Pianist and composer Herbie Hancock, in his liner notes to the Let’s Get Lost soundtrack, wrote that “many people would agree that [Chet Baker] played a very important role in their love life.” This suggests not only that Baker’s romantic brand of jazz could serve as the soundtrack to falling in or out of love – as director Bruce Weber claims happened to him – but also that the once handsome Adonis starred in many people’s fantasy lives as well.
This movie seems to want it both ways. But the harsh reality of who this man really was – a drug-addled sociopath who used, abused, abandoned and often ratted on friends, family, lovers, musicians and anyone else bewitched by the man or his music – is the needle that bursts the film’s fantasy bubble.
“Let’s Get Lost isn’t primarily about Chet Baker the jazz musician,” noted film writer Pauline Kael in her perceptive review; “it’s about Chet Baker the love object, the fetish.”
In short, Let’s Get Lost is an easy film to watch, at least for the first hour, but a miserable one to endure, especially as the film’s agonizingly protracted final hour slowly ticks by. It’s also a bitter pill of a film to swallow: whatever your attraction to Chet Baker, he doesn’t come off very attractively here.
Let’s Get Lost (1989) is Weber’s second feature film as a director, and recently made its American debut on Kino Lorber 4K blu-ray (the French 4K release, issued last year, also included the soundtrack CD). Weber, a fashion photographer famed at the time for his provocative Calvin Klein ads, has not crafted the typical documentary film here.
Perhaps that’s because Chet Baker is not the typical documentary subject. Once a star of the short-lived west coast “cool jazz” movement of the early fifties, Baker’s descent in to drugs probably cost him what might have been a more notable career.
But he remarkably endured for another three decades, recording frequently and particularly so in the last decade of his life.
While people can claim their own favorite Chet Baker record – many cite the 1954 Chet Baker Sings, with its iconic and entrancing cover, shot by William Claxton (who appears in the film) – the trumpeter and vocalist never waxed anything groundbreaking, tradition-defying or, truth be told, particularly relevant. You either liked ’em or you didn’t.
(The title track to my own favorite Baker disc,1974’s She Was Too Good to Me, is briefly heard in the film.)
Baker taught himself to play the trumpet and easily fell in with Charlie Parker, before rising to fame in a quartet with Gerry Mulligan. His playing, initially not much more than a lazier and sloppier imitation of early-fifties Miles Davis, never really progressed to anything remarkable. But the breezy sound he made, coupled with his youthful good looks, gave him a unique romantic personality that was loved by many.
By the time he started singing, in a breathy and suggestive way that wasn’t unlike his horn playing, Baker’s fandom was assured – particularly throughout Europe.
Whether in homage or by instinct, Weber brings a distinctly European sensibility to the film, one that is peculiarly Fellini-esque. The film starts by mixing old photos, album covers and film clips of the once-beautiful Baker with stylized scenes – staged to look very much like fifties-era L.A. – of the ravaged wreck of a man Baker had become by 1987, when the documentary was filmed.
The newer scenes – shot in the back of a vintage Cadillac, in a retro motel, an old recording studio and, in an unaccountably superfluous sequence, in bumper cars – show Baker as a sad, old man who is constantly caving in to the perceived safety of former girlfriend and erstwhile partner Diane Vavra’s bosom (much as he does on the cover of the Kino Lorber release: there, Baker is nuzzled like a child in the chest of his second wife, Halema Alli, in the famed William Claxton shot some three decades earlier).
Baker, clad throughout in bespoke designer duds, bought by Weber himself for the film, is surrounded by an entourage of Weber-casted fellow travelers as Cherry Vanilla, the film’s production assistant, the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Flea, singer Chris Isaak1 – likely for his uncanny similarity to Baker in his earlier years – and Andy Minsker, the lightweight – in both senses of the word – star of Weber’s previous documentary, Broken Noses (1987), himself a young Baker lookalike.
During the production, which lapsed over several months in early 1987, Weber was reportedly hobbled by the wholesale lack of people willing to talk publicly, positively or knowledgably about Baker. As a result, little meaningful consideration is given over to putting Baker’s music or artistry in to any sort of context. It’s just as likely, though, that Weber didn’t want this historic minutia to clutter up his pretty picture. After all, who wants detail in their fantasies?
Weber did, however, manage to secure on-screen appearances and restrained commentary from producer and long-suffering Baker supporter Richard Bock (1927-88, credited here as “Dick Block”), photographer William Claxton (1927-2008) – who not only helped Baker become the poster-boy for “west coast cool,” but secured the musician’s place as a pin-up heartthrob – and longtime friend and fellow trumpeter/vocalist Jack Sheldon (1931-2019).
As a portrait of the artist, with scant attention to much of his artistry, Let’s Get Lost gets painfully bogged down in Baker’s unseemly private life.
Weber films awkward and discomfiting scenes with Baker’s mother, Vera (1910-2002); his estranged wife, Carol (who, we learn, dated actor Terence Stamp before decamping to Baker); and their three children; as well as various ex-girlfriends, Diane Lavra (who appears with Baker in his 1987 scenes) and the all-too-happy-to-be-center-of-attention Ruth Young.2
Each one of these interviews reveals people that even look robbed and betrayed. When Weber goads them to come right out and say it, the viewer is forced to look on in horror. It’s like being on the set when Hitchcock directs handlers to throw birds at poor Tippi Hedren until she gives him what he wants.
Far too little is made of the music, however, particularly Baker’s trumpet playing. Two songs featuring Baker’s trumpet with only Italian guitarist, Nicola Stilo (b. 1956) – making lovely sounds together on Jobim’s “Zingaro” and Ellington’s “In a Sentimental Mood,” the latter of which does not even appear on the film’s soundtrack album – are used as source cues and shamefully hidden beneath the talking heads.
On the other hand, Baker’s singing takes center stage throughout. During these moments, Weber’s camera, so jittery (and MTV-y) elsewhere, goes deliberately and reverentially still as Baker solemnly delivers such tunes as the title tune, a lovely take on Elvis Costello’s “Almost Blue” (performed at Cannes to a seemingly indifferent audience), and, of course, “My Funny Valentine.”
During a painfully ironic scene, Baker recites the lyrics to “Deep in a Dream.” If he doesn’t recognize the lyric’s significance, Weber clearly understands that this is all part of the mystique: the fantasy figure who lives in his own dream world.
Surely, Baker’s flat, sometimes somnambulantly off-key tone – marred, here and there, by forgetting the words or just altogether nodding off – is hampered by his drug usage. But what becomes apparent, even amazing, in watching these scenes is just how remarkable Baker’s phrasing really is. Even his playing at this point had evolved in to something that is, well, alluring, haunting and all his own.
There is something preternatural about Baker that cannot be copied, faked or explained. Baker not only knows these tunes, but he understands them at a level that few interpreters ever have. Maybe that was his gift. Moreover, perhaps, it took someone as ingeniously perceptive as Bruce Weber to finally capture it. That is the real magic of Let’s Get Lost.
Pauline Kael, in her book “Movie Love,” cited Let’s Get Lost among a handful of “amazements,” during the years between 1988 and 1991 (the end of her reviewing career), a period she calls “not…a time of great moviemaking fervor.”3
Leonard Feather called the film “an opportunistic two-hour dirge on the life of Chet Baker.”4 DownBeat simply sighed, “What we find [here] is not so much a trumpeting Adonis or Gabriel as a male Siren, of whom one ex-lover exclaimed, ‘He was trouble, but beautiful!'”5
The point here is, that this is neither a typical nor ordinary documentary. It is a film that is all about surfaces and almost nothing about depth.
Not so much about musicianship or innovation as, well, getting by and getting accepted, Let’s Get Lost is an elegy for a musical zombie. By all accounts, Chet Baker had little depth, but much appeal, especially in Europe. This documentary shows exactly why Europeans adored Chet Baker and why Americans had little, if anything, to do with him.
He was a user…in every sense of the word.
Here, Baker is presented as more of a Dorian Gray than a Dale Turner, Dexter Gordon’s fictionalized character (based on the lives of Lester Young and Ben Webster) in Round Midnight (1986). While the facade is the point of Weber’s film, it’s the pathos that Weber actually delivers.
Still, the film, coupled with Baker’s death from a fall in Amsterdam in 1988, got the trumpeter and vocalist elected to DownBeat‘s Hall of Fame in 1989. Ironically, if Let’s Get Lost documents anything, it’s all falls.
Bruce Weber was given a $70,000 advance by the RCA-affiliated label Novus (now owned by Sony) to produce a “soundtrack” album for Let’s Get Lost. 6 It turned out to be the first major-label Baker release in a full decade – and his last.
Released posthumously, Let’s Get Lost features Weber’s photo of Baker, decked out in Weber-financed duds. The cover photo is stressed to look as though it was pulled from an old photo album and the music within is of moderate interest at best, but hardly noteworthy in Baker’s extensive discography.
At the same time, the jazz arm of the-then Capitol Records label issued a CD compilation of Baker’s Pacific Jazz recordings waxed between 1953 and 1956, titled The Best of Chet Baker Sings, and subtitled in Europe, appropriately enough, as – you guessed it – “Let’s Get Lost.” Appropriately, this disc features a vintage Claxton shot of the handsome young Baker brooding over the piano.
The contrast of the two images is just as telling as the music within.
Endnotes:
- Weber photographed Chris Isaak’s eponymous 1987 album cover and directed the singer-songwriter’s 1991 video, “Blue Spanish Sky,” which features an uncredited trumpet solo styled very much after Chet Baker. ↩︎
- Weber, dazzled by Ruth Young during the filming of Let’s Get Lost, had hoped to record an album with the vocalist. But nothing came of it. Young, who appears to vamp it up in the film with pianist Frank Strazzeri, eventually recorded This is Always in 2002, issued by Nagel Heyer in 2005. The disc features Tadd Dameron’s “Whatever Possessed Me,” which she also performs in the film (Baker performed the song as “Whatever Possess’d Me” in 1964). ↩︎
- Kael, Pauline, Movie Love (New York: Dutton, 1991). Kael’s review of Let’s Get Lost (pp. 121-126) was first published in the May 1, 1989, issue of The New Yorker. ↩︎
- NJSO (National Jazz Service Organization) Journal, Summer 1990. Feather published an extensive review of Let’s Get Lost, “Film Does Jazz a Disservice,” in the May 25, 1989, issue of the Los Angeles Times. ↩︎
- DownBeat, January 1990, p. 39. ↩︎
- Gavin, James, Deep in a Dream: The Long Night of Chet Baker (Chicago, Chicago Review Press, 2003), p. 334. ↩︎