An eavesdropper once heard the saxophonist practising a few lines, followed by his own voice sighing, 'The incredibly lovely sound of Stan Getz.' It was a case of vanity justified. All through a long and eventful career, Getz's pealing sound wooed and seduced audiences. He played alto sax and bassoon in his Philadelphia high-school orchestra but was already playing in New York at 16, having gone out to tour with Jack Teagarden. Next came jobs in the big bands of Stan Kenton, Jimmy Dorsey and Benny Goodman, and he worked briefly on the West Coast as a solo before joining Woody Herman at the end of 1947. As the key sound in Herman's 'Four Brothers' sax section he made a notable impact, which he built on further with an extended ballad solo on Herman's 1948 recording of Early Autumn, a lingering memory of the end of the swing era which is definitive in the minds of many listeners. From 1949, still only 22, Getz began leading small groups of his own, and this set the pattern for the rest of his career. Early bands with Al Haig, Jimmy Raney and Horace Silver made some scintillating records for Roost, and when Getz signed to Norman Granz's new Norgran label in 1952, it initiated a superb sequence of records, including At The Shrine (1954), West Coast Jazz (1955) and The Steamer (1956). Getz's phrasing had all the facility and agility associated with bebop, yet his golden timbre and a yearning edge on his melody lines set him aside from bop's jitters – even though the saxophonist had been, like many of his contemporaries, a heroin addict since his Kenton days. He toured both Europe and the US, joining Granz's JATP circus at one point, but his addiction brought health problems and in 1958 he decamped for Denmark, thereafter working in Europe for three years.

On his return in 1961 he found the new voices of Coltrane and Coleman in the ascendant, and he was suddenly last year's man: but 1962 saw his star rising again with an association with Charlie Byrd and a Brazilian sound that led to the hits Desafinado and The Girl From Ipanema, creating the sudden boom in bossa nova music. Granz recorded a rapid-fire sequence of albums to capitalize on it, and though Getz would later express dismay at what he saw as too much attention on this side of his work, it was music which settled his career into affluence (and it did point up the shapely beauty of his playing exceptionally well). He returned to a more straight-ahead sound as the 60s progressed and used new talents such as Gary Burton and Chick Corea among his sidemen. In the 70s, he looked down his nose at jazz-rock but was nevertheless tempted in the direction of soft fusion on some poor records for Columbia. In the following decade, though, he reasserted his most convincing side with a new contract with Concord that produced some impeccable records; and his audience had never really gone away. He eventually returned to a major label when he signed to Polygram, and despite one further album of prettified fusion made at Herb Alpert's behest, he cut some final dates with Kenny Barron and others which show the 'incredibly lovely sound' still rich and ravishing, bathed in an autumnal glow.

Cancer had begun to overtake him by the time of his final recordings, but he battled on to the very end, never anything less than an exceptionally cussed character. Getz disliked fools, and didn't seem to care too much for a lot of intelligent people, either. Ronnie Scott maintained that 'I got my bad back bending over backwards to accommodate Stan Getz', and woe betide sidemen taking a wrong turning or promoters not fulfilling a whim. Getz is a hard musician to copy – there is a truculent side to his playing, as well as the beautiful one, and while he had favourite licks his finest playing has a sailing, inevitable feeling to it which is nearly impossible to simulate. Nevertheless, tenor players trying a smoothly rhapsodic approach to a tune will always be called Getzian. For a long time he was considered to be just the best of the many tenor players who appropriated much of Lester Young's style ('Nice eyes,' the man himself approvingly told the young Stan), but Lester was buried a long way back in the music of the mature Getz: a magnificent jazz musician.

Biography from Richard Cook's Jazz Encyclopedia (2005).

If you'd like more information, check out The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz (2002) or The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz (2007), both of which are still in print.