Stan Getz: A Life in Jazz

Rating:
Summary: warts and all
Review:

Am two thirds into this heavy tome... Why am I reading it? Because Getz was some kind of sax playing genius, in my opinion...and we always wonder what our favorite artists were like away from the stage. Well, sadly (& maybe not so sadly, depends how you look at it), you get it here.

The trick is, once you have put the book away, to forget the negative and return to the music, appreciate the artist's art. Not always easy to do--but we do it. His art endures. You just wish he and his first wife (both junkies at one time) had been better parents to their kids, etc.

So then, was Getz a total lost cause? Of course not. He had his decent side--although when messed up on booze and/or drugs he was not pleasant to be around, to put it mildly.

Guy had demons, to be sure. Am talking about suicide attempts and depression. But then, how many of us haven't gone through a thing or two? It happens.

Don't know if this can be called the definitive bio on Stan the Man, but it is certainly worth reading.

Be warned, though, the last third is a heartbreaker. Just finished reading the entire thing. I'd like to give this tome 4 stars, instead of the three shown above, but (for some reason) amazon doesn't make it possible to change the rating.

I'm glad this biography was written.

Rating:
Summary: Lester gave him the banner and he ran with it
Review: As far back as I can recall, Stan Getz had always been my personal favorite jazz musician of all time. Blessed with an incredible musical memory - you just have to listen to the amount of quotes he would use during the course of a solo - he was able to render some of the most obscure lines from popular music to jazz lines to Jewish anthems. His personal sound was readily identifiable, pure,wholesome and wondrously beautiful and never filtered with sentimentality. When you heard a Getz solo there was never any mistake who was playing. Lester Young flowed through him and initially set the mold to this master jazz musician. Stan Getz carried the banner from Lester and ran with it.This book covers much of Stan Getz and his musical as well as personal life. Behind his playing was a torturous life hampered by drugs, alcohol, severe depression and anger. You would never have known this about the man after spending years of following and listening to the progressions of his performing art. Unlike the Chet Baker book this book chronologically follows his music as well as the events in his personal life. I found it inspiring to read about various recording sessions and all that was happening in his life at the time. All this while following it, by listening to the particular recording mentioned. He was a perfectionist and achieved it most of the time. If he felt his playing not to be at par this depressed him and would sadly result in dissonance for him and his family. He thought he needed to be stoned to play better. The irony is that he was throughout much of his life. Maggin mentions the many times when Stan would be inspired, either by another musician or a piece of music, that his playing would suddenly ignite and reach incredible levels of Art. I, for one, have on many occasions,witnessed such performances by him.This again brings up the question that has bothered me as a very devoted jazz follower: In order for the music to become a pure art, must it have flowed through the artist through suffering and artificially altering his senses with drugs and alcohol? Further, are the jazz musicians of today too antiseptic to ever achieve pure estheticism? These are troubling thoughts and often lends me to think that it may be impossible to truly create in a totally sober environment. True, the music can be technically brilliant, intricate and interesting, but would it be Getz,Parker, Monk, Baker, Davis or Coltrane?The book is very well written by Maggin and covers the career of Stan Getz thoroughly. Maggin has struck a delicate balance between the music, life and times of Getz. The nurturing, friendships and relationships of the musicians who began playing, developing and expanding with his various musical groups are clarified throughout the book. This book is an indispensable guide for anyone that has followed any of the aspects of Stan Getz the musician and the man.

Rating:
Summary: I would like to translate it to Swedish
Review: Being a recognized translator and a Stan Getz fan, I would like to translate the book to Swedish. At the same time I am aware of the fact that certain aspects concerns an important family in Sweden, i.e. Silfverskiold. Anyway, Maggins book is of too great importance to be ignored and Stan Getz is a legend...

Rating:
Summary: read it for getz's life, not his art.
Review: I read this a few years back, and it was brutal to get through, black clouds of depression lurking on every page. This is actually by way of saying that Maggin did his job well, although it couldn't have been much fun. There is account after account of a phenonenomally gifted yet self-absorbed monster who lived in a world of rationalization and evidently felt his talent justified doing unspeakable things to people (which, of course only means doing the same to oneself). You find yourself, as reader, torn: On one hand, one feels sympathy for one of the great musicians of our time who literally grew up on the road with no parental discipline (he started out, for example, at 15 with Jack Teagarden, a great player and undoubtedly a father figure to Getz, but also a notorious lush)who had to grow up fast and couldn't quite handle it. On the other, there's the aforementioned devil that the substances either created or, more likely, merely brought out. By the time Getz sincerely tried to mend his ways (a terminal illness will do it every time)the train had long left the station leaving much emotional wreckage in its wake.

But as with Charlie Parker, also widely reported to be a less-than-admirable person, we care about the art, and want to remember that. Sadly, this is where Maggin fails. He really means well, but his musical insights and prose style on the subject are, frankly, clumsy and less than helpful. He gropes for, but does not find Getz the musician or why he is so beloved. It's really simple: Getz was a fountain of melodic beauty, even as he swung his tail off. Improvising melodically sounds easy, but is one of the hardest things to do. Plus, his sound was a miracle--a force of nature. This is what puts Getz in the rarified category of accessible musical genius that includes very few others, Parker, Armstrong, Baker, Farmer and Davis among them. Maggin also even gets musicians' names wrong, a definite no-no.

Fortunately, Getz's music speaks for itself loud and clear. Perhaps someone will write the critical work Getz's enormous corpus of work deserves. Hopefully it will be a musician (we have a bad rap for being inarticulate and illiterate for some weird reason) However, Maggin deserves credit for his unflinching portrait of a complicated, at times loathsome man who nonetheless was chosen to be a conduit for some of the most rapturous and beautiful music this world has known.