With his feather-light, seemingly effortless tenor style, Stan Getz had been a major jazz figure almost from the beginning as a teenage sideman with various big swing bands in the 1940s.
Getz, however, seemed doomed by a destructive heroin habit that led him to jail and a near-fatal overdose. But he fought off the addiction and, in the early 1960s, returned from living in Denmark to record “Desafinado,” the tune that revived his career, enriched him, and launched the Bossa Nova fad in the United States.
He soon recorded an even bigger Bossa Nova hit, “The Girl From Ipanema,” with Brazilian singer Astrud Gilberto. It won a Grammy Award for best record of the year, a first for a jazz performance. His Jazz Samba album, with guitarist Charlie Byrd, made his comeback complete.
From there on, Getz rarely performed without hearing requests for “Desafinado,” “One Note Samba,” “Corcovado” (quiet nights and quiet stars . . . ) or one of his other Bossa Nova hits.
He called Bossa Nova “a great hybrid, the true samba blended with cool jazz” and said it “is just like a man and a woman getting together.”
Getz was born in Philadelphia on Feb. 2, 1927, the son of a tailor and his wife who had shortened their name from Gayetzsky when they immigrated from Russia. The family moved to the Bronx, where young Getz played the bass and bassoon before finally settling on the tenor saxophone.
Getz was a disciple of the great black tenor man, Lester Young, but developed his own warm, easy style. He went from band to band, including those of Bob Chester, Stan Kenton, Jimmy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Randy Brooks, Buddy Morrow and Herbie Fields.
A heroin addict since he was 18, Getz hit bottom in 1954, when he was arrested in a bumbling effort to hold up a Seattle pharmacy. Hours later, he was found unconscious in his cell. His condition was diagnosed as acute heroin intoxication. Some accounts suggested that Getz had attempted to kill himself.
Getz said later he had already made up his mind to get off drugs and clean up his life. He noted that many musicians had been addicted to heroin during that period. He told a Newsday reporter: “None of us knew what we were getting into, what a messy scene it was. We were very young and working hard, staying up all night and looking for false stimulation of one kind or another. So many of us got caught up in this round-robin thing that ends in death or insanity.”
While on a Norman Granz Jazz-at-the-Philharmonic tour of Europe, Getz decided to live in Denmark. He and his wife stayed there for three years. When he returned to the United States in 1961, it was to find bossa nova and enduring fame as he recorded with Brazilians Antonio Carlos Jobim, guitarist Joao Gilberto and the latter’s wife, Astrud.
He did not allow the Latin beat to keep him away from pure jazz, however, continuing to lead his own quartet and to record with such other highly regarded musicians as Count Basie, Oscar Peterson and Bob Brookmeyer.
In addition to his constant appearances at clubs and jazz concerts, he began in 1981 teaching during summers at Stanford, where he experimented with producing jazz by computer.
“I think jazz music is mostly a black man’s art,” he once told Times jazz critic Leonard Feather. “But there happen to be a few whites who can play it just as well, just as originally as any black man. Not many, but I know I’m one of them.” - LA Times Obituary, 1991
