Stan Getz

The Storyville club in Boston was one of those rooms that seemed to pull good music out of people. When Getz walked in on October 28, 1951, he was twenty-four years old and already playing with a confidence that had no right to exist at that age. The quintet behind him, Raney and Haig and Kotick and Kahn, had all been through the bebop wars. They knew how to leave space and when to push, and on this night they did both at the right moments.

What makes the Storyville recordings hold up is the combination of looseness and precision. Getz was already working that lighter-than-air tone, that way of floating over chord changes without ever losing his grip on the harmony underneath. On the uptempo numbers he cuts through with a brightness that still surprises you. On the ballads, there's already that quality of sustained ache, the sound of a musician who knows exactly how long to hold a note and exactly when to let it go.

Tiny Kahn behind the kit is worth special attention here. His brushwork on the slower pieces is extraordinarily sensitive, and when he opens up on the fast ones there's a crispness to his cymbal work that cuts right through the recording without overwhelming anything. Jimmy Raney's guitar adds a harmonic layer that makes the quintet sound bigger than its parts. For anyone who wants to understand where the young Getz's sound came from and where it was going, this is the essential document. It sounds live in every sense of the word.

The title is not accidental. This is Getz thinking about texture and intimacy in a way that separates him from nearly every other tenor player of the era. The addition of Jimmy Raney on guitar gives the group a different center of gravity than the standard piano trio plus horn format. Raney and Getz had an almost telepathic musical relationship, and on the slower pieces here that closeness is audible in every phrase they trade.

Duke Jordan's piano is perfectly calibrated: he fills the harmonic space without taking up too much of it, leaving room for the guitar-tenor conversation that is really the emotional core of the record. Crow and Isola keep things light and propulsive without ever pushing the tempo into territory that would break the intimate mood the front line is building.

This is not a flashy record. There are no pyrotechnic moments, no extended solos designed to showcase technique at the expense of feeling. What it is instead is a perfect example of what cool jazz was trying to accomplish: music with room to breathe, where the spaces between the notes carry as much weight as the notes themselves. A patient listen rewards you considerably.

The Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, November 8, 1954: a concert hall, not a club, with the kind of acoustic space that gives a horn player room to really open up. Getz and Bob Brookmeyer had been working together for a stretch by this point, and the Shrine recording catches them at the peak of that particular collaboration. Brookmeyer on valve trombone was one of the most harmonically interesting musicians in jazz at the time, and the two front-line voices complement each other in ways that reward careful listening.

The concert format brings out something in Getz that the studio doesn't always capture: a willingness to extend, to follow an idea past where it might naturally conclude and see what happens on the other side. On "Pennies from Heaven" and "I've Got You Under My Skin," he stretches phrases into territory that verges on outside without ever losing the melodic thread. Brookmeyer answers in kind, and the result is two musicians pushing each other somewhere neither would go alone.

John Williams, not the film composer but the jazz pianist, is an underrated presence throughout. He keeps the chord voicings open enough that the two horns can maneuver freely, and his own solo spots are model examples of mid-fifties piano thinking: bebop vocabulary filtered through a cooler, more spacious sensibility. This is the live Getz record to start with if you haven't heard any of them.

These are studio sides recorded for Prestige before Getz had fully arrived as a name, and there's something quietly fascinating about hearing him work in a more constrained context than the live recordings. The format is pure quartet: tenor plus piano, bass, drums, no guitar, recorded across three sessions between 1949 and 1950. What strikes you is how fully formed the conception already was. Getz at twenty-two or twenty-three sounds like Getz at thirty.

Three different rhythm sections appear across the sessions: Al Haig with Gene Ramey and Stan Levey, Haig again with Tommy Potter and Roy Haynes, and Tony Aless with Percy Heath and Don Lamond. The contrast between them is instructive. Haig is crystalline and boppish, matching Getz's clarity note for note. Aless brings a slightly different harmonic sensibility, and the tenor responds accordingly. Having all three sessions collected on a single LP makes these contrasts useful in a way that separate releases might not.

The sound quality varies across the sessions, as you'd expect from early Prestige recordings, but never badly enough to undercut the music. What you get is an essential snapshot of a major voice finding its feet, with enough specificity and individual character already present to make it clear that the later work was not an accident. Quartets is the prehistory of everything Getz would do in the decade that followed.

This is the record that established what people mean when they talk about the Getz tone. Not the sound itself, which had been there from the beginning, but the understanding that the sound was the point, that playing ballads at this level of sustained beauty was not a lesser ambition than playing fast, that beauty itself was a form of argument. From the opening bars of "Sweet Georgia Brown" played at half the expected tempo, Getz is announcing a different set of priorities.

The Raney-Jordan-Crow-Isola unit that appears here is the ideal Getz rhythm section for this kind of material. Jordan's piano is harmonically adventurous but never intrusive, never stepping on the melody while Getz is in the middle of saying something. Raney, when he solos, extends the mood rather than breaking it. Bill Crow's bass is deep and supportive in a way that seems to physically hold the other instruments up.

The ballad mastery on display here places Getz in the company of the great melodists: Coleman Hawkins at his most lyrical, Lester Young in his prime, Ben Webster in the slow numbers. He knew what he had and he used it completely without apology. Stan Getz Plays is one of the definitive tenor saxophone records of the 1950s, and it belongs in any serious collection of the music.

A California quintet and a New York tenor make for an unexpectedly perfect match on West Coast Jazz. Conte Candoli on trumpet adds a second voice up front, and the interplay between his bright, precise phrasing and Getz's floating warmth gives the album a dimension that the quartet records lack. Lou Levy was one of the most musically literate pianists on the Coast, with the kind of harmonic sophistication that could keep up with both horns on any standard. Leroy Vinnegar walked bass with a commitment that few players in any era could match. And Shelly Manne was simply one of the best drummers in the world at this point in his career, precise without being stiff, swinging without making it look effortful.

Getz sounds liberated here. The material ranges from bop to ballad, and he navigates all of it with that particular quality of ease that only comes from total command of the instrument. On the uptempo numbers, the lines run long and confident. On the slower pieces, the tone opens up into something that approaches warmth as a physical sensation. The recording quality is excellent, and you can hear every detail of what Manne is doing in the upper register of the kit.

West Coast Jazz also works as a kind of argument: that the geographic label was never quite right, that the music didn't belong to a coast but to a set of values about sound and space and the relationship between improvisation and composition. Getz understood those values better than almost anyone. This record is proof that geography is mostly irrelevant when the music is this good.

The rhythm section is the same West Coast unit from the West Coast Jazz album, recorded in the same month: Lou Levy, Leroy Vinnegar, Shelly Manne. What changes is the front line. Hampton came from the swing era and brought every bit of that energy to the date. Getz came from somewhere cooler and more interior. On paper, the pairing should create tension. In practice, it creates heat.

Hampton's vibraphone is by nature a bright, percussive instrument, and Getz's breathy warmth provides an unexpected counterpoint to that brightness. The two don't fuse so much as they trade and respond, each occupying different acoustic space in a way that makes the overall sound richer than either could produce alone. Manne's drumming holds the center, precise without being stiff, giving both soloists room to range without ever losing the pulse.

What surprises you, listening to this record, is how relaxed the whole thing sounds given the temperamental differences assembled in the room. Hampton was always a showman, but here he's listening more than performing, responding to Getz's phrasing in ways that suggest genuine musical curiosity rather than competitive display. The result is one of the more unexpected successful collaborations of the decade, a record that works precisely because the participants found a way to make their differences interesting rather than irreconcilable.

Five tenor saxophonists, all of them coming out of the same Lester Young lineage, all of them making something slightly different from the same set of influences. The Brothers collects various Prestige sessions from the early fifties and works as an accidental document of a specific moment in the music: the period when Young's influence was still being metabolized, when a generation of cool tenors was figuring out what to keep, what to extend, and what to leave behind.

Getz sounds like himself even in the company of four musicians who share his general approach. That's the test of a distinctive voice: can you tell it from others who appear to be doing the same thing? On "Five Brothers" and "The Brothers," where multiple tenors trade and blend, Getz cuts through with a brightness that immediately distinguishes him from Cohn's earthier warmth and Sims's more rhythmically extroverted attack. Each player is unmistakably who they are.

Allen Eager and Brew Moore appear on fewer tracks, but both are worth hearing here: Eager in particular plays with a mercurial quality that doesn't appear anywhere else in the collection, something slightly more angular and restless than the other four. As a historical document of a specific school, The Brothers is invaluable. As a listening experience, it has enough individual moments of genuine beauty to earn its place outside that context too. Close the decade out with this one.

This is the strangest record Getz ever made, and the one he called his favorite. He commissioned Eddie Sauter to write a suite for string orchestra, and Sauter did something no arranger would normally dare: he wrote no saxophone part at all. Seven finished pieces for strings, complete on their own, with air left inside them. Getz listened and improvised straight through the gaps. Nothing was sketched for him. What you hear is a great melodist thinking in real time against music that never stops moving underneath him.

The circumstances were brutal. Getz's mother died right before the first session in July 1961, and he missed the date entirely. The orchestra recorded without him, and Getz overdubbed his parts later that month. "Her" is dedicated to his mother, and once you know that, the way he plays over those strings is hard to shake. On the other end of the record, "I'm Late, I'm Late" tips its hat to Bartók on purpose, with Roy Haynes dropping in for the album's only real drum feature and pushing Getz into some of the most aggressive playing of his career.

Third stream records usually fail in one of two ways: the classical half is stiff, or the jazz half is decoration. Focus fails in neither direction. Sauter's writing stands on its own as modern string music, and Getz never once sounds like a guest on his own album. Fifty-plus years on, nobody has really made another record like it. If you only know the bossa nova Getz, this is the album that shows you how much more was in there.

The record that lit the fuse. Charlie Byrd came home from a State Department tour of South America with a suitcase full of Brazilian records and spent months trying to get someone to take the music seriously. Getz heard João Gilberto and Jobim and got it immediately. They cut this album in a single day, February 13, 1962, in the sanctuary of All Souls Unitarian Church in Washington, D.C., because Byrd liked the natural echo better than any studio in town.

The formula is simple and it works: Byrd's nylon-string guitar holds the samba pulse, two drummers keep everything feather-light, and Getz floats over the top with that tone. "Desafinado" won him a Grammy and cracked the pop charts, and the album itself went to number one on the Billboard pop chart, which no jazz record had done. Within a year every label in America was rushing out a bossa nova cash-in, most of them terrible.

Honest caveat: this is American jazz musicians playing bossa nova from the outside, gorgeous but not yet the real conversation. That record came two years later with Gilberto and Jobim in the room. But the melodic instincts that made Getz the right man for this music are all over every track, and "Desafinado" and "One Note Samba" still sound effortless in a way that hundreds of imitators never managed. The spark that started everything, and still a great Sunday morning record.

Two days in March 1963 at A&R Studios in New York, Creed Taylor producing, Phil Ramone behind the board, and the actual architects of bossa nova finally in the same room as Getz: João Gilberto singing and playing that impossible guitar, Jobim himself at the piano. Where Jazz Samba was American musicians reaching toward Brazil, this is the real conversation, and you can hear the difference in the first eight bars.

The famous accident is Astrud. João's wife was not a professional singer, but somebody needed to sing the English lyrics, and her cool, unadorned delivery on "The Girl from Ipanema" became one of the most recognizable vocal performances of the century. It won Record of the Year, and the album took Album of the Year, the first jazz record ever to do it. It sold over a million copies. None of that is why it holds up. It holds up because everyone on it plays quieter than they have to, and nobody fills a space that does not need filling.

Getz is astonishing here precisely because he does so little. His solos on "Corcovado" and "O Grande Amor" are melodies laid on top of melodies, no wasted notes, the tone carrying all the emotion the material needs. This is one of a handful of records where jazz crossed into the wider world without giving anything up. Every collection needs it, and the vinyl reissues are cheap and everywhere. There is no excuse.

By 1967 the bossa nova wave had crested, and Getz did the smartest thing a famous musician can do: he hired somebody young enough to be dangerous. Chick Corea was twenty-five, and Getz not only put him in the piano chair but recorded two of his tunes, "Litha" and "Windows," both of which stretch way past anything on the bossa records. Ron Carter and Grady Tate fill out the quartet, and Rudy Van Gelder engineered the March 1967 sessions.

"Litha" opens the album with almost nine minutes of shifting time and modal harmony, and Getz sounds hungry in a way he had not on record in years. The Jobim tune "O Grande Amor" is the bridge back to Brazil, but even that gets abstracted, slowed down and opened up. Mike Gibbs's title track and Dizzy's "Con Alma" round out a program with not one weak selection on it.

This is the great overlooked Getz record. The bossa albums made him famous and Focus was his own favorite, but Sweet Rain might be the best pure quartet playing of his career: modern without being cold, lyrical without being soft. If you want to hear where Corea's early language comes from, or what Getz's tone sounds like over harmony that keeps moving, start here. Then go listen to what Corea did on his own records a year later on the Chick Corea page.

Four nights in March 1991 at the Café Montmartre in Copenhagen, just Getz and Kenny Barron, no bass, no drums, no net. Getz was dying of liver cancer and knew it. Three months later he was gone. Verve released two discs from the stand the following year, and it is one of the most emotionally direct documents in the whole jazz catalog.

What gets you is that the tone survived everything. The breath is shorter, some phrases end earlier than the Getz of 1961 would have ended them, and none of it matters, because the sound itself, that floating, aching sound, is fully intact. Barron is the perfect partner, carrying rhythm and harmony at once and giving Getz something beautiful to lean on in every tune. The Benny Golson material, "Stablemates" and "I Remember Clifford," lands especially hard given how much of Golson's songbook is about mourning, and Charlie Haden's "First Song" gets a reading that is almost unbearably tender.

Four stars instead of five only because the physical struggle is occasionally audible and a few takes wobble, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. But nobody should skip this record. It is the sound of a great musician spending his last strength on the thing he did best, in front of people, with a friend. The farewell every player hopes they get, and almost nobody does.