Lost in a Dream

Bruce Weber waxes nostalgic about jazzman Chet Baker.

by Shaun Brady

PLAYING IT COOL: Archival footage of a young, sulky Baker and his band. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

With his dark good looks, hipster pose and soft caress of a voice, Chet Baker was often compared to James Dean and Jack Kerouac, fellow wounded romantics who also seemed to simultaneously rebel against and shrink away from the world. In the jazz world he remains a controversial figure, one of the instigators of the "West Coast Cool" sound so antithetical to the fiery devotees of bop and a harbinger of pretty-boy crossover success stories.

Photographer Bruce Weber first came under the spell of that image from an album cover discovered when he was 16. He initially approached Baker to make a three- to four-minute film, but once filming began, the filmmaker and his subject "just sort of fell into it," Weber says.

Two decades after the film's first release and Baker's death, Weber's fantasia on the mythology and history of Chet Baker, Let's Get Lost, is the opposite bookend to William Claxton's images of world-at-his-feet youth. It's distressing to see Baker hazy and diminished, but Weber says that while he may have found the condition of his idol shocking, the friendship they formed prevented it from being a disappointment.

"I think if I was disappointed with him, I would have stayed with the three-and-a-half-minute film and not gone on the journey," he says. "It was really upsetting. You become close to someone, almost family, and they're destroying themselves right in front of you."

One of the reasons Weber is glad to see the film re-emerge is that he considers Baker to be a type that doesn't much exist anymore. "The way life is today," he says, "there aren't a lot of characters left. I photograph so many young people, and they're constantly tied into their iPods and computers. You really get to know a character not through a computer, but by taking a walk with them, listening to their voice."

Weber feels that Baker became such a cultural touchstone because both art and image reflected the man's genuine qualities. "He wasn't hip because he did drugs and he was able to handle it for so many years; his special quality was that he was a character and he really expressed it in his music and the trippiness in his head. Chet was a funny guy. You never knew when, where, how, why something would happen. But that was also his magic."

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

Let's Get Lost opens Friday at Ritz at the Bourse. See review on p. 37.