LET’S GET LOST
This is jazz critic Martin Williams 30 years ago in a Down Beat review of It Could Happen to You: Chet Baker Sings. By this time, the youthful Baker had already established a reputation as a jazz trumpeter of some promise, and later in the same review, Williams concedes that as an improvising musician, he has a “fragile, melodic talent” that is “his own,” even if he “has hardly explored it.” The same strictures might apply to Let’s Get Lost, Bruce Weber’s spellbinding (if simpleminded) black-and-white documentary about the life, times, and last days of Chet Baker. The movie has a number of things going for it, but music plays at best only an incidental role.
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Listening to some of those sides recently, I was newly struck by their Spartan rigor. Without a pianist or guitarist feeding them chords, Mulligan and Baker–modernist in the bone-dry ironies of their solos and contrapuntal duets, yet traditionalist in their melodic sources–sound like the musical equivalent of tightrope walkers without a net. Set off by the gentle growls of Mulligan’s baritone sax, Baker’s trumpet, which was always a much richer instrument than his voice, combines some of the cushiony tone of Miles Davis with a lyricism harking back to Bix Beiderbecke; and if the overall range of invention is fairly narrow (as it always would be), there’s hardly a trace of the little-boy pathos that would later come to dominate his work. For all its deceptive simplicity, it doesn’t work as cocktail music or ambience, which is conceivably the reason Weber hasn’t included even a sample of it on his sound track; for better or for worse, one has to listen to this music straight, without mixers or chasers.
By the time Weber came to make a movie about Baker, in 1987-88, his face resembled a relief map and his manner was that of a burnt-out hipster on his last go-round. The poignance in the difference between the Adonis and the human wreck that emerged from him is what the movie exalts and circles around in endless morbid fascination; and thanks to the spell exerted by Jeff Preiss’s noirish high-contrast photography and the background purrings of Baker himself, it is very difficult not to share the fascination. But sharing the fascination entails involvement in a romantic cult of personality that cheerfully acknowledges all of Baker’s many shortcomings–his wife-beating, for instance–without letting them interfere with an unbridled adoration of his persona.
The film draws much of its appeal from the colorful gallery of friends, groupies, and diverse hangers-on (including a litter of adorable puppies) accompanying Baker and the film crew on his travels. Jazz trumpeter Jack Sheldon offers a couple of hilarious deadpan monologues about Baker, and Ruth Young–a singer, like Baker, in the Chris Connor/June Christy mode, and judging from the limited evidence a much better one than her former boyfriend–shows an equal amount of liveliness and intelligence; a few of the others have pertinent things to say as well, but most of the commentary is as walleyed and as bubbleheaded as the film itself–full of awe about very little, unless one confuses the idea of Chet Baker with Baker himself.
