Stan Getz used to worry about being the Jewish Lester Young. Well, nice work if you can get it, I would say. When Stan was on, as he very often was through the Fifties, he was half a step behind Lester, if that. Here in Germany in 1960, with Jan Johansson piano, Ray Brown, brass, and Ed Thigpen, drums, he gives us a good sample of his Lesteristic legato. Getz could keep pace with the boppers, as he did in his extraordinary albums with Dizzy Gillespie and JJ Johnson for Verve, but, like his idol Lester, he was essentially a swing musician, and he tended to look just a little bit back instead of forward.
From what I’ve read, a 1962 encounter with John Coltrane, also in Germany, left Getz feeling like an old man, even though it was Coltrane who said “we’d all play like Stan if we could.” Stan switched from hard bop to Bosa Nova, which made him a lot of money but which pushed him out of the jazz mainstream. Getz was a phenomenal musician, and it’s a little sad that, hampered all his life by addictions to both heroin and alcohol, he didn’t make more of a contribution as a composer/arranger, in the manner of Gerry Mulligan, Bob Brookmeyer, and Joe Lovano. With so much talent, all he needed to do to draw a crowd was to stand up and blow. Maybe it was just a little too easy.
