Can you listen to Chet Baker and not fall in love? It seems improbable. The trumpeter rose to fame in the 1950s with his languid, cool jazz and broken hearted vocal stylings (it didn’t hurt that he looked like Jimmy Dean). Legend has it that Charlie Parker heard him and called Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie to alert them to the new competition. Baker’s career fizzled out in years of heroin addiction, until the point, near the end of his life, when he was tracked down by photographer Bruce Weber—who documented his last tour and put old Chet up against archives. The film is achingly tender, steeped in beautiful music and black and white photography; a love letter to a lost soul.
Chet Baker is my favourite vocalist of the [20th] century… he’s the only singer I’ve ever been able to identify with. I love the fact he’s so expressive, so overemotional. It’s classic stuff; it makes me soft in my knees… He was so into it: like, ’Fuck those notes I’m singing, and fuck those songs I’m singing – what I want is the emotion.’ That’s how I feel about it too.
Björk
The finest jazz movie ever made.
David Parkinson, Empire Magazine
A gorgeous gravestone for the Beat Generation’s legacy of beautiful-loser chic.
Jim Ridley, The Village Voice
Bruce Weber
Chet Baker, William Claxton
USA
1988
English
Book Tickets
Indigenous & Community Access
Indigenous Access Tickets Community Access Tickets Ticket Donation Requests
Also Playing
A Duke Ellington Tribute with the Mike Braverman Sextet
After a scintillating session of Duke standards performed by The Mike Braverman Sextet, enjoy a roundup of Ellingtonia on Film: his first short sound films from the late 20s and 30s, and clips from the scores he composed in the 50s and 60s.
Our Lady of the Nile
Veronica and Virginia are inseparable friends at an elite Catholic boarding school, Our Lady of the Nile, but what binds them together is the very thing that separates them forever. We are in Rwanda, 1973, and tribal tensions are simmering ominously.
The Encampments
When pro-Palestine protests took hold of Columbia last year, the filmmakers were there from the beginning. This documentary charts the mounting tensions between students and the administration, as the protests were picked up across North America.