Chet Baker

After years of absence, Chet Baker (1929-1988) returned to the limelight when filmmaker Bruce Weber documented his life in Let's Get Lost, just before his mysterious fatal fall from a hotel window in Amsterdam. Like many of his generation, Baker discovered jazz while playing in Army bands. He went farther than many, finding fame as both a distinctive balladeer and innovative trumpeter but becoming an alcoholic and heroin addict in the process.Baker's early triumphs turned sour by the '60s, when he was in and out of jails and rehabs before finding some measure of peace through methadone. De Valk painstakingly documents Baker's scandals and successes in a powerful portrait of the tormented genius one critic called "a lyrical, self-taught improviser with a soft touch that seemed to kiss the notes as they flew by".