WHAT KIND OF BLUE? . . . . . . .
Nice piece on Chet Baker over at Aquarium Drunkard's Videodrome series
Videodrome :: Let’s Get Lost (1988)
When Bruce Weber’s documentary Let’s Get Lost premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, its subject was already dead. Four months earlier, on May 13th, 1988, famed jazz musician Chet Baker was found dead on the street below his hotel room in Amsterdam, apparently having fallen from his second-story window. Heroin and cocaine were found in his room; an autopsy report later found both drugs in his system. He was fifty-eight years old. That evening in Paris, all the jazz clubs were silent.
Rather than characterise Baker as the trumpet-wielding James Dean or a playboy jazz rebel, Weber shows Baker for who he was: a deeply flawed man, with bruises and blemishes and all. The contrast between Baker’s personality and musicality makes Weber’s profile of Baker that much more heartbreaking. How could someone of so few words be so lyrical and poignant in their musicianship? How could someone who lived so crudely play so gently and sing so sweetly?
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