Chet had it all going for him: musical genius, jazz-movie star looks and travel to exotic places; at the time the cool of Paris and Italy. And yet he chose, was it really heroin. Or was it something else, some kind of zen commitment to one vision of the self and music?

There were many rumours he was gay, that he only ever loved Richard Twardzik.

I have 38 albums of Chet's in this house, I guess, along with Miles and Pepper he's definitely my Beatles.

That's a great album, some of the later Steeplechase released albums are good too.

A lot of his live performances are let down by weak sidemen and the fact he was probably nodding out on H on some of the solos. Even so, there's always flashes of brilliance.

The main criticism of Chet tends to be that his playing was effete, which is the main gripe against the West Coast and cool school musicians. They didn't play straight hard bop and were lost in pretentious baroque chamber music etiquette.  He was not an innovator.

Chet, like Morissey is a one trick pony, he played in one style until the end. There are a few exceptions with Mariachi bands and the like, but he found perfection and purity of form. Something that Mulligan was trying to do in the end with ever more perfect versions of his old recordings.

Chet remains the idealised vision of the wasted musician who threw it all away to satisfy his own soul. The figure in Bruce Weber's documentary is truly beautiful. Perhaps only a trick with lenses and Kodak film. He was a junky after all.

Sad and grotesque indeed and yet how beautiful he was and what could have been. That's what's so echanting about the documentary, its so evocatively captures the spirit of the West Coast sound and Chet in his prime.  The later descent and ugliness is all the more poetic when watched in the film. Weber made homoerotic adverts and I guess, Let's Get Lost is the epitamy of his art.

Parker was so out of it, there's little worth in any biography other than sordid tales of nodding out on H and missing performances. Miles's autobiography is readable but he boasts about being a pimp and othe mysoginistic crap, which I think is a load of BS, he was the son of a middle class dentist after all. And he let his women dress him.

All junkies are idiots and Chet was no exception.

Last edited by 4F Hepcat (2010-08-01 06:26:35)