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Published on: 2/8/2003
Last Visited: 2/8/2003
Playwright James O'Reilly takes a many-faceted view of jazz star and junkie Chet Baker
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Attempting to stage the life of Chet Baker, the stylish but self-destructive jazz trumpeter and singer, is fraught with peril, and no one knows that better than James O'Reilly, author of the musical Time After Time: The Chet Baker Project, which begins a five-night run at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre on Tuesday (February 11).
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"If we were to do a straight-up rendition of Chet's life," O'Reilly says, on the line from his Toronto home, "the first scene would be thrilling and exciting, then there would be a middle act of absolute boredom that would last about three hours, and then there would be a final five-minute scene in which he dies."
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O'Reilly began his reappraisal of the original idea by inventing a narrator, Ted, who is attempting to piece together a biography of the elusive jazz legend.Then he added an array of real-life characters from Baker's milieu, including wives Carol and Halema, girlfriends Joyce and Ruth, pianist Russ Freeman, photographer William Claxton, and the piano-playing son of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. (Baker's flip pronouncement to the latter-"Oh yeah, man, it's a drag about your dad"-is taken from a real-life incident; social graces were never this star's strong point.) An unnamed man and woman are the first to appear: they fall in love listening to Baker's music; later they split up during an intense argument about the nature of love-and the nature of time.The present blends into the past; identities morph and shift.At one point, Ted, played by O'Reilly in the original production, turns into Baker's dog.He may also be the male half of the unnamed couple, 10 years on; it's never really clear.And through it all thread Baker's voice and trumpet.
"There's a couple of things that keep coming back in the play, and one is, ‘What does this music mean to people nowadays?' " O'Reilly offers."But the thing that I'm most interested in looking at is time.There's real time, the time that you and I live in: birth, death, beginning, middle, end.And then I think there's something that, for lack of a better word, we could call ecstatic time.And by ecstatic time I mean time that stands still, a time when music is playing or when you're playing music.This is also time that is frozen by drugs, by a sort of narcotic limbo.It's also nostalgic time; people don't age when we think of them nostalgically, when we look back… Well, it's not real.
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Time remains a source of fascination for O'Reilly, who is currently working on a semiautobiographical script based on his upbringing in Uranium Lake, Saskatchewan, during the 1950s and '60s.And music, too, continues to exert its pull."Had I to do it all over again," he concludes, "I'd be a musician.It's kind of frustrating as a writer to admit that music wins, for me. There's an emotional specificity that you just can't get at with writing-and that's a part of Time After Time as well."
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