Tim Draxl in Freeway – The Chet Baker Journey at The Hayes

Tim Draxl returns to the Sydney stage in Freeway – The Chet Baker Journey at the Hayes Theatre Co from 17 March 2015.  It is set to be part of the inaugural Spectrum Now festival, for which stage and screen actor Richard Roxburgh is creative director.

Conceived and written byBryce Hallett and Tim Draxl, Freeway began life at the tiny yet legendary jazz and music club El Rocco in Kings Cross in October 2010.

Freewayis packed with sensuous ballads and classic songs, including My Funny Valentine, My Buddy, Let’s Get Lost, These Foolish Things, You Don’t Know What Love Is, Look For the Silver Lining, Born to Be Blue, The Thrill is Gone and There Will Never Be Another You.  The intimate and spare production intersperses fragments of the singer and trumpeter Chet Baker’s radiant career and self-destructive life amid his musical jewels - the “blue diamonds of jazz” - that speak of yearning, heartache, despair and love.

The band comprises some of Australia’s most accomplished musicians: the legendary Ray Alldridge on piano, trumpeter Shannon Marshall, bass player Dave Ellis and Dave Goodman on drums.

When David and Lisa Campbellfirst saw Freeway at el Rocco they fell in love with its seamless storytelling and musical flair, hence programming the show in their 2011 Adelaide Cabaret Festival.  In each performance Draxl reveals a strong affinity with Chet Baker - “the Prince of Cool”, not only in terms of his own instinctiveness and charm but his eerily-similar voice and sophisticated rhythm. The title of the show is taken from the name of an instrumental written by Chet Baker, the word also encapsulating his high-spirited independence.

Upon collaborating with Draxl to create Freeway, writer and journalist Bryce Hallett (who wrote the concert drama Rolling Thunder Vietnam) said they chose not to dwell unnecessarily on Baker’s demons.  “Essentially we wanted to reveal his power to enchant even when his life was at its craziest and spinning out of control,” Hallett said.  “Freeway partly aims to draw audiences back to the intoxicating romance of the ‘50s but there’s no escaping Baker’s torment and self-destructiveness.”

In his late teens and early 20s, Chet Baker looked like an angel and sang and played trumpet with spell-binding assurance and ease.  His music had the power to conjure beauty out of ruin while the fragility of his voice, at any tempo, was both heart-breaking and true.

From his emergence in the 1950s - when the handsome young man from Oklahoma became an overnight sensation as a jazz trumpeter and singer on America’s West Coast - until his drug-related death in Amsterdam in 1988, Chet Baker’s music-making and drug-addled life has attracted attention the world over.  At once magnetic yet elusive, Baker was dubbed “the James Dean of Jazz” at the height of his success, his matinee idol looks and musical sensitivity seducing young and old alike in the ‘50s. Baker was the prototype of cool in the 20th century.

Tim Draxlbegan his career at the age of 17 when he went to New York and soon found himself singing in
its famous cabaret rooms, including The Algonquin.  At the age of 19 he won the prestigious MACaward (Manhattan Association of Cabaret and Clubs) for “best new cabaret talent”.  Tim has recorded four albums: the first two with Sony, including Insongniac, which was the last completed album musically directed by the legendary Peter Matz, and My Funny Valentine, a showcase of the songs in Freeway – The Chet Baker Journey on Fanfare Records.

Tim has achieved prominence as a stage and screen actor in Australia and in the United States.  He starred in She Loves Me for The Production Company, The Sound of Music for the Gordon Frost Organisation (GFO), in Nailed at Griffin Theatre and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Benedict Andrews at Belvoir St.  Tim’s film and television career has been extensive.  In Australia he featured in Dirty Deeds with Bryan Brown and starred in Swimming Upstream alongside Geoffrey Rush and Judy Davis.  Tim played the lead in the ABC/ Channel 4 mini-series The Shark Net and in Travelling Light with Pia Miranda.  He appeared in the mini-series Mrs Biggs, about the wife of the infamous train robber Ronald Biggs, and in the drama series Serangoon Road.  Tim also starred in the romantic comedy A Few Best Men, directed by Stephan Elliot, co-starring Xavier Samuel and Olivia Newton-John.

FREEWAY - THE CHET BAKER JOURNEY

Tuesday 17 to Friday 20 March at 8pm; Saturday 21 March at 3pm & 8pm, Sunday 22 March at 5pm

Hayes Theatre Co, 19 Greenknowe Ave., Potts Point

BOOKINGS: www.hayestheatre.com.au or 02 8065 7337