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, I also thought it did not make up for the rest of the film.
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The Music
It's been long since I've seen the movie, but I can'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, Bakers' 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.
I like the Barry album very much, and I'm glad it saw the light of day. But then, I like west coast jazz... |
Release Notes
I put pictures of both soundtracks here to (hopefully) cut down on confusion if someone wants to buy the album. If I remember correctly, this was something like what happened with Indecent Proposal: they started with an all-song soundtrack, and that didn't work. Then they went with a Barry score. Then they decided to do things half-assed and put some of the songs back in, and some Barry.
So we ended up with two albums. First came the official soundtrack album, which was a song anthology with only two tracks of Barry's music. Later came the Barry score album of the same name, though it would say "original music from the motion picture Playing By Heart," not "original motion picture soundtrack." Barry's album has photos of himself, trumpeter Chris Botti and the late Chet Baker.
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