{"id":16640,"date":"2025-02-19T11:27:45","date_gmt":"2025-02-19T17:27:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/?p=16640"},"modified":"2026-01-12T14:51:52","modified_gmt":"2026-01-12T20:51:52","slug":"16640","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/?p=16640","title":{"rendered":"Stan Getz now? Why he still matters"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Why now? Why Stan Getz now? I\u2019d meant to post this on his birthday, February 2, but got sidetracked. Still, I post because this remains his birthday month, and because he\u2019s a voice in time and beyond it, a voice within time and forever. Wherever I go, I\u2019ve come to know, I yearn to hear him, and all he has to say.<\/p>\n

I also share a warm moment with him, forever.<\/p>\n

I understand now, as well as a non-saxophonist can, what John Coltrane meant when he said of Getz, \u201cWe\u2019d all sound like that if we could.\u201d Coltrane was, among other things, a supreme master of balladeering, where many saxophonists make their bid for a sound as beautiful as possible.<\/p>\n

My own analogue to Coltrane\u2019s indirect superlative: I would carry Getz\u2019s sound with me further than any other instrument\u2019s, if forced to forsake all but one. Maybe it\u2019s a Sophie\u2019s choice between Getz and Miles Davis.<\/p>\n

As a relatively young music journalist, I had already reviewed a Getz performance at the Milwaukee Jazz Gallery for The Milwaukee Journal<\/em>, a highlight among many superb artists I heard and reviewed there. Two years later, I interviewed him in his Chicago hotel room, then wrote a feature previewing a Getz performance at a Rainbow Summer concert in Milwaukee. There I met him again afterwards and, though brief, his thanks for the article seemed authentic. Then he surprisingly asked me to accompany him walking to his nearby hotel room, under one small condition.<\/p>\n

Would I please carry his saxophone for him? After the performance, he was fatigued, partly the byproduct of years of abuse of his body with drugs and alcohol. He was only 57.<\/p>\n

I accepted the task gladly, and the moment soon swelled into a thrill. I gripped and hoisted the case of one of the world\u2019s most revered artistic instruments, beside its owner and artmaker. It inspired a short poem, \u201cBossa Not So Nova.\u201d<\/p>\n

So, I\u2019ve written about Getz in three modes but, mea culpa<\/em>, it still doesn\u2019t seem enough.<\/p>\n

You see, lately I\u2019ve revisited him upon buying a used copy of the Getz musical biography Nobody Else But Me<\/em>, by Dave Gelly. It discourses across the artist\u2019s career with close readings of numerous Getz recordings, his legacy beyond memories, as he died in 1991.<\/p>\n

This excellent book prompted me to dig out an array of Getz recordings. As I write, I\u2019m listening to him essay \u201cInfant Eyes,\u201d an exquisite ballad by another giant of the tenor sax, Wayne Shorter, and each long whole note unfurls with delicious tenderness and knowing delicacy.<\/p>\n

Here’s a link to Getz’s version of “Infant Eyes,” from the album Moments in Time<\/em>:\u00a0https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=gvr_BrW_xk0<\/a><\/p>\n

I couldn\u2019t have responded to this recording much earlier than a couple years ago, when I obtained a copy of this album, recorded live by Getz\u2019s Quartet in 1976, but not released until 2016 on Resonance, a label specializing in what I\u2019d call \u201cjazz archeology.\u201d<\/p>\n

And there\u2019s more affinity between Getz and Shorter than a few tunes in Getz\u2019s repertoire. The sound of their voices resonates similarly, an exquisitely soft vibration, a singing like a distinctly masculine bird that — warbles and vibratos aside — can hold a note like a distant horizon of destiny. Both saxophonists have lived lives deeply shadowed by tragedy, likely informing their profound sensibilities.<\/p>\n

Indeed now, the tune playing is \u201cThe Cry of the Wild Goose,\u201d by trumpeter Kenny Wheeler, and it belies one misplaced reservation I held about Getz in the past.<\/p>\n

He disabused me of it when I saw him in 1982 at the Jazz Gallery. But I\u2019m referring to back in the mid-1960s when he broke into public awareness with his lilting bossa nova luminosities. He could hold and caress a note as if it were palpable and breathing which, with him, it truly was. Such audible tenderness enchanted me as much as any other single jazz artist did with one recording, Getz\/Gilberto<\/em>. Created, arranged, and recorded by virtually all Brazilian musicians, the album racked up unprecedented sales for a jazz recording (2 million copies in 1964) and became the first non-American album to win a Grammy Award for Album of the Year, in 1965.<\/p>\n

And sure enough, right now with Horace Silver\u2019s \u201cPeace\u201d (also from Moments in Time<\/em>), Getz is beguiling yet again. But back during the bossa nova craze, for all my admiration, I doubted whether Getz was capable of anything approaching what I call \u201cThe Cry.\u201d<\/p>\n

I do hear a cry in the \u201cwild goose cry\u201d tune I\u2019d just heard, but I\u2019m referring to a sound often heard among saxophonists in the 1960s, during the same time Getz lulled and seduced with \u201cThe Girl from Ipanema.\u201d<\/p>\n

The notion of \u201cThe Cry\u201d is the expressionism that numerous saxophonists especially began manifesting during that period of social upheaval and raised consciousness over racial injustice. It\u2019s a heavily freighted topic and subtext. So perhaps its unsurprising that a naturally lyrical white saxophonist isn\u2019t easily associated with it. Nevertheless, over the years, the true and extraordinary range of Getz\u2019s expressive power expanded, and his version of \u201cThe Cry\u201d arose, as such a striking contrast to his inherently singing style that it carried the weight of striking effects, like a sculptor\u2019s chisel discharging chards and sparks, to convey how life can force us to extremes of feeling and response.<\/p>\n

To me, Getz seemed to be universalizing the plight and poignance conveyed in \u201cThe Cry,\u201d most often associated with African-American musicians. This is not to minimize the racial suffering those artists endured and expressed, but to find the shared humanity in it. Getz\u2019s suffering might be arguably his own demons\u2019 making more than of a cruel society built on systemic racism. As a Russian Jew, he may have ancestral instincts of suffering and class oppression hounding his psyche. that of the perpetul serf, in the bottom rung of an bloted monarchial system. Even today, how do those millions in the nation’s lowest caste subsist in Putin’s oligarchic, war-mongering Russia? We may hear Stan’s echo in them, too.<\/p>\n

Accordingly, he seems a different sort of expressive animal — \u201cNobody Else But Me\u201d as the biography\u2019s title seems to borrow from his voice. The simplicity of the declaration also may reflect Getz\u2019s uniqueness, his fingerprint identity, his sonic originality as a pied piper whom, when heard, we still feel compelled to follow, decades after bossa nova first sailed across waves and valleys. Years after his last living breath.<\/p>\n

Gelly insightfully notes a great irony, how the drugs and liquor might\u2019ve facilitated an \u201calpha state\u201d in which, Getz explained, \u201cthe less you concentrate the better. The best way to create is to get in the alpha state\u2026what we would call relaxed concentration.\u201d<\/p>\n

Such can be the price of art. Does that make it ill-begotten? Illegitimate?<\/p>\n

Nay, I say. Thank the music gods for his voice, retrieved and captured.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Stan Getz and Astrid Gilberto in Berline 1966.<\/em><\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=sVdaFQhS86E<\/a><\/p>\n

Finally, here is my revised version of \u201cBossa Not So Nova.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bossa Not So Nova<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Fattening and fifty-seven, Stan Getz<\/em><\/p>\n

sweats out a melody, red-faced.<\/em><\/p>\n

The sax sings effortlessly.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cHey thanks for the article,<\/em>
\nI gotta walk to the Hyatt,<\/em>
\ncan you carry my horn?\u201d he croaks.<\/em>
\nThe sax sings light blue.<\/em><\/p>\n

Young and tan, and tall and lovely<\/em><\/strong>
\nthe girl in knee socks walks and sways.<\/em><\/strong>
\nAnd Stan stops his sax, and walks and goes,<\/em><\/strong>
\n\u201cAhhhh.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

It ain\u2019t so much man appraising sweet youth.<\/em><\/p>\n

Or it\u2019s that too, with a clear trace of chagrin.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m beat,\u201d his cigarette breath bellows softly. \u201cJust go slow.<\/em>
\nHey can you find a doctor?<\/em>
\nMy bass player needs one.\u201d<\/em>
\nHis bass player?<\/em><\/p>\n

We walk along the Milwaukee River<\/em><\/strong>
\nat 10 PM Sunday.<\/em><\/strong>
\nIs there a doctor in the river?<\/em><\/strong>
\nThey\u2019re all on-call,\u00a0sleepin\u2019 or smokin\u2019<\/em><\/strong>
\nin a big, green, long-and-cold halllll.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Stan wonders about Mader\u2019s, is it open do I know?<\/em><\/strong>
\nHis belly rumbles southern volcanos.<\/em><\/strong>
\nThe sax sings effortlessly, but just not really at me,<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

no, right from its case like the wind,<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

in her hair, in her long and lust-erous hair .<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Tall and tan and young and handsome,<\/em><\/strong>
\nthe boyish man from Ipanema is wheezin\u2019<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

while a woman somewhere dreams\u2026<\/em><\/strong>
\nto the old scratchy side that goes, Ahhh.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The sax singing ever so softly<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

as in a morning sunrise,<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

en la playa del aureo hombres…<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

(on the beach of golden men…)<\/p>\n

(tenor sax solo to fade-out)<\/em><\/p>\n