Institute History
Description
Bruce Weber’s dark and shimmering valentine to the great jazz trumpet player Chet Baker, Let’s Get Lost is a bravura portrait of a lost man who made the most beautiful music. Impressionistic and inflected by the cinematic equivalents of ostinato, full of chiaroscuro riffs and lilting shadows, the film is more a documentary which circles around its subject, rather than actually being about him. Baker’s life remains no less mysterious than his fatal fall from an Amsterdam hotel window in May, 1988: women floated around him: women floated around him ; drugs poured into him; and thugs robbed him of his art when they knocked out his front teeth. Baker’s biography ultimately resists interpretation. To those who tried to know him intimately, he was trouble; to his fans, he was a natural musician with a mellifluous voice.
In 1987, Weber, whose favorite record was Baker’s 1950s album, “Let’s Get Lost,” hung out with the musician, then fifty-seven, who was chiseled and worn but still playing dates in the U. S. and Europe. Before Baker’s death and with his permission, Weber conducted a series of unorthodox interviews in Stillwater, Oklahoma with Baker’s mother, ex-wife, and children; he also spoke with Baker’s ex-lovers and professional colleagues, people like Dick Block, who discovered Baker, and photographer William Claxton, who captured his aura as a sex symbol. Intercutting these sequences with scenes of Baker in performance throughout his career, Weber creates a tracery of indomitable solitude.