Friday, January 18, 2008

Getting Lost (the suavest Role Model)

My new blog-friend (blog-fiend?) "Keith Tolstoy" posted this exquisite video of the great jazz trumpeter/singer Chet Baker in his youth last week.

That, of course, led me to wandering around YouTube for an hour or two checking out the other clips of Chet. I think this is perhaps my favourite. It's not a performance video but a montage of (mostly black & white) still photographs. Chet was perhaps more photographed than any of the other jazz greats - because he was such a handsome rogue in his youth (albeit in a rather angular, ugly-handsome kind of way), possibly even more dazzling than last week's 'Role Model', Errol Flynn; but then those film-star good looks of his withered dramatically with years of drug abuse, and the ravaged face of his later years is compelling in a different way. This is a great set of pictures, and a fabulous song too.

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