... SIMON SPILLETT reviews
Dave Gelly's new book :-

Stan Getz Nobody Else But Me

[Backbeat Books, 2002]

The late Stan Getz was such a ubiquitous and mandatory influence upon tenor saxophonists everywhere that it is all too easy to overlook or even underestimate how far-reaching that influence was, and indeed still is. His innovations, especially tonally, informed a diverse range of stylists, from obvious candidates such as Joe Henderson and Wayne Shorter, to players whose approaches could be described as generally more muscular, such as Britain's Tubby Hayes and Ronnie Scott, and right into the realms of mavericks like Eddie Harris and Charles Lloyd. John Coltrane himself famously commented that "we'd all sound like that if we could," a maxim that some of Trane's more earnestly slavish imitators might be wise to observe. Even today, young British tenorist Jim Tomlinson mines a notable seam from the Getz legacy.

This widespread influence tended to get short-changed in the days after Getz became that most loathed of figures, a jazz musician who dares to score a commercial hit. Cynicism about his post Bossa Nova super-nova stardom led to all kinds of accusations of selling out, thus ignoring the fact that at the height of The Girl From Ipanema's epic stroll through jazz purism, Getz was leading perhaps the most daring of instrumentations he ever fronted, namely a quartet with the vibraphone prodigy Gary Burton.

It is therefore probably rather more surprising these days, with the bit of retrospection between the teeth, that Getz had to wait so long for anyone to write a biography of his life. The first, an interesting but limited sketch by Richard Palmer, came in the eighties in the now defunct Jazz Masters series. The second, Donald Maggin's Stan Getz: A Life In Jazz (Quill 1996), came in the mid-nineties, a few years after Getz's untimely death. Its reception was mixed, detractors citing Maggin's willingness to dwell on Getz's failings as a person rather than his unfailingly personal musical brilliance. At its best the book was candidly factual; at its worse it fell little short of being voyeuristic, the reading maintaining an uneasy presence as we witnessed Getz lurching from crisis to crisis.

What was needed was a level-headed examination of Getz the musician, delivered in a tone that was both factual and accurate but which still conveyed a passion for the subject at hand. This is the kind of writing for which Dave Gelly has become renowned, and his latest effort Stan Getz: Nobody Else But Me (Backbeat Books, 2002) walks just such a line with class.

Gelly is himself a tenor saxophonist, nowadays very much Mr. Mainstream, but back in the sixties he was synthesising an effective style out of the influences of Hank Mobley, Wayne Shorter, George Coleman and, yes, Stan Getz, often in the challenging company of such Brit-Jazz heavy-hitters as Art Themen, Barbara Thompson and Neil Ardley. As a result, he writes with a musician's practical understanding of what Getz did but, thankfully, this is not a book comprising endless analytical examinations of Getz's choice of saxophone, mouthpiece and reed. Let's face it, if Coltrane couldn't figure out how Getz got that sound, who can? Nor does Gelly concentrate much on analysis of Getz's solos or harmonic choices, again saving his work from reading like a treatise.

For that matter, Getz himself seems not to have been too enlightened as to how he created his own brand of magic, relying conveniently on what he called an 'Alpha State', wherein the less he thought, the more he could construct musically. The book is refreshingly free of the kind of indulgent posturing that jazz musicians can often assume when attempting to unravel their art into words. Gelly instead concentrates on a factual, yet highly readable, chronology of Getz's career. His own enthusiasms enter the picture frequently. Quite rightly he goes into raptures over the tenorist's work in the 1950s, made during the halcyon era in which Getz and Sonny Rollins represented the twin peaks of tenor saxophone artistry, especially the At Storyville and At the Shrine sets, as well as those sessions held in Hollywood which resulted in Getz's mid-decade trilogy West Coast Jazz, The Steamer and Award Winner, a classic line of jazz product that is amongst the finest in post-bop. The first of those albums contained Getz's mammoth outpouring on Shine, a recurrent enthusiasm of Gelly's. He returns to it here with tangible passion, but it is also a sign of true erudition when he makes more than a footnote about Getz's only studio set with pianist Mose Allison, one of his least well-known but still incredibly rewarding sessions.

Gelly is also positively objective about Getz's period of popular success. Whilst his music from Jazz Samba onwards through the Bossa Nova era did everything to widen the appeal of his ever evolving gift, Gelly is keen to point out Getz's patronage of artists such as Steve Kuhn, Gary Burton and Chick Corea around this time. He looks at the Brazilian music for the beautiful art it is, choosing not to plant it as an imposing full stop on Getz's jazz credentials.

Despite being in favour of Getz's Bacharach project, and his Voices album (although he does make the mistake of still attributing the latter to a patch-up job following Wes Montgomery's termination of contract with Verve), one cannot escape the feeling that the author's own belief in the directions Getz took begins to wane by the late-sixties. Consequently, he delivers only a brief overview of Getz's sometimes patchy work during the 1970s. Captain Marvel with Chick Corea is justly celebrated, as is the collaboration with pianist Jimmy Rowles, The Peacocks, which might well one day be seen as Getz's lost masterpiece; but Gelly is unafraid to give lukewarm, or even more pointedly, dismissive, reception to such uncharacteristically un-Getz-like lapses of taste as his version of Don't Cry For Me Argentina, or his somewhat vain use of electronic gadgetry.

Eventually, what emerges from Gelly's recounting of Getz's musical odyssey is the author's almost palpable relief - shared with many fans of the tenorist, this writer included - when Getz finally returned to an all-accoustic format in the 1980s, identical in fact to that which had launched his solo career forty years before. Albums such as Pure Getz, Voyage and Anniversary, all from the saxophonist's final decade, are as reverently treated as the mid-fifties classics; a case of what comes around goes around.

Musicians, perhaps more than any other type of artist, are judged by the company they keep, something which, with the big names in jazz especially, tends to get exploded into the company they discover. Getz was actually less a discoverer and more a promulgator. True, Horace Silver was plucked from wholesale obscurity by the tenorist, but this was nothing more than the domino effect of Getz commencing his career as a bandleader in his own right. More correctly, Getz had a 'nose for talent', manifesting itself in giving promising musicians the wider exposure his name could guarantee, something he shared with Ellington, Blakey and Miles. Ironically, he is seldom included in that company and rarely thought of as a great bandleader, but the list of those who subsequently benefited from his Midas touch is the reason why we are reading a book about Stan Getz and not Al Cohn or Zoot Sims. Bob Brookmeyer, Mose Allison, Gary Burton and Chick Corea spring to mind, each achieving more in their tenures with Getz than they had done previously. Getz seemed willing and open to the changes they respectively brought to his musical world, and vice versa. Compare, for example, Corea's work with the trumpeter Blue Mitchell, his previous employer, to that with Getz. Small wonder that their Sweet Rain album remains among both men's greatest moments.

More interesting, however, are Getz's dealings with musicians who fell outside his personal ambit. Chet Baker, on paper seemingly one of Getz's ideal partners, sharing as he did the little-boy-lost severity that made both men cool-school icons, never got the Getz endorsement, as Gelly recounts. Their resulting records, a couple of dates in the 1950s and some from a disastrous Scandinavian tour in the early 1980s, come across as tolerant exercises in co-operation rather than true collaborations. Gelly is truthfully objective about their merits, but he doesn't falsely pretend they are classics.

Gerry Mulligan is another. Their two-sax summit from 1957, expected to be a landmark head-to-head for the leading lights of the cool movement, reached neither highs nor lows, and has created little wake outside its inherent marquee quality. One suspects that both men's legendary testiness would have been the impasse blocking anything other than the most polite of encounters, as if each man held the other in watchful check. Hear the recording to bear this out, not least, as Gelly highlights, the tracks on which the two protagonists swap horns, creating an almost total lack of impression.

Getz's meetings with Bill Evans, again another highly likely musical bedfellow, suffered similarly. Their studio set, cut for Verve in 1964, and released a decade later to both men's dismay, had Elvin Jones on day-release from the Coltrane quartet, and seemingly determined to carve his own path whatever. (Strangely, hear how well Elvin responds to Getz on the Bob Brookmeyer and Friends album cut the same month.) The posthumously released live tapes, from a European tour a decade later, commence with Getz the musical bully ostracising Evans by playing a theme that the pianist apparently hadn't agreed to perform. A week later, on the same tour, we find Getz playing Happy Birthday to Bill, with apparent sincerity. As fellow tenorist Zoot Sims once remarks, "Stan Getz - nice bunch of guys."

Gelly, to his credit, doesn't don the mantle of amateur psychologist to explain away Getz's inconsistent behaviours. But he does reveal enough of the dichotomous character of this study to convey that the near angelic beauty of Getz's music came through a steely, uptight and at times demonically nasty person. This ambivalence is present in all jazz artists to various degrees of prominence, but thankfully Gelly avoids the pitfalls that plagued Donald Maggin's book; Getz's nefarious personal problems are observed in a rather less indulgent and detached manner.

The Antabuse drug, secretly administered to Getz for close to twenty years by his wife Monica in order to combat his violent alcoholic rages, is not dwelt upon. The 'discovery' incident which occurred on the very day of Getz's recording with the pianist Albert Dailey, which resulted in the sublime Poetry album, gets nary a welcome, Gelly preferring to concentrate on the gorgeous partnership the two men documented which, in a book about Stan Getz's music, is exactly how it should be.

Similarly, Getz's long battle with illness at the close of his career is not morbidly examined with mock sentiment. Getz, it transpires, wanted to soldier on and, on record at least, he exits doing what he did best - as anyone who has heard the valedictory duets with pianist Kenny Barron on the People Time double-CD attests to.

Added to this are some wonderful photographs of Getz throughout his career, many of which are rare. We see a pale baby-faced Stan peering out from behind a music stand in Jack Teagarden's big band. There is a photo of Getz reunited with another old boss, Benny Goodman, in the company (uncredited) of arranger Tadd Dameron, and shortly afterward blowing beside the winsomely delicious Astrud Gilberto, which perfectly captures the almost disengaged air that Getz sometimes assumed when performing. Another rarity is the shot of Getz's 'European' quartet, which he took out on the road in 1970, formed by borrowing Tubby Hayes' rhythm section of pianist Mike Pyne, bassist Ron Matthewson and drummer Spike Wells.

Dave Gelly's study of Stan Getz succeeds in triumphing the saxophonist's music in much the same way as Getz's records themselves have done, in that the more you digest, the more you want to read and, ultimately, hear. Any jazz writing that effectively turns a potential listener into an actual one cannot fail to be recommended to aficionados and novices alike.

SIMON SPILLETTJanuary 2003

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buy the book:-

Stan Getz Nobody Else
But Me

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Else But Me you will enjoy also :-

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