By Stuart Mitchner

The first of many things I didn’t know about tenor saxophonist Stan Getz is that I was going to be writing about him today. In February 1954 when he was arrested for holding up a Seattle drugstore, I was shocked. I was 15, just getting into jazz, and I admired Getz for his moody, lyrical playing with guitarist Johnny Smith on “Moonlight in Vermont” and for his passionate solos with the Count Basie rhythm section and an all-star cast in Jam Session 3. Eventually I came to know him best for his work on Diz and Getz, with Dizzy Gillespie, a session that had been recorded in Los Angeles three months before his arrest.

Had I known the whole story of what happened in Seattle at the time — that Getz fumbled the hold-up, fled to his room at the hotel across the street, and called the drugstore to apologize — I wouldn’t have appreciated it as much as I do now, three decades after his death. If I find myself responding to Getz’s plight Holden-Caulfield-style, as in “it killed me,” maybe it’s because it happened around the time The Catcher in the Rye came into my life. The whole thing seemed so Holden Caulfield, so J.D. Salinger. Sure, even if old Holden had been a drug addict, he’d have never been crazy enough to hold up a drugstore claiming he had a gun and then running away as soon as the woman behind the counter called his bluff. And if Holden was telling the story, it would have killed him that the lady’s name was Mary and that the first thing Getz said to her when she answered the phone was “I’m sorry for the crazy thing I did. I’ve never done anything like that before.”

His Life’s Story

It also kills me that when the cop who was listening in, tracing the call, pretending to be a doctor, asked about his addiction, Getz “blurted out his life’s story,” which is something else I didn’t know until I looked it up on Wikipedia: that Getz was born Stanley Gayetski, in Philadelphia, February 2, 1927 (which meant he turned 27 10 days before his arrest); that he was the son of a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant who bought him his first saxophone when he was 12, after the family had moved to the Bronx; that he dropped out of James Monroe High at 16 and joined Jack Teagarden’s band (becoming Teagarden’s ward because of his age); and that he was still in his teens when he got hooked on hard drugs. Finally, the most Salingeresque summary of Getz’s story comes from tenor man Zoot Sims, his “Four Brothers” colleague in Woody Herman’s band. Said Zoot: “Stan Getz? Nice bunch of guys.”

Early Autumn

If you really want to know about it, as Holden would say, this column actually began when my son was complaining about the hot heavy summer and I said “Maybe we’ll have an early autumn.” Those two innocent everyday words sent me to YouTube, typing “Early Autumn,” a song that hadn’t surfaced since Eisenhower was president. Two minutes into the three-plus-minutes of the Woody Herman-Ralph Burns composition, Stan Getz plays the eight bar solo that, legend has it, made him famous, or at least, as Gary Giddins says in Visions of Jazz, “put him at the foot of the summit.”

Something famous-making does seem to be brewing when Getz plays the solo, quietly, subtly, hauntingly, as casual as a walk in the woods, yet so fluent, so right in itself on its dreamy way to the coda that ends the record like a life lived in 15 seconds.

Prose and Jazz

Having called Getz “one of the uncompromising stylists of his time,” Giddins conjures up a “fervor of well-being, candlelight intimacy, and flaming youth, all strenthened by a capacity to peer into the void.” After that uncanny view from the summit come solos “that are often giddily discursive nightmares of melodic fragments.” Given the world of possibilities put in play by those cadenzas where prose and jazz coalesce, you know what Zoot Sims meant with his “nice bunch of guys.”

Among the pleasures of Visions of Jazz is the author’s knack for highlighting the quintessential comment, like the night that Getz’s idol Lester “the Pres” Young heard him play for the first time and offered him “a benediction of five words that Getz forever treasured: ‘Nice eyes, Pres. Carry on.’”

Knowing the Lyric

Getz was no doubt familiar with Lester Young’s belief in attending to the lyrics of the songs you’re exploring. The “dance pavilion in the rain all shuttered down” and “winding country lane all russet brown” of “Early Autumn” have serious resonance for me. Put simply, they kill me. First, there’s my best friend, who died in the late autumn of 2020 and was so enamoured of the lyric that he began a novel with it. Then there’s the southern Indiana college town that he and I grew up in, a town whose jazz roots go back to Hoagy Carmichael and Bix Beiderbecke. Then there’s the memory of high school nights sitting side by side with Gene Sherman, who played jazz on “Sherman’s March” from 10 to 1 over WTTS in Bloomington, which is where I first saw Woody Herman’s Third Herd, albeit without Getz, who had moved on. Sherman’s hip DJ charisma derived from the story that he had known and even roomed with Stan Getz during his days as an advance man for Woody’s Second Herd.

Basie at 120

Sometimes I think of myself as a DJ at WTT (for Town Topics), trying out playlists that often go beyond the bounds of probability, as in the previous week’s lineup of Taylor Swift, Wim Wenders, and Shakespeare. For a Basie Birthday Broadcast, today being Count Basie’s 120th, I’d play something from every incarnation of the band, including the small group of the early 1950s featuring trumpeter Clark Terry and tenor saxophonist Wardell Gray, whose impact on my life has been the subject of more than one column here. At the top of my playlist is the triple-encore show piece, “April in Paris,” wherein the whole band, spearheaded by the formidable Basie brass, transforms the three little words of the title into something Herman Melville might have called “Yes in Thunder.” Once again it’s Gary Giddins who provides the necessary commentary, quoting Basie’s “I wanted those four trumpets and three trombones to bite with real guts.” According to Giddins, “When the ensemble locked gears, it had the force of a steam engine, and audiences gasped with pleasure,” thrilled by “the range between shaking fortissimos and barely audible sighs…. The Swing Era was history, but Basie was in flower. Along with Ellington, Herman, and Kenton, he kept the game alive.”

Getz the Reader

Surely at some point during his tumultuous, poll-winning career, Stan Getz, the self-described Jewish boy from the Bronx, read The Catcher in the Rye. While I haven’t been able to uncover evidence that he ever read Salinger, I did find something worth mentioning in Joseph Hooper’s June 1991 New York Times Magazine article, “Stan Getz Through the Years.”

Based on an interview with Getz the previous summer in his “plush suite” at the Parker Meridien Hotel, after a Carnegie Hall concert, Hooper pictures Getz stretched out on his bed, “exhausted, chain-smoking Gauloise cigarettes,” his face “as round and devoid of malice as a baby’s.” After referring to “all the records and accolades and triumphant concerts at Carnegie Hall,” Hooper inadvertently echoes young Seymour Glass in Hapworth 16, 1924, observing “just how well preserved that touchy, insecure kid is.” At this point, Hooper takes note of “a few of the books Getz is packing for a European tour” — William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses, Octavio Paz’s Labyrinth of Solitude, and Samuel Beckett’s Murphy. Gazing at the books, Getz says, “See what the kid from the Bronx is reading.”

Timing

Toward the end of the article, after observing how Getz “has charmed and bullied his cancer into temporary submission,” Hooper writes, “Today anything is possible. Other days, other moods,” Getz is “less sanguine,” saying, “The miracle can stop being a miracle in the time it takes to die.” According to a note at the end of the online article, “On Thursday, after the magazine had gone to press, Mr. Getz died at the age of 64.”