Young Man with a Horn, starring Kirk Douglas, is probably the most famous entry in this tidy genre, though it is not very good, and For Love or Country: The Arturo Sandoval Story is entertaining but obscure. Neither of these movies are classics, but then very few movies about trumpet players are. But the film ends long before this tragedy occurs. He died in Amsterdam at the age of 59, after he fell or was pushed out of a hotel room window with lots and lots of drugs in his body. In fact, Baker had been singing since early in his career.
The film suggests – inaccurately – that this is why he started to sing standards like My Funny Valentine in his odd, affecting falsetto. Later in the film, when Baker resurfaces at Birdland after years of drug abuse and orthodontic trauma, Davis grudgingly applauds his performance.īaker, it should be noted, got his teeth knocked out by vexed drug dealers in 1966, making it very hard to play the trumpet with any real panache. Early on, when the doomed but likable Baker (nicely played by the easy, breezy, eternally boyish Ethan Hawke) first performs at New York’s legendary nightclub Birdland, Davis coolly dismisses his younger rival as a lightweight who should take his innocuous music back to Los Angeles. Davis (played by Kedar Brown) is seen only twice in Born to Be Blue, but both times to great effect.
