Forum of the Saxes

CMelodyMan · Posted: Wed Sep 14, 2005 3:48 pm Post subject: AOTW #3

This week's Artist is Stan Getz.

BuffaloBariSax · Posted: Thu Sep 15, 2005 9:16 am Post subject:

Born in Philadelphia and raised in New York City in a family originally from Russia, Getz played a number of instruments before his father bought him his first saxophone at the age of 13. In 1943, at the age of 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 since 1950.

In the 1950s, Getz had become quite popular playing cool jazz with a young Horace Silver, 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 Jobim's composition "So Danco 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 composer Antonio Carlos Jobim, guitarist João Gilberto and his wife, the singer Astrud Gilberto. Their collaboration on "The Girl from Ipanema" (1963) won a Grammy award, making Jobim'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 Joao Gilberto, won two Grammy awards in 1965. 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 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 1980's, and experimenting with an Echoplex on his tenor saxophone, which critics vilified him for doing. 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 1980's, gradually de-emphasized the Bossa Nova as his style of choice, opting for more esoteric and perhaps less mainstream jazz. He 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.

(Taken from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stan_Getz)
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Louis Scuderi · Posted: Fri Sep 16, 2005 8:34 pm Post subject:

Stan Getz's signature solo on "Girl from Ipanema" can be found here:

http://www.saxsolos.com/page5.html
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Louis Scuderi
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