Stan Getz

Stan Getz played the tenor saxophone with a sound so pure and warm that people called it The Sound, as if there were only one. It came out of Lester Young’s light, floating approach, but Getz refined it into something silken and immediately recognizable. One phrase and you knew it was him.

He made his name young, in the late 1940s, as one of the cool-toned tenors in Woody Herman’s band, and spent the 1950s as a leading light of cool jazz – relaxed, lyrical, gorgeously melodic. The hard-bop crowd sometimes dismissed cool as soft, but Getz could swing with anyone, and the beauty was never empty.

Then in the early 1960s he did something that changed popular music. He teamed with Brazilian musicians to record bossa nova, and the results – especially the 1964 album with João and Astrud Gilberto – became a worldwide phenomenon. “The Girl from Ipanema” was suddenly everywhere, and Getz’s tenor was the sound of sophistication.

His personal life was turbulent – addiction, hard living, a temper – but the playing stayed luminous to the end. Even his final recordings, made when he was dying of cancer, have that same heartbreaking beauty of tone. The Sound never left him.