Jazz icon Chet Baker’s initial pretty boy looks and innate coolness were as much an attraction as his trumpet playing, making him obvious subject matter for an equally cool monochrome documentary. His turbulent love life and struggles with heroin addiction only added to the cinematic fascination. As one ex-wife succinctly concludes in Bruce Weber’s 1988 film, completed shortly after Baker’s death, “He was bad, he was trouble, he was beautiful.”
Combining archive concert footage, clips from Baker’s dual career as an actor in 60s Italian movies (an odd state of affairs for a California jazzman) and newly filmed sequences showing a shockingly smack-ravaged casualty, it’s a mesmerising portrait of a great talent gone to waste – a bit like an obituary with the corpse’s co-operation.
Über-fan Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers gives Baker’s impact a modern significance, as does the inclusion of a latterday performance of Elvis Costello’s Almost Blue (Chet returned to prominence after playing the solo on EC’s Shipbuilding). Weber should be applauded for never losing sight of the man’s musical brilliance in the face of ever-mounting tabloid salaciousness.
