poster for Let’s Get Lost, Bruce Weber’s Academy Award-nominated documentary film about Chet Baker
“Let’s Get Lost,” Bruce Weber’s Academy Award-nominated documentary film about Chet Baker
6:30 p.m. Thursday, May 21st, Jazz Gallery Center for the Arts, 936 E. Center St. Milwaukee.
The Chuck LaPaglia Jazz Film Series
Trumpeter Joel Lehman quintet will perform music of Baker after the film.
Suggested donation $15 ($10, students)
https://jazzgallerycenterforarts.org/
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Chet Baker was often compared stylistically to Miles Davis as trumpeters who helped define the cool school of jazz. That’s worth revisiting: Each plied us with the limpid beaty and sly tenderness of their horn. As the lead performer on the iconic recording The Birth of the Cool, Miles probably correctly gets credit as initiator of the style.
A big difference in persona can affect interpretation. As a romantic, Miles was always a tough customer, an amateur boxer, who once recorded an album dedicated to the pioneering black heavyweight champion Jack Johnson (However, his whispery voice resulted from an improperly healed throat operation, not a street fight).
By contrast, Baker almost always conveyed degrees of vulnerability and wistfulness, rather than toughness. He was a lyrically inventive trumpeter but what stood out was his singing, rare among musicians known first as instrumentalists.
His tenor voice sounded like an injured dove inhabiting a man’s frame. In his youth, he also had lean square-jawed good looks comparable to James Dean. In his last years, after a life ravaged by drugs, he was the proverbial picture of Dorian Grey, but without the demonic aura.
In August of 1981, Baker played at the Milwaukee Jazz Gallery, and now that venue’s current incarnation, The Jazz Gallery Center for the Arts, will present Let’s Get Lost, Bruce Weber’s 1988 Academy Award-nominated documentary film about the unforgettable jazz trumpeter and singer, at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, May 21.
Immediately following, trumpeter Joel Lehman’s quartet will perform music by and associated with Baker.
Soundtrack to Burce Weber’s film on Chet Baker, “Let’s Get Lost.”
A Wikipedia listing includes this on the film: “By juxtaposing these two decades, Weber presents a sharp contrast between the younger, handsome Baker — the statuesque idol who resembled a mix of James Dean and Jack Kerouac — to what he became, “a seamy looking drugstore cowboy-cum-derelict”, as J. Hoberman put it in his Village Voice review.” 1
The Icelandic singer-songwriter and actor Bjork, is unstinting in her praise of Baker: “He’s the only singer I’ve ever been able to identify with. I love the fact he’s so expressive, so overemotional. It’s classic stuff; it makes me soft in my knees… He was so into it: like, ‘Fuck those notes I’m singing, and fuck those songs I’m singing – what I want is the emotion.’ That’s how I feel about it too.”
Let’s Get Lost also received a 93% Rotten Tomatoes rating.
I was fortunate to document Baker’s 1981 performance here for The Milwaukee Journal. My phone interview feature with Baker (August 7) and review of his Jazz Gallery concert (August 12) are included chronologically in The Milwaukee Jazz Gallery 1978-1984 anthology, reprinted in 2016, but now hard to find, possibily at the JGCA. The Milwaukee Public Library owns a copy. 3
So, I include scanned copies of both documents here.
This event continues the valuable film and performance series named for the Milwaukee Jazz Gallery founder Chuck LaPaglia and expertly curated by a JGCA board member Ron Aplin.
This writer’s 1981 phone interview with Chet Baker for The Milwaukee Journal:
This writer’s 1981 review of Chet Baker at The Milwaukee Jazz Gallery:
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- Hoberman, J (April 25, 1989). “Self-Destructive Beauties”. The Village Voice.
- Aston, Martin (October 1993). “Björk Guðmundsdóttir’s Record Collection”. Q.