see who could tolerate the most agony before blacking out; the former, which had little to do with the art form of jazz, was the spectacle of a ravaged, aging heroin addict's struggle to live through a 40-minute set. Both performances were disturbing, but not as much so as the blood lust in the aisles.

In the end, Chet Baker's life was mostly about drugs, and so is Gavin's book. We follow Baker as he hunts for drugs, injects the drugs and gets high from them, loses his wives and friends to the drugs, goes to prison for possession of drugs and related charges and prostitutes himself creatively to maintain his supply of drugs. The story is relentlessly bleak and depleting, but essential in its truth, much like the second volume of Peter Guralnick's biography of Elvis Presley, ''Careless Love.'' By the time Baker is found dead from a mysterious fall somehow connected to his addiction to drugs, we're almost relieved. James Gavin has brought us as close as life to his subject: Chet Baker has poisoned us, too.

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