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Poster for the documentary about Chet Baker, Let's Get Lost, directed by Bruce Weber, 1988.
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Chet Baker in Let's Get Lost, filmed 1987.
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Chet Baker in the 1950's.
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The jazz trumpeter Chet Baker had one of the most colorful
and tragic life stories in the genre. With all the tragedies and early deaths
jazz has seen, that’s really saying something. Briefly, Baker was a heroin
addict for the better chunk of 30 years, served 4 months in Rikers Island prison
in 1959 on drug charges, served 18 months in an Italian prison for drugs in
1960-61, was deported from almost every country in Europe, lost his teeth,
either through a beating or decay due to drug use, had to re-learn how to play
the trumpet, and died by falling out of his hotel window in Amsterdam in 1988.
Or was he pushed?
Okay, so now add to the equation the fact that Baker was
super handsome in his younger days, and sang ballads in a high, aching tenor
voice, and you’ll understand why he’s often called “the James Dean of jazz,”
and is regarded as an icon of coolness. (Ironically, Baker recorded an album of
music from the 1957 documentary The James Dean Story.)
Baker is certainly presented as an icon of 1950’s West Coast
cool in photographer Bruce Weber’s 1988 documentary Let’s Get Lost. Filmed
in glorious black and white, all the better to match up with the photos of
young Chet Baker, Let’s Get Lost is perhaps too precious and stylized.
It’s an entertaining movie to watch, but everything feels very staged.
At the beginning of the movie, we see Baker riding in the
backseat of a 1959 Cadillac convertible, with his arms around two girls. Dig,
man! What kinda groovy, swingin’ hepcat is this old man? And then you focus on
Baker’s face. His eyes, always deeply set even in his youth, now recede even
further back in his skull. The rest of his face has sunken around his high
cheekbones. His face is crisscrossed with lines and wrinkles, a testament to a
life full of hard living. He has an awful, wispy mustache. His full head of
dark hair is the one remaining connection to his youth and beauty. If you saw Chet
Baker walking down the street in 1987, you’d assume he was a bum who was about
to ask you for a dollar or two for bus fare.
The scene is somewhat ridiculous, as Weber is intent on
freezing Baker in the 1950’s. It’s not like Chet Baker had a rider in his
contracts stipulating that he be provided at all times with a vintage
convertible and two gorgeous women to accompany him in the backseat. Weber
staged it to make Baker fit his idea of cool.
There’s a recording session, at which Baker is accompanied,
for no obvious reason, by Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers and retro
rockabilly crooner Chris Isaak. It appears the objective was, “Let’s get Chris
Isaak, who looks like young Chet Baker, in the same shot as old Chet Baker!”
Baker shot to fame in the mid-1950’s as the trumpet player
in Gerry Mulligan’s quartet. Out of nowhere, Baker started winning jazz
magazine polls as the best trumpeter. The photographer William Claxton, who
took many of the most famous photos of Baker, talks in the movie about how the
camera was just drawn to Chet, and how unpretentious Chet was. Baker was a
natural. This fits perfectly with his musical style—Chet didn’t read music; he
played and sang by ear.
Baker’s trumpet playing and singing styles fit together very
well—both were romantic, deeply felt, and unostentatious. At a time when the
model for most trumpet players was the rapid-fire virtuosity of Dizzy
Gillespie, Baker’s style stood out because he didn’t go on flashy runs or use
much of the upper register of his instrument. But Baker was good enough to have
impressed Charlie Parker when he played with Parker in 1952. Baker’s trumpet style
had a great deal in common with Miles Davis. Their tone on the horn is quite
different, but the effect they were going after was the same: how can I get across
the emotional message of this song in as few notes as possible? Like Baker,
Davis wasn’t regarded as a virtuoso along the lines of Gillespie or Louis
Armstrong, but Davis knew how to get the feeling of the song across. Davis wasn’t
going to hit 50 high C’s in a row the way Armstrong supposedly could. It’s a
testament to Baker and Davis’ shared romanticism that both men could claim “My
Funny Valentine” as a signature song.
Baker’s singing style is an acquired taste: after listening
to him you could very well ask, is he a great singer or a terrible singer? Baker
sang in a remarkably high tenor—high enough that at first you might not be able
to discern if it was a male or female singing. Baker also had a very pure tone
with almost no vibrato. Amazingly enough, despite all the ways he abused his
body, Baker’s voice remained much the same—even in the late 1980’s, he still
sounded just like he did in the mid-1950’s. Baker’s vocals varied a lot in
quality. After listening to his 1958 version of “Everything Happens to Me,”
found on the Riverside album It Could Happen to You, I was convinced
that it was a poor match of singer and song. Then I heard a version of “Everything
Happens to Me” that Baker had recorded in Europe in 1955-56, and I thought it
was fantastic. The song suddenly fit him. (Baker’s European material from that
time has been re-issued many times by many different labels.) The conclusion I’ve
come to is that Baker was capable as a vocalist of giving excellent
performances. Baker’s no match for Frank Sinatra (who is?) but given the right
song and setting, he’s a remarkably effective vocalist. At the end of Let’s
Get Lost Baker sings Elvis Costello’s song “Almost Blue,” and it’s a
beautiful moment.
During the first half of Let’s Get Lost, Weber has
convinced us that Chet Baker is the coolest, most handsome guy around. During
the second half of the movie, Weber pulls the rug out from under our feet and
shows us the real price of being as cool as Chet Baker. Through interviews with
Baker’s wives and girlfriends, we see that Baker has isolated himself from
other people. I’ve read that for the last decade or so of Chet Baker’s life he
didn’t have a checking account, or a permanent address. He was on the move,
always looking for the next gig, the next score. I suspect that the only two
things in life that Chet Baker really cared about were drugs and music.
Everything else was superfluous to him, and so, everything else fell by the
wayside.
Diane Vavra, Baker’s then-current girlfriend, doesn’t really
have any illusions left about Chet, but she loves him all the same. She says, “He
looked like a Greek God to me.” Well, okay, maybe when he was 25, but you met
him when he was 50-whatever. More like a ruin of a Greek God. Diane later says,
“You really can’t rely on Chet.” Good to know.
There’s a very funny and awkward moment where Diane is
looking at photos of young Chet from the 1950’s and she says, “Who is this
woman you’re with? She looks Black.” Chet replies, “That was my second wife.” Ah,
that old dilemma when your current girlfriend doesn’t know what your ex-wives
looked like.
We also meet Carol Baker, an English actress who met Chet in
Italy. They had three children together, and we see them hanging out with Chet’s
mom in Oklahoma. Notably, we don’t see Chet interact with his kids at all. We
meet Ruth Young, a singer who had a relationship with Chet. When recalling what
a possible relationship with Chet would be like, she says, “It would be like
living with Picasso.” Well, if you’ve got ladies who think you’re Picasso, even
when you’re a middle-aged heroin-addicted trumpet player with a new set of
dentures who’s trying to get his embouchure back, it’s not my place to tell you
to hold off of the crazy ladies who put you on a pedestal.
This is the contradiction of Chet Baker: that someone could
lead such a messy shambles of a life, and yet still produce art of great
beauty. It’s a paradox, it makes no sense. But despite Weber pulling down the façade
of cool around Chet Baker, his music still draws us in. There’s a kind of
fragile, emotional honesty in Baker’s singing and playing that speaks to the
listener. Baker may have conned the people around him in his personal life, but
on record he’s incapable of conning the listener. He doesn’t hide his playing
or his singing behind any ironic detachment—in this way, Chet Baker is not cool.
His art was a raw nerve, naked and exposed for all to see, the same way that
his face became not a mask to hide behind, but a visible road map of all those
years spent chasing his obsessions.
Hey, Chet, man, good to see you, Daddy-o! Cool, man, you
just keep going where the jazz takes you, you dig, man? All the way out to Edge
City, chasing one more high, one more perfect, glorious run of achingly
beautiful trumpet notes to wrap that song up in. And you keep it up for so
long, until late one night, your foot slips. You catch yourself, exhale deeply,
maybe even chuckle at your good luck. But then your foot slips a second time,
and this time you can’t catch yourself, and you hurtle towards the ground, the paved
bricks of the Amsterdam street suddenly rushing up to meet you…when the police
found Chet Baker’s body, they incongruously report that it was the body of a
28-year-old man, rather than a 58-year-old man, as though in death all of those
lines suddenly vanished from his face and left him the beautiful, handsome
youth he once was, forever cool, even in death.
