© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.
"In Getz's case, information technology'south ironic that the very matter that was (and has remained) his most talked of virtue – his sound – has done more to bury the atomic number 82 of his being a great blues player than promote it. And yet it is Getz' sound – that far reaching, emotion-packed tone that could vary from a goosebump-raising purr to a seizing weep – that contains his most fundamental and profound link to the blues." …
"Some who knew the tenorist personally plant him to be zip but a mass of emotional dissimilarity and contradiction (his long term friend Zoot Sims once summed Getz upwards as "a nice bunch of guys"), however at that place was i matter which united these sometimes alarmingly disparate strands – the saxophonist's ability to outline a musical narrative.
Getz' knack for telling a melodic story is central to his fable, and whether they be tales told at top speed (1955's astonishing Smooth) or at near heart-stopping stillness (hear his 1966 account of When The World Was Immature) these stories were always cogent, convincing and full of a sure sense of intelligent musical architecture, attributes all the more impressive for being improvised rather than scripted. He as well had a talent for getting to the meat of whatever he was playing, …"
"Only somewhere, deep within the twisting, interlocked and however separate characters that made up the public edifice called Stan Getz there lay a melancholy and a sadness that was every inch a match for that inside the rural blues of the south, or the urban dejection of Chicago or Kansas City. Where this came from is anyone's estimate. Dave Gelly postulated that it might take been role of Getz' Jewish heritage – a sort of cantor weep transplanted to jazz; others from his less than comfy upbringing in New York's East Bronx. Wherever information technology stemmed from, information technology'southward certain that the raging contradictions of pride and sorrow – the very schism that make the blues work as a consistently dignified expression of the human being condition, regardless of idiom – were already in play within him every bit a young man. And they never left him: …"
- Simon Spillett
Simon Spillett is a first-charge per unit Jazz tenor saxophonist and an authority on the music of many of the groovy players of the instrument who blossomed during the second one-half of the 20th century, both in Corking Britain and in the Us.
He is the author of The Long Shadow of the Little Giant: The Life, Work and Legacy of Tubby Hayes which Equinox has recently published in a 2d edition. You can locate my review of it by going hither.
In addition to fronting his own quartet and large band, Simon has won several awards for his music, including the tenor saxophone category of the British Jazz Awards (2011), Jazz Journal magazine, Critic's Choice CD of the Year (2009) and Rising Star in the BBC Jazz Awards (2007).
Simon has previously shared essays on Hank Mobley, Hank with Miles Davis and Booker Erwin on this page.
His free energy and enthusiasm for the music is reflected in well-researched and well-written pieces most Jazz and its makers and it is always a treat to have his piece of work upwardly on the JazzProfiles weblog.
You may call up, every bit y'all read the title of this posting, that it is nothing more than a simple statement of descriptive fact, but y'all'd exist wrong, because what follows is a full blown argumentation and debate on Stan Getz's talent and ability to play the dejection. Simon employs a paradigm shift that gives the reader a different angle of acceptance on Stan Getz's relationship with the blues, a perspective both aurally and narratively which I daresay, you've never heard or read before.
Simon has his own website which you can visit via this link.
© - Simon Spillett, copyright protected; all rights reserved, used with the author's permission.
"What'southward going on in your life comes out in the way you play on whatever particular twenty-four hour period, without even trying."
- Stan Getz
"A hundred years since the release of the showtime jazz recordings – or rather since the release of the commencement records to utilise the discussion as a genre-defining selling point – it'southward hardly surprising that the music'due south rich history has of late found itself under fifty-fifty greater scrutiny than ever earlier. Serious scholars of the way'due south growth and development are zilch new, of form; what nosotros might call first-hand intellectual coverage of the music has been going on since at least the 1930s, the decade when European critics started a tendency for regarding jazz as much more than than a novel form of entertainment. More recently, what we might at present term the gilded age of jazz – the 1940s to the 1960s – has slid under the microscope of a new kind of thinking, that of revisionist commentators, some of whose purpose appears to be little more than the grand reveal – telling us that what nosotros thought we knew really wasn't so, seeking to reframe history for the sound-seize with teeth obsessed, post-millennial world.
A centennial mark is always a cue for retrospection, but in jazz, a genre whose development has more than or less gone hand-in-hand with that of recording technology, it'south doubly appealing; unlike other music, the early practitioners of which were lost to the sands of (pre-recorded sound) time, nosotros tin hear almost all of jazz'due south pacesetters for ourselves. Minus disruptive folk-myth and apocrypha they're all out there on record, the internet and as digital downloads.
We tin also continue to benefit from the reflections of the musicians still living who vividly recall their artistic forebears. Thus in contempo years Sonny Rollins has talked of his reverential relationship with Coleman Hawkins, Benny Golson has written of the night he watched Louis Armstrong and Clifford Brown lock horns and Cecil Taylor, in one of his last interviews, delighted in revealing that Duke Ellington'southward personal nickname for Miles Davis was "Inky", no less. Revisionist thinking cannot be practical quite and then readily to these surviving figures as it can their now departed contemporaries – after all a Wayne Shorter is still effectually to tell it similar it was; a Count Basie is not – which is why in this age of always more forensic examinations of the piece of work and lives of the iconic figures within the music it remains the expressionless giants who proceed to generate the about column inches. Information technology's piece of cake to meet the appeal. Theirs are careers that tin can be easily codified, that are faits accomplis and which, at this altitude in time, tin exist happily dissected by all and sundry, well informed or not. And, as history never ceases to remind u.s., dead men can't fight dorsum.
Of late there's been a distinctly 21 st century-flavoured spin put on all sorts of "revelations" about the skillful and the great of the music, many of whom are handily unable to set the record straight. A few of the more obvious recent examples include Terry Teachout's biography Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington (Gotham Books, 2013), which sought to strip jazz's nearly elegant of figureheads of much of his mystique, revealing him to be a vainglorious womaniser with a talent for obfuscation. Then there's the utterly peculiar attempt in some quarters to rebrand Tubby Hayes, arguably Britain'due south nigh authentic-sounding mod jazz soloist, who died in 1973, as a prototype for the United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland's Mod movement of the 1960s, with some contriving to find a link between Hayes' uber-slick Hard Bop and the raw, nihilistic pretensions of The Who, The Minor Faces and co.
And, at the time of writing, the internet is ablaze with news of the release of a "lost" Coltrane record, hailed past some equally a jazz Holy Grail, the publicity for which has somehow drowned out the fact that the "album", such as information technology is, actually wasn't and so much lost as discarded; Coltrane himself plain decided non to sanction these recordings for public result and just moved on leaving them to gather dust (and it seems increased commercial value). Conveniently, of course, neither he nor his producer Bob Thiele are around to take their say – in fact, it'due south not difficult to believe that if they were these tapes might take remained on the shelf.
The Coltrane consequence arrived about in sync with social media giant Facebook announcing a major clampdown on Imitation News and information misuse, an ironically timed gesture when one thinks of how much mid-20 th century jazz history has been rejigged of late, folklore and facts frequently twisted to tell stories that might not always be quite what those writing them would have usa believe. In some instances, it's nearly as if the voices of those who were there matter not every bit much as those at present doing the spinning. Indeed, this conceit ignores the value of eye (and ear) witness testimony, the very affair that brings jazz history to life in way that the hindsight of after-the-fact commentators cannot. Striking the balance betwixt objectivity and a personalised "angle" has never been more difficult for jazz writers. Information technology's zero new though.
Take the case of Stan Getz, a veritable icon of post-state of war jazz and bailiwick of what must surely be one of the virtually disquieting of all musician biographies – A Life In Jazz by Donald L. Maggin (William Morrow and Company, 1996) – a retelling published at a time when many of today's icon-topplers had still to lose their milk teeth.
The mid-1990s was early for such a book to announced, but information technology was already long overdue. In fact, Getz fabricated an especially good choice for any author looking to practice a revisionist study and at the time information technology appeared Maggin'southward forensically detailed business relationship divided the jazz fraternity. In some quarters the author was regarded every bit a heretic, daring to dismantle an unassailable god, to others here at last was a man willing to discount the myth and focus on facts. To his credit though, Maggin had been conscientious to include enough of first-hand testimony (including that of Getz'due south family), and his text steered an accurate and largely not-judgemental course through Getz's life and times. What emerged was the tale of a personality that bordered disturbingly on the psychotic, the saxophonist's musical serenity off-set by binges of violence and monstrously overblown indulgence.
Looking at the lives of some of his generational peers – read about Fine art Pepper and Gerry Mulligan to run into equally huge egos at work – Getz was hardly alone in his volatility, but what mayhap made Maggin'due south revelations so much more stomach turning was that they contrasted so incongruously from the image the globe knows of Getz'south music – that of his artistic consistency, his lyricism edging into the romantic, and his golden tone, a audio that spoke of grace, sophistication and charming refinement. In some senses, these musical avails weren't then much calling cards as simulated flags. Underneath it all, Getz had guts, musical and otherwise, a tensile-strength toughness that, if you lot looked hard enough had always hidden in plain sight.
The English pianist Stan Tracey, who accompanied the saxophonist of his showtime visit to Ronnie Scott's club in London in 1964, saw it instantly. "Later on yous know him – yous see the nasty bits in his music," Tracey told announcer Ken Hyder in 1973. "He's completely selfish and he comes on with the large superior flake."
Scott himself captured the paradox of professionalism and personality that made Getz such a perplexing study; "During those moving, poignant ballads of his you lot could hear a pin drop," he wrote of Getz's appearance at his lodge in Melody Maker . "And if anyone had dropped a pin, he'd've got a look from Stan's babe-bluish eyes which would accept felled a polar acquit."
Maggin's volume may have upset a lot of people, simply at root it told us nothing about Getz that hadn't already long been part of jazz-lore. He was a cussed, stubborn son of a bitch, who, like Chet Baker, beginning a personable mien with a hopelessly ugly interior. And you couldn't blame it all on the usual bitternesses that bedevil many a jazz legend – aye, Getz drank and smoked to excess and had, for a time, a serious heroin habit (even serving a curt jail term in 1954), simply he had never really struggled, not in the starving-artist-in-a-garret way. All the same, fifty-fifty commercial success couldn't quash his inner angst. By the center-1960s, when Tracey and Scott came into contact with him, he was one of the world's acknowledged jazz artists, thanks to the unprecedented (in jazz) sales of the bossa-nova hits Desafinado and The Girl From Ipanema . Consequently, he was also among the music's nigh financially sewn-up of performers, owning a capacious mansion in up-country New York. In addition to this, a dashingly handsome man (one writer once compared him to the player John Garfield), he had a drop-expressionless gorgeous Grace Kelly-ish wife – his 2d - whose lineage was that of Swedish aristocracy, and who bore him a clutch of photogenic children who looked more than like the personification of young WASP America than the offspring of a 3rd-generation Russian Jewish immigrant and his foreign helpmate.
At the time the bossa-boom hitting, Getz was nudging towards middle-age and, thanks to a lengthy association with jazz impresario Norman Granz, was already ane of the most successful jazz instrumentalists of his generation; this new found mainstream stardom seemed a nice mid-life advantage for a career of wholesale artistic dedication. (There were other prizes too; at the time The Girl From Ipanema went global, Getz - a serial womaniser - was bedding Astrud Gilberto, the vocalist whose Lolita-like brand of sexual activity entreatment had done so much to make the tape a commercial success.)
Even earlier he'd clearly had nada to mutter about. Donald Maggin's book has a teenaged Getz beingness pursued by none other than Ava Gardner (whom he turned down!) and, every bit Doug Ramsey pointed out in a note for a collection of Getz's earliest piece of work as a leader "at 20-ii, [he] had popular success, fame and the admiration of musicians of all stripes. He was a homeowner with a immature son [and] a wife who loved him."
Nor was his inner conflict immediately apparent to his public. On stage he appeared unshowy and unpretentious, and his softly-spoken vocalism and quiet sense of humor independent barely a hint of the violent temper which lay beneath. He as well left little in the way of written controversy; his many magazine interviews rarely dissed fellow musicians (unlike those of Miles Davis) and he proved to be a remarkably articulate wordsmith, writing witty sleeve notes for a couple of his own albums.
(Another facet emerges when looking at his Three Wishes in the book of the aforementioned name, a collection of wish lists from prominent 1950s-60s jazzmen collated by one of the music's greatest patrons, the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter [Abrams Image, 2008]. Hoping for Justice, Truth and Beauty, he comes across as almost saintly.)
It sounds like a charmed life, one so smooth that all the usual reactionary clichés nigh jazz musicians having to endure in order to create seem redundant. Fable has it that whatever dirt existed in Getz'south life, it never always impinged in his music. Although like virtually jazzmen he'd play the blues, they couldn't actually be said to be a direct conduit to his innermost self. Surely his kind of dejection were no more than a formality, a routine, something added to an LP or a live set to balance the programme? To land that Stan Getz was annihilation other than a functional purveyor of the blues form within jazz at present that – that would be Fake News.
Or would it? Like many things with Stan Getz, nothing is quite what it seems. Indeed, if in that location is i final piece of revisionist thinking to exist applied to his life and piece of work information technology's that he was, even early on in his career, non but a pretty sound simply a player with genuine soulfulness, working a pearl of a tone around some deeply embedded integral grit. This, of course, doesn't quite fit received wisdom.
The usual thumbnail sketch of Getz'south contribution to jazz goes something like this: inspired by Lester Young he extended and amplified the lyricism of his forebear into e'er more than romantic dimensions, creating a sound bespoke for the riches within the Keen American Songbook and, afterwards even so, the Brazilian inventions of the bossa-nova; tone and melody were his strongest suits, ballads his most suitable artistic canvass. He could play hard and fast, yes, but that's not really what he was about.
It's an adequate plenty reduction, just, as with all such encapsulations, information technology'south only that; a cameo rather than the full picture.
That Getz could always swing was never really in doubt (go back to his primeval solo titles made in July 1946 and y'all may find yourself shocked at how earthly he does and so) but that he could be as as constructive exponent of the most bones of all jazz vehicles – the twelve bar blues – is a fact overlooked in about every account of his life. But that skill was there too, right from the off. And, as with anecdotes about the other fundamental aspects of Getz' art beingness firmly in place while still only a youngster – his sight-reading abilities, his perfect pitch, his unfailing knack for continuing out in a oversupply – 1 doesn't have to search hard as well notice a first-hand example.
In 1 of the most revealing anecdotes in Maggin's biography, trumpeter Shorty Rogers recalled his first meet with a 14 year onetime Getz, both men playing in a hastily formed dance orchestra somewhere in the Bronx. Within a few years they would be featured soloists with one of America's leading large bands, that of Woody Herman, eventually becoming icons of 1950s modern jazz, but back in 1941 they were little more than enthusiastic kids, except that in Getz's instance youthful élan went paw in paw with God-given genius.
"I listened, and to my amazement he never made one mistake," remembered Rogers of that get-go gig. "We did a Glenn Miller matter, 'In The Mood', and he stood upward and played Tex Beneke'due south solo...with the same sound and everything. And I said 'what's going on with this guy?' So we played 'One O'Clock Jump' [and he] did Lester Immature'due south solo. Merely perfect."
A teenage souvenir for mimicry is superficially the well-nigh impressive attribute of Roger chestnut, simply a niggling deeper in comes the realisation (one that few other observers seem to have twigged) that Getz was already well familiar with the patterns of the dejection. In The Mood and One O'Clock Bound – veritable signatures from polar opposites of swing – are both based on the blues; Getz may have been using the solos of other men equally his template at this betoken merely the fact remains that in learning Beneke's and Young'due south choruses past rote he wasn't just showing a precocious ability to get with the 2 principal approaches of jazz tenor in the early 1940s – Coleman Hawkins (filtered through Beneke) and Lester Young – he was showing how the dejection was already a key function of his musical DNA.
One has to be conscientious not to overstate this indicate; for some jazz musicians the ability to play a convincing blues is itself a sort of litmus exam (Dexter Gordon in one case said "If yous can't play the blues you may too forget it"), for others, it'south something they've never really got to grips with or consider important. However, in Getz' generation such a skill was very much looked upon as necessary in all schools of jazz, even among those radically reinventing the music; just look at Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and even Cecil Taylor, all of whom used the blues as a base from which to explore the outer reaches.
On the surface, Stan Getz appeared to be the about unlikely dejection player on the planet, especially during the start years of his career-rising immediately mail-Woody Herman. His watercolour-similar contribution to Herman'south recording of Early Fall – the tape that effectively launched his distinction - had seemingly set out his palette; a tone so airy and light that it could at times be more alto- than tenor-like; a penchant for achingly lyrical delineations of tune and a technique so clean as to be polished. None of these musical brush strokes seemed to indicate the base-level virility of the blues.
Another Getz biographer, Richard Palmer, noted how this kind of delivery instantly ready Getz apart, creating "[an] apparent distance from the 'scarlet-blooded' schoolhouse of tenor-playing most obviously associated with [Coleman] Hawkins, Lockjaw [Davis] and such as Johnny Griffin and Dexter Gordon", the inference at the time being that but men playing with the huge, boiling tones of Hawkins, Gordon and co. could generate whatsoever musical heat.
But before Getz there was an alternative method of getting hot, ably demonstrated during the 1930s by Lester Young, the beginning tenor saxophonist to suggest a viable alternative to the large-bore method that Hawkins had pioneered (amplified to a sure degree by all the above named players).
Immature's playing had a sidelong quality to it; it overjoyed and insinuated where Hawkins' pushed and probed. Information technology was more like musical foreplay than a full-blown consummation; it suggested rather than outlined; and it showed another style with the dejection.
Equally a blackness southerner, Immature was well aware of the primacy of the blues, and yet, equally in everything else he achieved musically, he took to the form with subtlety besides equally emotional candour. Great blues improvisations are littered throughout his discography, from those independent on his sides with Count Basie during the belatedly 1930s and early 1940s (which Getz would have known only too well) to a surprising number of triumphs within the format in the years supposed to represent his creative refuse, post-World State of war Two – DB Blues (1945, with the added wrinkle of an 8 bar bridge), Back to The Land (1946), Jumpin' with Symphony Sid (1947), Blueish 'northward' Bells (1949), Undercover Dejection (1951), Red Boy Dejection (1955) and the late-in-the-day masterpiece Pres Returns (1956).
It's unsurprising therefore given the titanic impact Immature fabricated on all other areas of his mode that his influence should too be felt keenly whenever Getz tackled the blues. In fact, information technology was very frequently when playing a elementary twelve-bar that the younger man would doff the absurd-schoolhouse façade in favour of a series of direct references back to Immature. By no means was his alone in this practise – contemporaries like Zoot Sims and Al Cohn did much the same thing - every bit did Wardell Gray and Dexter Gordon - when playing a blues. However, what men like Getz, Sims and Cohn didn't accept was the directly, overarching link to the black urban R& B traditions that players such as Gordon and Gray possessed (and which was nowadays in a more overt style in the piece of work of tenors like Lockjaw Davis and Gene Ammons too as in that of other, far lesser, R&B journeymen).
The formative learning forum of black spring music would too aid shape the playing of a dandy many of the leading Afro-American jazz tenorists to emerge in the wake of Gordon and Gray – amid them John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Hank Mobley, Benny Golson, Johnny Griffin and Junior Cook. Getz hadn't attended this kind of finishing school so how on globe could he play a convincing blues solo? Surely his approach was – to put information technology bluntly – all too white and besides polite?
In this, it's impossible to avoid the hoary contention of race – the old "can white musicians play a black music?" argument. Tired as this debate now is, if only to clarify Getz'south qualifications as a nifty blues improviser, it'south worth briefly reviving it here.
A numbskull view of jazz history sees two streams of post-war evolution; a black, dejection-infused menstruum of difficult-hitting jazz which encompasses the waves of Bebop, Difficult Bop and Soul Jazz, and a largely white-dominated tributary that delivered cool, Westward Coast jazz and the more than cerebral experiments of the 'Third Stream', the avowed aim of which was to marry jazz and classical techniques. This imbecilic viewpoint sees no connection – and absolutely no cross-over – betwixt the two streams, leading to such idiotic statements as Hard Bop is a solely black music and white men can't play the blues. Like all oversimplifications of jazz progress, this leaves plenty of musicians stranded in actuality; Art Pepper and Zoot Sims played the blues to the manner born yet both were white; Miles Davis could be cooler than an Chill evening yet he was black; Benny Golson wrote compositions and arrangements as finicky as any West Coaster; Richie Kamuca grooved more than plenty of New York tenors; the Gerry Mulligan Quartet, cool jazz's start supergroup, had a black drummer, and so on. In curt, it merely doesn't piece of work.
It'southward besides worth remembering that the starting time name jazz musician to take find of the teenage Getz, and the man who employed him in his first fully professional job, trombonist Jack Teagarden, was another thespian who didn't fit the accepted wisdom about white and black jazz. A white man built-in in New Orleans, who refused to recognise the racial barriers of his day (a radical and at times unsafe mental attitude during the 1920s and '30s, particularly for a southerner), Teagarden had a big impact on his teenage charge. Not only did he play with a free-wheeling aptitude for improvisation rare among white players of his generation, he likewise identified deeply with the dejection. His audio too served equally something of a blueprint for Getz: a ringing, singing tone which in its sheer beauty could convey a broad-range of emotional colours. And like Bix Beiderbecke, he was among the first to brandish what writer Gary Giddins identified every bit the white jazzman's gift for "swinging with melancholy" (this lineage would eventually grow to include Artie Shaw, Lee Konitz, Paul Desmond, Chet Baker, Art Pepper, Beak Evans and others, including Stan Getz).
"Teagarden, at present there was a human with a cute tone," Getz said of his erstwhile dominate in the early 1970s, "a full and human audio."
In Getz's example, it's ironic that the very thing that was (and has remained) his virtually talked of virtue – his audio – has washed more to bury the lead of his being a bang-up blues player than promote information technology. And yet it is Getz' audio – that far reaching, emotion-packed tone that could vary from a goosebump-raising purr to a seizing cry – that contains his near key and profound link to the blues. Really to talk of one sound where Getz is concerned is disingenuous. Every bit Dave Gelly (another Getz biographer) in one case wrote information technology was never simply ane thing, instead "gradually evolving from the delicate lightness of his youth to the broad, almost operatic proportions of his last few years." That said, information technology'south usually the sound of Getz in the early-to-mid-1950s that is conjured in nigh listeners minds when his name crops upward – a polish, most blanched tone, in which every note has an evenness of articulation and is perfectly in melody, "completely poker-faced, expressionless, a study in cool," every bit Gelly describes it.
Such uniformity of delivery doesn't sit down well with the old thought of the jazz horn role player trying to capture the nuances of the human voice - those smeared inflections and off-pitch asides that make, say, Johnny Hodges, one of the nigh easily identifiable of all jazz saxophonists.
Getz saw the connexion though and was never shy about how his own unique tone fitted the proffer."The saxophone to me is a translation of the man phonation," he once said, citing Lester Immature as the first thespian to truly realise this ideal. Withal to some listeners, his clear-toned, fifty-fifty-keeled consistency had less of the human, dejection-drawn quality to it and more connexion with the classical tradition. "Everything was very precise, even when [he] was playing fast," says Grammy-winning classical saxophonist Robert Black of Getz. "Yous never heard the horn being 'slid effectually' on. Every note was in identify, which is very much in the way of classical composition [and w]hereas many sax players go more to the reed to get the buzz that's role of their sound, Stan got that fizz from the vibration of the brass – from the saxophone itself."
I might therefore believe that minus a reedy rasp – and think of how well the word rasp applies to the notation product of many a convincing blues tenor from Ben Webster through to Wilton Felder – Getz would be a non-starter in a blues-setting. Not so. Like all great jazzmen, he made his souvenir fit the context not the opposite. And, as when playing a carol, when playing the dejection Getz was a master of emotional contrast, this musical tool surely somehow connected to the fractured, many-sided personality he displayed off-stage. Some who knew the tenorist personally found him to be zippo simply a mass of emotional contrast and contradiction (his long term friend Zoot Sims once summed Getz upwards equally "a dainty agglomeration of guys"), however there was one thing which united these sometimes alarmingly disparate strands – the saxophonist's power to outline a musical narrative.
Getz' knack for telling a melodic story is primal to his legend, and whether they be tales told at top speed (1955's astonishing Smoothen ) or at almost eye-stopping stillness (hear his 1966 account of When The Globe Was Immature ) these stories were always cogent, convincing and total of a sure sense of intelligent musical architecture, attributes all the more impressive for beingness improvised rather than scripted. He also had a talent for getting to the meat of whatsoever he was playing, the very reason why, when guitarist Charlie Byrd was looking for someone to feature on an album of new Brazilian material he planned to tape in 1961 – the record that was to become the best-selling Jazz Samba - he chose Getz. "[I] looked for some kind of phonation to be a little like the apply of the human voice in these songs," he after recalled. "It had to be someone who could play jazz, simply with sensitivity. Stan was perfect."
No bottom figure than Miles Davis agreed, complementing the saxophonist on how "other people can't get nothing out of a song, but he tin can, which takes a lot of imagination." Davis was talking of the bossa-nova, a music which, at its nigh elemental has a wistfulness and longing that is very much connected with the blues tradition (the same mix of melancholy and pride which Davis had earlier plant in the canto honco of Espana, as documented in the album Sketches of Spain ), just he could take been speaking equally virtually Getz' work within a more traditional twelve-bar sequence. Indeed, from this tiny musical kernel, would flourish some of his near luxuriant creations, a dozen of which comprise this drove.
Similar virtually every other jazz effigy of notation from his generation, Getz constitute various ways in which to use the blues. Early in his career – on what was one of his very commencement recording sessions equally leader – it was used as format to display his incredible technical command. The Prestige 78rpm of Crazy Chords was goose egg less than an exercise in casting downwardly an intimidating technical gauntlet, Getz and his band of immature boppers taking the blues through all twelve major keys (jazzmen rarely play annihilation in B, E or A, for example, even the nearly simplest of material). The impact of Charlie Parker on Getz had been a shade less seismic than on many of his contemporaries – after all both he and Bird were coming from the same source, Lester Immature - simply if he took annihilation from Parker at all, it was the altoist'south sense of general musical liberation; bebop per se it might not be, but ane tin can hardly imagine a pre-bop tenor player so offhandedly moving through the modulations as Getz does on Crazy Chords.
In a sort of sequel to this signal accomplishment, the post-obit year he waxed Navy Bluish , another operation in which his clear-eyed delivery sits atop a distinctly boppish rhythm department, this fourth dimension helmed past 1 of the commencement in a long line of Getz discoveries, pianist Horace Silver.
With a player as funky as Silver nowadays, it was small wonder that Getz was now starting to generate reviews that praised his middle- and up-tempo piece of work almost as fulsomely equally they did his ballads. In some quarters there was genuine surprise at this; one French jazz book of the 1950s declared with a hint of novelty that "on occasion he can be a bang-up swingman," almost as if this side of his gift were a lesser talent that ought not to detain listeners.
For the saxophonist himself, at that place was no need to exist and so cautious. "I can play different styles," he told Metronome magazine the same month he'd recorded Navy Blueish . "I'one thousand non trying to shove any style or sound downwards people's throats. It'due south fun swingin' and getting 'hot' for a change instead of trying to exist cool...I can exist a real stompin' tenor homo."
In the same interview, he declared "I don't desire to go stagnant," which in retrospect sounds similar an proclamation of a slight shift in his emotional spectrum. As the sides with Argent had shown, he was every bit capable of mixing fire and water ice to good consequence, very oft demonstrating this new found alchemy near stunningly on elementary, dejection-based pieces. Even at the top of his "cool" period – the early 1950s – he continued to find a apply for the about fundamental of jazz devices. On an atmospheric alive recording made at Boston'south Storyville jazz club in 1951, he and guitarist Jimmy Raney contrived to blend Lester Young's canticle Jumpin' With Symphony Sid with a new dejection written by a young alto saxophonist Gigi Gryce, Eleanor (this latter theme has gone uncredited on all previous problems of this functioning; it is the opening unison line played ahead of Young'due south meliorate-known melody). The outcome was a Janus-faced celebration of jazz old and new, Getz and Raney telegraphing their initial swing era influences – Young and Charlie Christian – into the world of "modern" jazz.
The dejection as well made a handy meeting signal for Getz and the other Norman Granz-signed soloists he "met" on various Norgran/Verve recordings during the mid-to-late Fifties. On the rocketing Impromptu , taken from a 1953 Diz and Getz tiptop with bop founders Dizzy Gillespie and Max Roach, the trumpeter goes hell-for-leather, while Getz generates all his rut and excitement through pin-sharp articulation and an unflappable sense of fourth dimension, regardless of the tear-arse tempo. "Featherbrained really wanted a slice of Stan bad that mean solar day," remembered the session'southward pianist Oscar Peterson in his autobiography. "Dizzy was out for claret." Rather than a pugilistic fight to the death though, the ebullient bopfather got an ice-out, with Getz proving utterly impassive.
On some other Granz-staged briefing, recorded in 1955, while both headliners were in Hollywood shooting The Benny Goodman Story , Getz went head-to-head with veteran vibraphonist Lionel Hampton. The rest of Hamp and Getz was dominated a go-for-bankrupt accounts of such warhorses as Jumpin' At The Woodside and Cherokee , but a single blues theme, Hampton'southward gently unfurling Gladys (named for his wife) struck a more modern annotation, its sequence utilising a subtly contradistinct variant of the descending dejection harmonies pioneered during the 1940s by Charlie Parker. Rather than coming undone in the heady star-on-star ambience both Getz and Hampton audio like the very souls of restraint.
1957 marked Getz'due south most concentrated period of recording to appointment, culminating a a series of Verve projects taped in the summer and fall of the year, including albums cut with Gerry Mulligan, Ella Fitzgerald, J. J. Johnson and others.
Chocolate Sundae dates to an August (and august) session – aptly titled Jazz Giants '58 - uniting the saxophonist with a cross-generational phalanx of swing and post-bop stars, ranging from trumpeter Harry 'Sweets' Edison and drummer Louie Bellson to Gerry Mulligan and the Oscar Peterson trio. Despite Granz's on-sleeve declaration that "Mulligan'[s] deftly fix head arrangements [requite] more than form and direction than in the usual improvised anthology" there is precious picayune to show for them on this rail, which afterwards bassist Ray Brown's solo opening takes more than a few minutes to find its groove. Of the horn soloists, Edison and Getz come out best, the tenorist also having the very last give-and-take.
A month later and Getz and the Peterson trio were in the eye of state-broad tour with Granz'south Jazz at The Philharmonic package, pairing them with bop trombone pioneer J. J. Johnson. Ii of the show's stop-overs were captured on tape with this version of Charlie Parker'southward dejection Billie'south Bounciness (with Bellson on drums once again, not Connie Kay every bit was stated on the original LP consequence) coming from the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, a location immortalised on an earlier Getz LP.
Although much of the novelty of this performance comes from hearing Johnson removed from his usual hard bop confrères (his ain band'southward drummer at this time was Elvin Jones, a world away from Louie Bellson), it is Getz who steals the performance, offer upwards an improvisation at one time heated and emotional, its whole tied together with a tone at times searingly hot. He's harmonically more daring too, casting well-nigh various superimposed chordal substitutes which, had they been played by a saxophonist with a less endearing sound, might well accept made more ears prick up (another of Getz's gifts was his ability to sell you an angular or off-the-wall thought with yous inappreciably noticing, the secret being to wrap the phrase up in a velvet tone).
Several nights later and Getz and three-quarters of his Shrine accompanists (this time minus a guest drummer) taped what must surely rank as one of the saxophonist'due south most relaxed albums, Stan Getz and the Oscar Peterson Trio , its contents shot through with an almost palpable sense of relief that a months' worth of nationwide airplane and bus rides were at present over. Donald Maggin characterised information technology as having "the easy, laid-back quality of a group of old friends jamming in a back room". Indeed, at that place's a positively "after hours" experience to much of the proceedings, even on a piece originally left off the album, Blues For Herky , which begins with Peterson showing off his boogie-woogie chops. Guitarist Herb Ellis'due south back-land twang adds to the vibe, while Getz reveals a sense of fourth dimension and pacing second to none. "It is i of the nigh enjoyable recordings I ever fabricated," he wrote of this session in 1980. "How refreshing to play with these pros – no drums needed, nor missed."
If his solo on Blues For Herky were notably down-home then Getz's contributions to Ellis' own blues-themed anthology, taped the post-obit day, were almost primeval. Nothing But The Blues is a gem of a record, playing to its leaders strongest musical suit (a sort of bluegrass-meets-bop folksiness) and enhanced greatly past two other deciding factors: the recruitment of Getz and trumpeter firecracker Roy Eldridge as a front-line to die for and the option to omit a pianoforte (an Oscar Peterson could accept overcooked things here, for all his brilliance).
Recorded on the Westward Coast, the anthology might also have a loaded subtext; packaged in a cover blueprint that could near be a Blue Note pastiche and including a playlist that included such venerable choices every bit Royal Garden Dejection , information technology may have been a nod to the prevailing mood of old time "funk" and then emerging from New York, where players like Horace Silver and Sonny Rollins were drawing on jazz's dorsum pages to come upwards with fresh themes like The Preacher and Doxy.
Nevertheless despite its excellence, Zilch But The Blues has ever remained something of an obscurity, rarely if ever mentioned past Getz fans, waiting an age to receive a CD reissue, and still leaving his various biographers divided. Dave Gelly called it "a practiced idea that didn't quite come off"; Richard Palmer thought it "a splendid album" proving "[Getz] a man with existent fire in his belly." Donald Maggin loved the tape too. "The session moves right down 'into the alley'", he observed, "[and] Stan fits in beautifully every bit he leaves the complexities of bebop behind and wails plaintively in a traditional blues mode."
Maggin could well have been writing specifically of Blues For Janet (written for Ellis' daughter), which to this writers ears contains one of Getz' finest solos of the era, quite a merits considering that it dates to a time when the saxophonist had fix the bar peculiarly high. It'southward non merely the earthiness of his improvised lines that arrive then; his tone too is warmer and fuller, somehow plugging the sonic gap left past the absenteeism of a pianoforte. Those in the studio with saxophonist that day certainly felt he'd excelled himself. "[He'south] playing the greatest I've heard him," remarked Roy Eldridge after the session. "He comes from the quondam school too, you know, and he proved it on that date. Virtually of the younger cats tin can't become with but one matter; Getz tin fit into something like this too."
Interviewed by Nat Hentoff the post-obit yr, the tenorist offered a little caption as to how he'd grown of tardily. Playing with a quartet had helped, making him realise that a variety of approaches was the best manner in which to escape the potential pitfalls of cool school monotony. "I can branch out into dissimilar areas of feeling," he believed. "I can still be lyrical just also I play guttier and more basic… I've had to increment my control and take hold of my horn and myself and play in the widest scope of emotions."
Getz made these comments in the sleeve notes to one of his least-known on-record trysts with a fellow jazz star, trumpeter Chet Baker. Perfect partners on paper, in existent life the two famously detested each other (Getz's 1980's drummer Victor Lewis'southward summary of their relationship was delightfully understated; "they weren't exactly bosom buddies, that's for sure") and as a issue their Stan Meets Chet LP was less a summit of equals and more of a forced coalition. Even the 1 matter that might have saved the engagement – a friendly sounding blues – was absent, with Getz seemingly choosing a programme designed to make his "partner" sound as floppy as possible.
Yet 1958 was an especially adept year for Getz on record, a fact masked by the usual dilemma of when and how record labels determine to event their product. Aslope the Baker album (which had some stunning playing from the tenorist, tempered only by a wooden rhythm section), there was a session with various European musicians taped in the saxophonist's new adopted home of Copenhagen, to which he had moved that summer and, among his final US album dates, a collaboration with vibraphonist Cal Tjader, taped a calendar week prior to his disastrous lucifer with Baker, and ane of the few sessions of this period to take been recorded outside of the umbrella of Norman Granz.
This time the idea of pitching two modernistic jazz stars together worked and the resulting album is a consistently rewarding recording, noted equally much for the presence of two new jazz names in bassist Scott LaFaro and drummer Baton Higgins (both of whom had been working a San Francisco date with Getz just prior to the session) equally for the glorious ballad work of its 2 principles. It wasn't just the personnel that contained a hint of the future: Tjader's Ginza Samba looked ahead to the bossa-nova years, but, every bit original annotator Ralph J. Gleason observed the biggest kicks came on titles like Crow'southward Nest on which "you lot tin can hear [the headliners] as down low and funky with the best." Aslope the leaders solos, LaFaro has a contribution that again points up the fact that jazz innovations always have one human foot firmly in familiar territory.
Two classic Getz blues performances from the 1950s deserve to be mentioned in isolation from those discussed above, not considering they are radical departures from the general emotional tenor of the preceding titles simply because they illustrate – possibly more than graphically than any others – the indelible stylistic connexion that runs directly from Lester Young's conception of the blues to that of Getz.
The commencement, a 1954 version of Buster Harding's Nails , with Getz out front end of the Count Basie Orchestra is the more overtly Young-like, doubtless due to the fact that both he and his idol were guesting with Basie that nighttime, on a Carnegie Hall bear witness likewise showcasing Charlie Parker and Sarah Vaughan. "Playing with Basie for a jazzman is the equivalent of a classical musician playing under Toscanini," he afterward said.
At what is surely the most perfect of tempos, Getz unwinds two and a half minutes of pure jazz invention, telling a story in a vernacular that pays an explicit homage to his hero (hear those repeated Pres-like honks) while retaining his own identity. Performances like this flesh out Shorty Rogers recollection of the saxophonist being able to dip into whoever's handbag he liked at will.
The spirit of Young also hovers over the magisterial Blues For Mary Jane , the highlight of Getz'southward iconic 1957 quartet album The Steamer , a name bestowed on the saxophonist past Oscar Peterson after a JATP show in which he had "battled" Coleman Hawkins, Sonny Stitt, Illinois Jacquet, Lester Immature, Sonny Stitt and Flip Phillips ("You ain't from the absurd schoolhouse you! Yous're The Steamer!").
Named for Norman Granz'south secretary, one Mary Jane Outwater, the operation is a masterpiece that exemplifies the best of jazz saxophone, consummate with a refreshing employ of two especially Young-like devices; an unaccompanied tenor introduction which playfully hints at a pocket-size fundamental earlier revealing the true tonality, and the inclusion of finish-time (in which the rhythm section outline only the get-go beat of every two bars of the twelve-bar framework, leaving Getz to fill the residual).
The event of the latter device shifts Getz up a gear, however is the full general air of concentrated invention that impresses most. Across a solo lasting no fewer than twelve choruses, around three and a quartet minutes in length, the tenorist come up with a fund of newly minted yet unpretentious ideas, succeeding in tying each into an interconnected narrative. If anyone at the time had thought to examine this solo under the rigours of the then newly emerging practise of jazz transcription, as Gunther Schuller most famously did with Sonny Rollins' dejection epic Blue 7 , taped five months before, then Getz might well have found himself similarly tagged as a "thematic" improviser. What he plays hither is anything merely a mash-upwardly of throwaway licks, each phrase suggesting the adjacent and revealing a highly acute musical mind creating pure, unadulterated improvisation. "This is timeless music, unattached to any detail jazz fashion or move or school", wrote Dave Gelly of Blues For Mary Jane , putting his finger smack on what made Getz every bit as engaging on a blues every bit on a ballad (Oddly, Donald Maggin awards The Steamer a mere six lines in his biography, and fails to mention any of its six performances individually).
Timeless though his music may well exist, Getz the homo was a mere earthbound mortal, a person whose alien emotional facets left fifty-fifty those close to him bewildered as to who might be the "real" him – each left nether the spell of another kind of Getz-generated blues.
"He was a very circuitous person," remembered his friend the pianist Lou Levy, whose skilful accompaniment had added greatly to the success of Blues For Mary Jane . "A complete musician with a quite simple arroyo, a great instrumentalist, artistic, with great time, and a sound like an affections."
Along with the angel, though, came a demon, the ire-spitting beast who'd recall nothing of using his fists to get his manner, fifty-fifty on those he loved. Information technology was this Getz, the contrary, ego-driven narcissist, that led many to treat him with child gloves, or, at worst, to grow always more disillusioned with their ane-time idol. "How can a guy play then beautifully and exist such a bastard?" mused one admirer, the English saxophonist Peter King, while Ronnie Scott characteristically used sense of humour to mask his mixed feelings for his hero. "I got a slipped disc bending over backwards to please Stan Getz," he would famously quip, a flippant line encapsulating the cocktail of deference and exasperation that would flavour their on-off relationship.
In that location'southward no doubt that Stan Getz left a trail of upset, confused and unhappy people in the backwash of his brilliance – lovers, promoters, fellow musicians, fans – all of whom experienced a alien melange of emotions when exposed to his art/personality dichotomy. There's no doubt too that he knew exactly what he'd done, only expressing true contrition when his health began to fail in the 1980s, by which time he'd burned far too many bridges.
Late in his life, with the cancer that was eventually to kill him in remission, he sought to mend his ways, forging a new, near Built-in Again character that displayed humility and sensitivity as never before. Among those he reconnected with during this time was Shorty Rogers, whose ain religious rebirth had led him to becoming a cornerstone (and leader of a community band) at Church On The Style in Van Nuys, California. Close to the end, Getz began dropping past.
"We had a lot of people there praying for him and he was very grateful and asked if he could come to one of the rehearsals," remembered Rogers. "He brought his horn and they had a lilliputian blues arrangement and he just got up and blew a bunch of choruses with the guys. When he was done, he said, 'Can I merely sit down and read the saxophone parts?' - and he played the rest of the rehearsal that mode. Just playin' in the section."
Full circle so: Getz rising out of a nondescript saxophone section to astonish Rogers and his fellow musicians with an outstanding dejection chorus. It could have been 1941 all over again, merely it wasn't; information technology was 1990 and Getz was on borrowed time. After his death in the summertime of 1991, aged just 64, it barbarous to Rogers to arrange the scattering of his ashes in the Pacific ocean. "I thought before information technology happened that someone would say a prayer or something," recalled Getz' old friend, "simply the music said it all. Stan spoke to u.s.a. all through the music."
The stories Getz had told through the music, in a career stretching xl-5 years, were many and varied, woven around all manner of material, stretching from Broadway ballads and the Sixties kitsch-beats of Burt Bacharach, to the Brazilian waves of the bossa-nova and the bedrock of American jazz, the blues, in all its hues.
On the surface, he'd led a life that refuted many of the deepest embedded clichés in jazz: he had more than his share of vices, but he'd led a commercially successful life whose trappings enabled him to by and large hibernate their impact. The wider world rarely, if always, saw Stan Getz down or out. Those who still hang onto such romantic constructs as the questing, crestfallen creative person finding greater truth and pregnant following catalogues of professional person failures won't find much to fuel their argument in Getz's life. The fact remains that Stan Getz the peerless creative person was for most of his life in harness to Stan Getz the shrewd business brain. There was no hard-line subscription to the thought that great art cannot come from anyone who makes coin; he fabricated both, consistently. Indeed, he stands close to the centre of a select coterie of generational peers (Brubeck, Mulligan, Miles Davis) who could counter the half-joked claim that "millionaires tin't play the dejection". He could and he did.
Only somewhere, deep within the twisting, interlocked and still split characters that made up the public edifice called Stan Getz there lay a melancholy and a sadness that was every inch a match for that within the rural blues of the south, or the urban blues of Chicago or Kansas City. Where this came from is anyone's guess. Dave Gelly postulated that it might accept been function of Getz' Jewish heritage – a sort of cantor weep transplanted to jazz; others from his less than comfortable upbringing in New York's East Bronx. Wherever information technology stemmed from, it's certain that the raging contradictions of pride and sorrow – the very schism that make the blues piece of work as a consistently dignified expression of the human condition, regardless of idiom – were already in play within him every bit a young man. And they never left him: simply hear his valedictory album People Time to hear a performer using his own tragedy – in this instance, that of impending death – to colour his work a however deeper shade of bluish. To some, this is simply too much, the moment when melodrama slips irretrievably into desolation, as information technology Getz were tooling his mortality into an on-stage gimmick; these are very probable that same people who'd earlier sold him brusk, as but a pretty-boy talent who had it all and who treated those around his like dirt just because he could.
Others might maintain that locked abroad inside of him was a nice guy – one of the "agglomeration" Zoot Sims spoke of – buried beneath years of selfishness and ego-bound destruction, and that, in the end, the warmth of his fine art was matched by that of his persona.
The reality is that Stan Getz – similar all of us – was only human being, and within his being had all the same inconsistencies and contradictions that we all have, simply in his example these seemed to be exacerbated past what he chosen "a taut inner bound" which he maintained "propelled me to almost compulsively reach for perfection in music, frequently – in fact, generally – at the expense of everything else in my life." When the spring snapped, Getz could be a monster and the suffering - not only for those effectually him but for himself - was unconfined. Without that buckling inner ringlet, though, he mightn't take left us such immortal music – who can say for sure?
Information technology's all also piece of cake, as well neat, far besides poetic to close by saying something perfunctory like "Stan Getz played the dejection so beautifully because he suffered" and leave information technology at that (Spike Milligan in one case compared the saxophonist's torturous mental state to that of Vincent Van Gogh). However one chooses to wearing apparel it up, and regardless of what may have been his motivation, the fact remains that he did so with all the passion and humanity that permeated all the other great musical achievements throughout his career, from his sui generis work with strings Focus to his pioneering essay in jazz-stone Captain Marvel, and beyond. On the surface, the blues may appear just one tiny part of his language, a default dialect overshadowed by his brilliance at the ballad form and his innovative fusion with the bossa-nova. Really, it was more than akin to a mother tongue.
Indeed for Getz, blues playing wasn't ever a box-ticking exercise or a stylistic arrayal; he was always – as they say these days - "present", consistently choosing what Shorty Rogers called "real pretty notes". In that location's no real revelation at that place; the argument "Stan Getz Played The Blues" is aught new – information technology tin't exist spun or trumpeted equally False News, nor has whatever publicly available data been manipulated to create such an thought. Information technology'south not even artful piece of post-millennial revisionism. It is what information technology's always been; the truth."
Simon Spillett
July 2018
Sleeve notes to Acrobat ACMCD 4398
one. Crazy Chords (Getz)
Stan Getz (tenor saxophone); Al Haig (piano); Factor Ramey (bass); Stan Levey (drums)
June 21 st 1949, New York City
Originally issued on 78rpm New Jazz/Prestige 811
2. Navy Bluish (Getz)
Stan Getz (tenor saxophone); Horace Argent (piano); Joe Calloway (bass); Walter Bolden (drums)
Dec x th 1950, New York City
Originally issued on 10" LP Roost RLP 2258 – Stan Getz: The Getz Historic period
3. Jumpin' With Symphony Sid (Immature)
Stan Getz (tenor saxophone); Jimmy Raney (guitar); Al Haig (piano); Teddy Kotick (bass); Tiny Kahn (drums)
October 28 th 1951, Storyville, Boston
Originally issued on x" LP Roost RLP 411 – Stan Getz: Jazz at Storyville, Vol. 2
four. Impromptu (Gillespie)
Stan Getz (tenor saxophone); Dizzy Gillespie (trumpet); Oscar Peterson (piano); Herb Ellis (guitar); Ray Chocolate-brown (bass); Ray Brown (bass); Max Roach (drums)
December ix th 1953, Radio Recorders, Los Angeles
Originally issued on 10" LP Norgran MGN eighteen – More than of the Dizzy Gillespie/Stan Getz Sextet #2
v. Nails (Harding)
Stan Getz (tenor saxophone); with the Count Basie Orchestra
Wendell Culley, Renauld Jones, Thad Jones, Joe Newman (trumpets); Henry Coker, Benny Powell, Nib Hughes (trombones); Marshall Royal, Ernie Wilkins (alto saxophones); Frank Wess, Frank Foster (tenor saxophones); Charlie Fowlkes (baritone saxophone); Count Basie (piano); Freddie Green (guitar); Eddie Jones (bass); Gus Johnson (drums)
September 25 h 1954, Carnegie Hall, New York City
Originally issued on 12" LP Roulette RE-126 – Count Basie, Stan Getz, Sarah Vaughan: Echoes of An Era
six. Gladys (Hampton)
Stan Getz (tenor saxophone); Lionel Hampton (vibraphone); Lou Levy (piano); Leroy Vinnegar (bass); Shelly Manne (drums)
August 1 st 1955, Radio Recorders, Los Angeles
Originally issued on 12" LP Norgran 1037 – Lionel Hampton-Stan Getz: Hamp and Getz
7. Dejection For Mary Jane (Getz)
Stan Getz (tenor saxophone); Lou Levy (piano); Leroy Vinnegar (bass); Stan Levey (drums)
November 24 th 1956, Radio Recorders, Los Angeles
Originally issued on 12" LP Verve MGV 8294 – Stan Getz: The Steamer
8. Chocolate Sundae (Peterson, Getz, Edison, Mulligan)
Stan Getz (tenor saxophone); Harry 'Sweets' Edison (trumpet); Gerry Mulligan (baritone saxophone); Oscar Peterson (pianoforte); Herb Ellis (guitar); Ray Chocolate-brown (bass); Louie Bellson (drums)
August 1 st 1957, Capitol Belfry, Los Angeles
Originally issued on 12" LP Verve MGV 8248 – Jazz Giants '58
9. Billie'due south Bounce (Parker)
Stan Getz (tenor saxophone); J. J. Johnson (trombone); Oscar Peterson (pianoforte); Herb Ellis (guitar); Ray Chocolate-brown (bass); Louie Bellson (drums)
October 7 h 1957, Shrine Auditorium, Los Angeles
Originally issued on 12" LP Verve V6-8490 – Stan Getz and J.J. Johnson at The Opera House
ten. Blues For Herky (Getz)
Stan Getz (tenor saxophone); Oscar Peterson (pianoforte); Herb Ellis (guitar); Ray Brown (bass)
October 10 th 1957, Capitol Belfry, Los Angeles
Originally issued on 12" LP Verve MGV 8348 – Stan Getz and Gerry Mulligan/Stan Getz and The Oscar Peterson Trio
11. Blues For Janet (Ellis)
Stan Getz (tenor saxophone); Roy Eldridge (trumpet); Her Ellis (guitar); Ray Brown (bass); Stan Levey (drums)
October xi th and 12 th 1957, Capitol Belfry, Los Angeles
Originally issued on 12" LP Verve MGV 8252 – Herb Ellis: Zero But The Blues
12. Crow's Nest (Tjader)
Stan Getz (tenor saxophone); Cal Tjader (vibraphone); Vince Guaraldi (piano); Eddie Duran (guitar); Scott LaFaro (bass); Baton Higgins (drums)
February 8 thursday 1958, Marines Memorial Auditorium, San Francisco
Originally issued on 12" LP Fantasy 3266 Cal Tjader/Stan Getz Sextet
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