{"id":703,"date":"2016-08-03T18:32:12","date_gmt":"2016-08-03T18:32:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnandkathleenshow.com\/?p=703"},"modified":"2016-08-03T18:33:40","modified_gmt":"2016-08-03T18:33:40","slug":"chet-baker-and-the-old-jazz-guys","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/johnandkathleenshow.com\/?p=703","title":{"rendered":"Chet Baker and the Old Jazz Guys"},"content":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s a new movie about Chet Baker which is on our Netflix list, but somehow I also put there the old documentary about him, Let\u2019s Get Lost<\/em>. So we watched it thinking it would be the new movie with Ethan Hawke as Chet and found it was the old movie with Chet as Chet (apparently the new movie is a movie about the making of that old movie\u2026).<\/p>\n

\"Chet<\/a><\/p>\n

It started with scenes in clubs in Los Angeles in the 1950s and reminiscences about those clubs from the era of the West Coast Sound, where Chet played in little store front establishments with people such as Dizzy Gillespie, before he became the victim of his drug habit, and aged and waned before our eyes.<\/p>\n

Old jazz guys in Los Angeles bemoan the fact that the jazz and club scene isn\u2019t what it once was, and when they do that, I roll my eyes, but the documentary enabled me to see what they mean. They complain regularly about the places that have closed down, and I can make a list from the time I\u2019ve been here. The third night after we moved to Pasadena, we went to the Pasadena Baked Potato (yes, that\u2019s what they serve) and I noted there weren\u2019t many people there; the next day it closed. We used to go to the Hollywood Baked Potato; it closed. We went to Charlie O\u2019s, and one evening found it was closing that very night (the singer for the evening was pretty bewildered, too). The Pasadena Jazz Institute lost the plot and closed down. The Vic in Santa Monica just closed. While sometimes the places lose clientele, as often as not it\u2019s because the owner gets bored.<\/p>\n

I am as struck by the new places that open. On Monday we were at the Blue Whale in Little Tokyo (don\u2019t ask me why it\u2019s there), in a street called after Ellison Onizuka, the Japanese American astronaut who died in the space shuttle Challenger disaster. Vocalist Jessica Vautor was celebrating her birthday and her CD with the most original and creative arrangements of standards by Vardan Ovsepian on piano and extraordinary jazz cello playing by Artyom Manukyan (there were non-Armenians in the band as well). That was only Monday. Tuesday there was the New Breed Brass Band from New Orleans doing a free outdoor concert, and on Thursday Sara Gazarek and the New West Guitar Group doing another free outdoor concert, and on Friday Asian American Connie Han\u2019s lively piano trio at Red White and Bluezz. Don\u2019t listen too much to the old jazz guys.<\/p>\n

\"Jessica<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s a new movie about Chet Baker which is on our Netflix list, but somehow I also put there the old documentary about him, Let\u2019s Get Lost. So we watched it thinking it would be the new movie with Ethan Hawke as Chet and found it was the old movie with Chet as Chet (apparently […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8,1],"tags":[21,19,20],"class_list":["post-703","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music","category-uncategorized","tag-chet-baker","tag-jazz","tag-jessica-vautor"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5VlqB-bl","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/johnandkathleenshow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/703","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/johnandkathleenshow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/johnandkathleenshow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johnandkathleenshow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johnandkathleenshow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=703"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/johnandkathleenshow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/703\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":706,"href":"http:\/\/johnandkathleenshow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/703\/revisions\/706"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/johnandkathleenshow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=703"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johnandkathleenshow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=703"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johnandkathleenshow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=703"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}