Chet Baker: lost and found

Paul Weideman | The New Mexican

3/13/2008 - 3/14/08

It's strange how facts about culture get rewritten. This is definitely true in the case of popular music in the 1950s, according to screenwriter Lawrence Trimble. The common perception today, he says, is that all the kids were listening to Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens. But Trimble remembers that when he was a teenager, jazz was the happening music. And on the West Coast, it was all about saxophonists Gerry Mulligan and Stan Getz, pianists George Shearing and Dave Brubeck, drummer Shelly Manne, trombonist Kai Winding, and trumpeters Miles Davis and Shorty Rogers. And then there was the paradigm of cool, Chet Baker.

Trimble shares these recollections in a section of Bruce Weber's Let's Get Lost, a 1988 documentary about the life of Baker (1929-1988) that opens on Friday, March 14, at the Center for Contemporary Arts Cinematheque. Weber, best known as a fashion photographer, constructed his film like a sort of moving scrapbook, including film clips and still photographs from the early '50s, when Baker was one of the hippest jazzmen around — as well as a James Dean-like dreamboat. These historic images are interspersed with later shots of the heroin-ravaged musician in his late 50s.

One of the film's narrators is William Claxton, whose iconic photographs of Baker were published in his 1993 book, Young Chet. "I was attracted to him photographically, and the camera was, too," Claxton says. He recalls that, as he watched his first images of Baker come up in the developing tray in his darkroom, he had "a very strong feeling, for the first time, of what photogenic meant."

Baker certainly had charisma, but he was also a dedicated musician with an intensely personal style as a singer and trumpeter. As the New Grove Dictionary of Jazz puts it, "His clear tone and subdued, lyrical manner — he rarely played louder than mezzoforte and sometimes restricted his melodic span to less than an octave — immediately became hallmarks of West Coast cool jazz and were widely imitated." Dick Bock, co-founder of Los Angeles-based Pacific Jazz Records, which released more than a dozen of Baker's albums, says in the film, "I got him at the best time. He was a kid of 23. At his peak, I don't think anyone played trumpet better. He was the history of jazz — Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, and Bunny Berigan all rolled into one. He never really played clichés."

Let's Get Lost is a great jazz film — because the soundtrack features more than 40 jazz tunes and because the film portrays real musicians in real situations. It includes footage of Baker performing at Italy's San Remo Jazz Festival in 1956 and on the Steve Allen Show in 1958. We also see the gaunt 1980s incarnation of Baker as he's taping the Elvis Costello song "Almost Blue," his ultrasoft, jazzy voice still beautiful and his playing inimitable, as always.

The mood of 1950s jazz is accentuated by the fact that Weber and cinematographer Jeff Preiss chose to shoot the film in black and white. "That was a joint decision, not just because we'd lived with so many black-and-white jazz photos. We felt it was the mood we were in," Weber said in a recent telephone interview.

The atmosphere of the film is gritty, and Baker's soft music and quiet, slightly confused speaking voice creates a hazy quality. "We wanted the movie to have the feeling of Chet, and you could never put your finger on him," Weber said. "Different people would come up to us at film festivals and say, like, 'Why wasn't I in your film? Chet lived with us for six months, and he was our baby sitter,' which we thought was incredible, or 'I used to go deep-sea diving with Chet all the time.'"

In the first scene of Let's Get Lost, several hipsters dance with abandon on a beach in Santa Monica. We hear mellow trumpet lines. Weber cuts to dusky palm trees waving in the breeze and then to an image that repeats throughout the film: Baker in the back of a convertible, cruising the California roads at night with pretty girls snuggling up to him on both sides.

The cast of women in Baker's story includes his three wives — the last, Carol, figures prominently in the film — and many girlfriends. For Let's Get Lost, Weber also employed musician Cherry Vanilla and actress/model Lisa Marie as well as a few "girlfriends" chosen at random.

"I like to make movies the same way I do my photographs, where I just go to a place and bump into people," Weber said. "One girl in the film, a painter, I met in the lobby of our hotel. We needed a girl to be with Chet, and when I saw her I just asked her, 'What are you doing?' I wanted her because she reminded me of some of the women Chet was photographed with years ago. He always liked exotic beauties. I think it was because he was a boy from Oklahoma, and that was the way he could travel the world."

Baker's parents moved their family from Yale, Oklahoma, to Glendale, California, in 1940. When Chet was 11, his father, a professional guitarist, brought him a trombone — because, Baker says in the film, his dad's favorite musician was jazz trombonist Jack Teagarden. The trombone was too big an instrument for the boy, though, so his father brought home a trumpet. "It was love at first sight," Baker says.

Baker dropped out of high school at 16 to enlist in the military and first performed with the 298th Army Band in Berlin. Early in 1952, an audition landed him a job with bebop saxophonist Charlie Parker in Los Angeles. That year he also played with Stan Getz and joined the Gerry Mulligan Quartet, scoring a huge hit with "My Funny Valentine."

Baker wasn't as interested in playing popular bebop riffs as he was playing pretty tunes, says bassist Hersh Hamel, one of the film's other narrators. At the time, some East Coast, bop-oriented musicians and fans looked down on West Coast "cool jazz." Those people, Hamel adds, just failed to understand that musicians like Chet Baker and Art Pepper were natural products of their environment — sun, beaches, and warmth.

Unfortunately, from the time he was in his 20s, Baker's environment also included heroin. As the film shows, Baker had a magical talent but was rarely untroubled. Diane Vavra, a friend to Baker in his later years, describes him as "gentle, sweet, and charming" but also says he frequently used his ability to elicit sympathy from people to con them.

Women in particular were drawn to him. "I never met a lady who didn't spend 10 minutes with Chet and ask me the next day how he was doing and [say] that she's been thinking of him," Weber said. "I guess they all wanted to take care of him, to be the one that would help him get his act together." He added, "One time in the middle of filming, I had a birthday party, and Astrud Gilberto came to sing. Chet was there, and she was so nervous because she was so in love with him. She was so afraid he wouldn't like her."

After his success with the Mulligan band, Baker toured Europe in 1955 and 1956 and then settled in Italy in 1959. Over the next five years, he was arrested and imprisoned in Italy and deported from Germany and England because of his drug habit. He suffered a musical decline in the U.S. in the late 1960s and early 1970s but then made a comeback. He spent his last decade — 1978 to 1988 — in Europe, recording more than at any other time. According to an online biography, his playing during a 1987 tour in Japan was "more alert, lively and inspired than ever before," and his live album Chet Baker in Tokyo is one of his best.

Baker died at 58 after falling out of the window of his Amsterdam hotel room. It's amazing that he lived as long as he did after using heroin for more than three decades. "Yeah, I always found him both older and younger," Weber said. "He looked like he might have been 70, but he acted like he was 25. They said that when they found his body on the street, they reported it as a man who was maybe 40, because all the pain was gone from his face."

"We lived through a lot with him," said Weber. "There's not a day that goes by that I don't miss him and wish that he had all the things we dreamed he would have after this film, like his music being in stores, maybe a house down by the beach, and a couple great old cars. ... I hope people dig his music," he added, "because I think it was the thing that kept him going in his life."

details

Let's Get Lost, documentary about jazz trumpeter Chet Baker

Opens Friday, March 14

CCA Cinematheque, 1050 Old Pecos Trail

$9, $8 students, $7.50 seniors, $7 12 and under; 982-1338