The Movie
This is one of the hardest films for me to write about here, because things worked out so oddly. A mostly-star cast (at least at the time) work on their troubled relationships and romances in concurrent stories. Frankly I didn't care much for the movie—only a couple of the characters interested me in the least, and while I thought the ending was decent, it did not make up for the rest of the film.
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The Music
It's been a long time since I've seen the movie and I couldn't remember how it's supposed to tie to Chet Baker. He was a jazz trumpeter who was considered an emerging star in the 50's—perhaps a white Miles Davis. But Davis broke through as the pioneer and master of "cool" or "west coast jazz;" Baker never quite made it. When jazz foundered as the dominant musical genre in American popular culture in the 1960s, Baker's fortunes sank with it. Like many jazz artists he ended up in Europe, where there was still an appreciative, if small, audience; and died in Amsterdam when he fell out a hotel window after taking heroin and cocaine.
The dominant theme for Barry's score is "Remembering Chet," which features Chris Botti's trumpet and that cool, minimalist jazz combo. There are a couple songs by Chet Baker himself which appear on the Barry version of the album, and some orchestral music as well.
It wasn't until I read the book Music by John Barry, where Jon Burlingame's chapter on this film explained what happened. Barry scored a movie called Dancing About Architecture and he and the director agreed that Chet Baker's jazz sound was going to be a major theme. But Harvey Weinstein (yes, that Harvey Weinstein) and his company, which financed the film, decided to "rethink" it. Dancing About Architecture became Playing By Heart, the Chet Baker influence was minimized, and the music was largely rescored by Christopher Young.
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