Blown away: Bruce Weber's documentary on Chet Baker comes to television. Phil Johnson applauds

When the makers of commercials for Levi's were looking for a successor to Nick Kamen to appear in another classic retro-American ad, it's said that one of them saw a glossy pic of the young jazz trumpeter and vocalist Chet Baker lying around the office. Struck by this paragon of beauty so perfectly in period, he announced the search was over and an instruction was issued to bring the boy in for a screen test. Only then did someone notice that the photo was 30 years old.

If they'd checked up on the latest additions to the Baker picture file, they would have got a shock. The cool dude on the glossy was never going to pass the test, even for a senior citizen's jeans ad: glinting cheekbones sunk into his face, the skull beneath the skin rather too apparent, the creamy complexion marred by a mesh of wrinkles like the later W H Auden - young Chesney had not grown old gracefully. And then he died, falling (or, as some think, pushed) out of an Amsterdam hotel window in 1988.

The legend, as they say, lives on; Baker has more albums in print now than probably any other jazz artist. He's Bjork's favourite singer and Elvis Costello, Van Morrison and Georgie Fame paid tribute long ago. The Australian vocalist and trumpeter Vince Jones has more or less dedicated his career to sounding like Chet, and there's a tribute album of sorts, Imagination by Medium Cool (Cooking Vinyl) on which admirers like James White and Alex Chilton conspire to sound even more wasted than their hero. In But Beautiful the novelist Geoff Dyer fictionalises the famous incident when Baker had his mouth smashed in by dope dealers.

Chet's story is told most comprehensively in Bruce Weber's fascinating documentary from 1988, Let's Get Lost, being shown on BBC 2 tomorrow night. It's a strange film, part winsome iconography, part post-mortem in the making, and the narcissistic images drawn from photographer William Claxton's 1950s Baker-shots are set against the less-than-glamorous contemporary interviews with wives, girlfriends and the man himself. Even his mom is hard-pressed to say something good about him. But his music still casts a powerful spell. The best of the vocals is on EMI's version of Let's Get Lost, later reissued in a slightly inferior collection as My Funny Valentine, and for the trumpet works the Pacific Jazz Years (EMI) is a good bet, though almost everything he recorded, even the later Italian recordings where he often approaches narcolepsy, usually has something to commend it.

He remained true to himself to the end; when an interviewer asked him what the worst thing was about drugs, he answered: 'The price.'

(Photograph omitted)