Stan Getz

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Stanley Gayetzky (February 2, 1927 – June 6, 1991), better known by his stage name Stan Getz, was an American jazz musician. He is considered one of the greatest tenor saxophone players of all time and was known as "The Sound" because of his warm, lyrical, and instantly recognizable tone as displayed in his version of the song "The Girl from Ipanema". Getz's prime influence was the wispy, mellow tone of Lester Young, yet Getz continued to develop his approach to playing throughout his life. He said of himself in 1986: "I never consciously tried to conceive of what my sound should be..."

1 Life and work
2 Quotes regarding Getz
3 Samples
4 Partial discography
5 External links

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Life and work

Born in Philadelphia to Russian Jewish parents and raised in New York City, Getz played a number of instruments before his father bought him his first saxophone at the age of 13. In 1943, at age 16, he was accepted into Jack Teagarden's band. After playing in various other bands (1944 Stan Kenton; 1945 Jimmy Dorsey; 1945–46 Benny Goodman) Getz became better known as a soloist in the Woody Herman Band from 1947–49. He scored a hit with his melodic and lyrical solo on Ralph Burns' piece Early Autumn. With few exceptions, Getz would be a leader on all of his recording sessions after 1950.

In the 1950s, Getz had become quite popular playing cool jazz with a young Horace Silver, Johnny Smith, Oscar Peterson, and many others. Getz's first two quintets were notable for their personnel, including Charlie Parker's rhythm section of drummer Roy Haynes, pianist Al Haig and bassist Tommy Potter. In 1958, Getz tried to escape his narcotics addiction (for which he had gotten arrested four years earlier), by moving to Copenhagen, Denmark.

After returning to America in 1961, Getz would become a central figure in the fusion of jazz and Bossa Nova. Along with guitarist Charlie Byrd, who had just returned from a U.S. State Department tour of Brazil, Getz recorded the album Jazz Samba in 1962, and it became a commercial success. The title track "Jazz Samba" was an adaptation of Antonio Carlos Jobim's composition "So Danço Samba". Getz won the Grammy for Best Jazz Performance of 1963 for the track "Desafinado".

The next step of this fusion was the meeting of Getz with the Brazilian musicians themselves. Getz recorded with Jobim, guitarist João Gilberto and his wife, the singer Astrud Gilberto. Their collaboration on "The Girl from Ipanema" (1963) won a Grammy Award, making Gilberto's style, known as Bossa Nova, much more popular. This piece became one of the most well-known jazz pieces of all time.

The album Getz/Gilberto, a collaboration of Getz and João Gilberto, won two Grammy Awards in 1964. They won Best Album and Best Single, besting The Beatles' A Hard Day's Night. This was no doubt a victory for jazz and for Bossa Nova and it resulted in the propagation of the music to millions, and paved the way for an influx of Brazilian music and instruments into jazz.

Stan Getz understood the language of Bossa Nova and he sounds completely natural in his recordings with Brazilian musicians. Brazilian jazz has survived as a definite influence in the works of other famous jazz musicians such as Wes Montgomery and Joe Henderson. In 1967, Getz became more inspired by jazz-rock fusion and other post-bop developments, recording albums with Chick Corea and Stanley Clarke.

After another drug-induced hiatus in Málaga, Spain, from 1969, Getz resurfaced, playing with electric ensembles into the 1980s, and experimenting with an Echoplex on his tenor saxophone, for which critics vilified him. To the relief of many jazz critics, he discarded fusion and the electric side of jazz in favour of acoustic jazz again, into the middle of the 1980s. Getz, later in the decade, gradually de-emphasized the Bossa Nova as his style of choice, opting for more esoteric and perhaps less mainstream jazz.

Stan Getz died in 1991 of liver cancer in Malibu, California. In 1998, The "Stan Getz Media Center and Library" at the Berklee College of Music was dedicated to the memory of the saxophonist through a donation from the Herb Alpert Foundation.

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Quotes regarding Getz

"Flawless technique, perfect time, strong melodic sense and more than enough harmonic expertise, fabulous memory, and great ears. Add a superb sense of dynamics, pacing, and format. Top this off with a sound of pure gold and you have Stan Getz". —pianist Lou Levy