The Price of Being Cool: Chet Baker in Let's Get Lost, directed by Bruce Weber (1988)

 

Poster for the documentary about Chet Baker, Let's Get Lost, directed by Bruce Weber, 1988.

Chet Baker in Let's Get Lost, filmed 1987.

Chet Baker in the 1950's.

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.