Let's Get Lost

Front Row at the Movies by Shirrel Rhoades

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If you are a jazz aficionado, you won’t want to miss “Let’s Get Lost,” a documentary about the late Chet Baker.

Chesney Henry “Chet” Baker Jr. was a genius on the trumpet and the epitome of what is called “cool jazz,” a style of modern jazz music inspired by bebop and big band. It is characterized by more relaxed tempos than those found in contemporaneous jazz idioms.

In fact, Chet Baker was known as the Prince of Cool.

He was also a drug addict.

Baker became popular in the ‘50s, notably for his albums, “Chet Baker Sings” and “It Could Happen to You.” He had a resurgence in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

As a boy, he sang in the church choir. His parents bought him a trombone, but that proved too large for the slight youth. He settled on a trumpet.

In the army (two stretches) he played in the 298th Army Band and the 6th Army Band. In between enlistments, he studied music theory at El Camino College in Los Angeles.

Early in his music career he performed with Stan Getz and Charlie Parker and Gerry Mulligan.

His solo rendition of “My Funny Valentine” was a hit and became what might be considered his theme song.

Everything was going fine, until it wasn’t.

The culprit was heroin.

Arrested several times, spending prison time in Germany and Italy, before being deported from England and Germany. Back in the US, he began doing albums that he described as “simply a job to pay the rent.”

Sometimes he pawned his instruments to buy drugs.

In the mid-‘60s, Baker got beaten up in a drug deal gone bad. He lost several teeth, eventually requiring dentures. That ruined his embouchure (the use of the lips, facial muscles, tongue, and teeth in playing a wind instrument), and he had to relearn how to play the trumpet and flugelhorn.

He worked for three years at a gas station. Eventually, he stopped performing in public and went on welfare.

Finding renewed interest for music in France, Italy, Germany, and Denmark, he returned to Europe to restart his career. In 1979, Baker made 11 records; the following year, he made 10.

In 1983, British singer Elvis Costello, a longtime fan of Baker, hired the trumpeter to play a solo for his album “Punch the Clock.” It exposed Baker’s music to a new generation of fans.

In 1986, “Chet Baker: Live at Ronnie Scott’s London” filmed him with Elvis Costello and Van Morrison as he performed a set of both standards and classics.

In the winter of 1986, at a club in New York City, Baker met fashion photographer Bruce Weber, who convinced him to appear in a three-minute film. Weber found Baker’s life so fascinating, it morphed into a full-length documentary titled “Let’s Get Lost.” This stylized film explores Baker’s “talent and charm, the glamour of his youth now withered into a derelict state, and his turbulent, sensational romantic and family life.”

It contains some of his music too.

You can catch a retrospective screening of “Let’s Get Lost” at the Tropic cinema if you hurry.

The black-and-white documentary includes “a series of interviews with friends, family (including his three children by third wife Carol Baker), musical associates, and female friends, interspersed with footage from Baker’s earlier life, and interviews with Baker in his last years.”

Let’s Get Lost” was released in September 1988, four months after Baker’s death. He fell from a second-floor window of his hotel in Amsterdam. Ruled accidental, he had traces of heroin in his system.

Although “Let’s Get Lost” has been criticized for presenting Chet Baker as a “washed-up musician in his later years,” it was nominated for an Academy Award.

Ironically, in 2023, Rolling Stone ranked Baker at number 116 on its list of the 200 Greatest Singers of All Time.

To jazz fans, Chet Baker remains the Prince of Cool.

Email Shirrel: srhoades@aol.com