jazzman Chet Baker, a being of shadow and light in a documentary as beautiful as it is melancholic

In 1988, a few months after the tragic death of the famous jazz singer and trumpeter, Bruce Weber’s film plunged us into the tormented career and psyche of Chet Baker. The director had the opportunity to follow and interview the musician at the end of his life. A new 4K version of this poignant document is released on Wednesday.

Chet Baker, virtuoso trumpeter, singer with a velvet tone, icon of jazz from the west coast of the United States, skinned alive consumed by drugs, has always haunted the musical world and inspired that of cinema. On May 13, 1988, the musician died suddenly at the age of 58, in Amsterdam where he fell from a hotel window. He was unable to attend the premiere of Let’s Get Lost, the documentary devoted to him by Bruce Weber, at the Venice festival. More than thirty years after its release, the film returns to the big screen adventure in a new 4K version on June 19.

During 1987, Weber, a renowned photographer and filmmaker, worked on a film dedicated to Chet Baker. While he had initially asked him for a simple photo shoot, he had decided to go further, to spend time with him as soon as their schedules allowed, to meet his loved ones – his mother, the women who shared his life, his children – and his musician friends. To Venise, Let’s Get Lost received the Critics’ Prize, then it was nominated for the Oscars in 1989 in the category of best documentary.

The first theme that resonates in Let’s Get Lost (“Let’s get lost”, a title in allusion to a jazz standard sung by Chet Baker and a premonition for those who were going to “get lost”) is Zingaro by Tom Jobim, in a famous trumpet version by the jazzman. A sublime, melancholy and haunting melody which hovers over a Californian beach where young people sing and dance carefreely, in 1987. Among these young people, Flea, bassist of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and crazy about Dizzy Gillespie, one of the kings of the jazz trumpet of the 20th century.

Zingaro, instrumental theme, became a song when Chico Buarque put words to Jobim’s melody. With a new title: Retrato em branco e preto. “Portrait in white and black.” A wink from the director or not, the entire documentary is immersed in sumptuous black and white, archives from the 50s and 60s as well as sequences and interviews from 1987. A chiaroscuro on a bumpy journey, in the city as on stage , from native Oklahoma to Europe.

Chet Baker has been a total fascination since his beginnings in the first half of the 1950s, as recalled in the documentary which shows superb photos of recording sessions from 1953 by William Claxton. Interviewed, the photographer remembers how the young man “attracted the lens”. With a face that was both babyish and suspicious, Chet Baker had the profile of a Hollywood star, and he had a style that was enormously copied, as was the case for James Dean, by the youth of his time. The contrast between the young musician of the first filmed concerts and the man with the wrinkled and emaciated face of 1987 is all the more striking. Director Bruce Weber skillfully interweaves documents and eras, musical excerpts from yesteryear and confidences, song and trumpet sequences from 1987.

Weber’s film reveals Chet Baker in all his dimension as an artist, but also as a man – with his sincere cooperation, even if he often seems elsewhere, absent from himself. The artist is this young trumpeter so brilliant that he convinced Charlie Parker himself – who hired him in his early days – to call Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie to tell them “There’s a white guy who’s going to give you a hard time,” according to the recollections of William Claxton. Man is this eternal seducer who fascinated and collected women. A seducer who also made them suffer. Manipulative when necessary, and sometimes violent under the influence of the substances he administered every day. “You can’t win with a junkie”, confides Diane, the valiant companion of the last part of her life. “We can’t count on Chet. If we know, we can get through this.”

Without complacency, the director does not hide the artist’s gray areas. The testimonies he takes from his companions, but also those from his mother (her painful silence during an interview with Bruce Weber says a lot) and his children, give an overview of the conflicts, disillusions and resentments which undermined Chet Baker’s entourage. The drug didn’t just ravage his personal life. She poisoned her career with arrests and prison sentences, not to mention the violent attack that kept her from the stage for years.

If the documentary is necessarily bittersweet, it also offers very beautiful moments of lightness and jazz, Chet’s raison d’être. For example, we like this joyful moment of scat shared with young Flea on Joy Spring, standard of trumpeter Clifford Brown who died at age 25. We like the pretty bumper car sequence. And what can we say when Chet, inhabited by his cracks, sings several times for Weber’s camera… The emotion he transmits is intact.

Gender : musical documentary
Director :Bruce Weber
Country : UNITED STATES
Year : 1988
4K version output : June 19, 2024
Distributer : MK2 Broadcast
Synopsis : this documentary evokes the life of the famous trumpeter Chet Baker during his journey from Oklahoma to California, and from New York to Europe, during the 1950s. Through the fascinating testimonies of his family, his friends and of musicians from the West Coast jazz movement, the film follows the artist until 1987, a year before his death.