Jazz: Back from the Wild Side

When Stanley turned 13, everybody in his corner of The Bronx heard about it — whether they wanted to or not. Why? His father gave him a saxophone. It was a battered, $35 hock-shop special, and Stanley honked away on it for eight hours a day until the tenement reverberated with angry cries. But whenever somebody shouted, “Shut that kid up!” his mother would shout back from the kitchen, “Play louder, Stanley! Play louder!”

Stan Getz is 38 now, and his audience has grown more appreciative, largely because he never quite learned how to play louder. In a period when the best of his contemporaries are feverishly trying to break the sound barriers of jazz, Tenorman Getz continues to play it cool. He now commands a top fee of $5,000 a performance, and his schedule for the past month was typical. After playing to a collective audience of 100,000 in six sellout concerts in Japan, he touched down at a Skokie, III, shopping center, where 15,000 persons had waited an hour in the rain to hear him. Then on to the Music Barn in Massachusetts’ Berkshire Hills. Then back to Manhattan to record the sound track for Columbia Pictures’ forthcoming Mickey One. Last week, before a two month tour of South America and Europe, he was holding forth at the Carter Barren Amphitheater in Washington, D.C.

Dance &; Flow. A reserved, almost introverted personality onstage (“I have something of an inferiority complex”), Getz begins playing the moment he sidles up to the microphone. Once into the music, he relaxes, sketching with the sure, spare strokes of a Japanese brush painter. In an up-tempo number such as Like Someone in Love, his figurations fairly dance around the melody; in Here’s That Rainy Day, they flow with the melting warmth of an after-dinner brandy.

Getz’s success is a return from a long walk on the wild side; from the age of 18 to 27 he was a confirmed dope addict. Son of Russian Jewish immigrants (original name: Gayetzsky), he left school at 15 to tour with Jack Teagarden’s band, got as far as St. Louis before the truant officers caught up with him. It was wartime, and musicians were scarce, so Teagarden agreed to become his legal guardian and “teach me all my lessons.” After the band broke up a year later, Getz went on to play with Stan Kenton, Jimmy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, and Woody Herman’s famed “Four Brothers” sax section.

By then he was already hooked on heroin. Despite this, he formed his own group, and in the early 1950s became the dominant figure in the newly emerging “cool school.” But he was spending $70 a day for drugs. In 1954, he walked into a Seattle drugstore, stuck his finger in his pocket and demanded narcotics. When the clerk asked to see his gun, he fled. Incongruously, a few minutes later he telephoned the pharmacy to apologize. Police traced the call to his hotel room and arrested him. He collapsed and was removed to a hospital. From his hospital bed, he vowed “to break the habit and come back.”

Time & Pangs. He did, but it took time. After spending six months in jail, he went to Sweden to recuperate, but there he contracted pleurisy and pneumonia. On doctor’s orders he went to a seacoast village in Kenya, Africa, spent the next six months skindiving to rebuild his lungs and suffering through the pangs of withdrawal. He married a Swedish girl, settled in Elsinore, Denmark, in a villa in the shadow of the famed Kronborg Castle, and played throughout Europe for the next three years. When he returned to the U.S. in 1961, he was playing better than ever, helped popularize the bossa nova. One album, with Brazilian Guitarist João Gilberto, was belatedly released last year. It became one of the best-selling jazz albums of all time. Winner of nearly every jazz popularity poll in the past two years, he recently moved into a 23-room, century-old mansion in Irvington, N.Y., with his wife and five children, this year expects to make a cool $250,000. Looking back, Stan Getz says: “It’s been a struggle. You either get bitter from those things or you become compassionate. I went one way.” It seems it was the best way.