Customer Reviews

Stan Getz: A Life in Jazz

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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.

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.

Okay, I'm a fairly knowledgeable jazz buff, got lots of Stan Getz CDs. Thought I'd try a book about the man behind the incredible sounds of deep emotions. But whoa! This guy was as much a mess off the stage as Chet Baker, Charlie Parker, Art Pepper,et. al. I had NO idea!! Donald Maggin does a fine job of reporting the events as they occurred & lets us formulate our opinions about this incredible "Life In Jazz". The book badly needs a discography although to follow along w/ the story. Maybe next edition?! Otherwise a book hard to put down for jazzbos AND paparazzi/soap opera lovers! Dr.Mike Baughan Richmond,Va

In his 49 year career Stan Getz was a master in all the major movements in jazz. Yet, in each idiom he was able to sustain his distinct style and voice on the tenor saxaphone and remained an important contributor to the evolution and vitality of Jazz throughout his career. Like many of his contemporaries he also endured a troubled personal life including drug addiction, alcohol abuse, troubled marriages and agonizing emotional pain. In "Stan Getz: A Life in Jazz" Donald L. Maggin not only effectively chronicles Getz's personal and career developments, but he also takes time to establish the context of Getz's musical development in the careers of the people he played with and the larger jazz movements. This is a compelling story which celebrates Getz's triumphs and empathizes with his pain without excusing his abuses. An excellent biography which offers a view of the jazz world since WW II. Highly recommended reading of equal value to jazz enthusiasts and casual listeners.

Charlie Saxe
Chicago, Illinois

I am so fed up with jazz biographies and histories loaded with racial politics. Maggin's book is such a breath of fresh air in that regard. Through this fascinating biography, you learn how collaborative jazz has long been between the races as Getz comfortably performed with white and black musicians. It definitely needs a discography. But given the amount of work Maggin put into detailing Getz's life, he was probably too worn out to tackle a discography. Great book.

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.

There was a Time-Life commercial that featured Jazz masters on a cable channel. Astrud Gilberto was singing "Girl from Ipanema", and I was captivated by her beauty and her vulnerability on stage. I didn't realize it at the time, but Stan Getz was the one supplying the sound.

As I picked up this book, my interest was in learning about the man and his music. Stan Getz was a croosover talent in the history of jazz. His story is often painful to read. His flaws are numerous, and detailed in this book. He was a wife beater, heroin addict, alcoholic, adulterer and self indulgent artist.

But he could play, compose and improvise jazz to a level that put him with few, if any, peers in th ehistory of jazz.

Jazz has never been the ticket to wealth like its weak step-sister rock n roll. (Don't get me wrong, I love rock n roll, but jazz is so much more expressive). But Getz made a phenomenal amount of money playing his horn. He was in great demand, both by his fans, and by other musicians to play with.

His story is interesting, painful, and inspiring. Never formally educated, he took his God-given talent and rode it to incredible heights in the music world.

There are few other books on this subject. This one is worthwhile to learn about a jazz legend.

I bought this book because I'm a bossa nova fan, and perhaps no one did more to bring that music to an American audience than Stan Getz. Getz had a career that spanned about fifty years, encompassing the big band, swing, hard bop, bossa nova, and jazz-fusion eras. In those years, Getz played some of the best jazz music ever recorded. Maggin has done his research and the book is well-written. But I have several problems with his biography.

First, is Maggin's inclusion of lots of extraneous detail. The book does not skimp on describing who Getz was playing with at any given time or where and when (to the hour, in some cases) he was playing. Getz was constantly on the road, and the author is admirable in not ignoring any facet of Getz's work. However, I often felt Maggin gave us far too much detail. The text often reads like liner notes of a CD box set. At times, paragraphs are nothing more than the musician line-up for a particular Getz gig. If you are an avid jazz fan, you might want to know such details, but sometimes it makes for reading about as enjoyable as the end credits of a movie. Another problem, related to this one, is Maggin's use of indented quotations. A lot of them. About every page has a block quotation. Maggin could have boiled down this material for us to make for faster reading. In short, the book is long on description, short on analysis.

Second, is the lack of focus in the first third of the biography. Until Getz is arrested for heroin use, the book felt more like a "life and times" than it should have. We don't need, for example, pages of information about who Benny Goodman was, especially when Getz's name disappears for pages at a time. Context is good, but a writer can easily give us too much. A biographer should never diverge from his subject for very long. When the author drifts, the reader drifts.

Third, is Getz the man. For Maggin, this is a larger problem than the excessive detail he includes. Maggin has no constraints when it comes to analyzing Getz's music: his subject clearly was a genius with the sax, and his output was prolific. There's lots of music to talk about. Getz the man is less impressive. He comes across as very two-dimensional person focused only on music and drugs. Getz could play regardless of how messed up he was, but the drugs turned him into a monster. He was a verbally and physically abusive man when drunk or stoned. And his abuse seemed reserved for his family more than his fellow musicians. I have a lot of respect for Getz the artist, but I came away not liking Getz personally and not having much respect for his intellect.

Fourth, is Getz the artist. Composing was not part of Getz's legacy, a fact which perhaps relegates him to the second tier of jazz greats. Unlike, say another subject of music biography, John Lennon, Getz did not write the greatest songs he played on. It was Carlos Jobim who wrote the hits on "Getz/Gilberto," and it was Chick Corea who wrote the greats songs on "Captain Marvel." Getz also didn't have much of a sense of irony. John Lennon always had some good lines for the press, and he had a wicked sense of humor. Getz, in contrast, seemed a rather humorless workaholic. Unlike Lennon--or say, Ian Anderson or Pete Townshend--Getz probably wouldn't be much fun to talk with at a dinner party. It's his lack of intellectual depth (as say, Miles Davis) or spiritual depth (John Coltrane) that makes 380 pages about him too much. Getz was like a Hall of Fame baseball player who was boring when not on the field.

Getz certainly deserves serious work done on his mastery of the sax, but as a personality, he's a disappointment.

a good biographic book on stan getz, i guess it always helps to appreciate more the music of you know the background of the artist. this book provides that.

I knew that Stan lived a complicated life, but this book says it all. His life with all its ups and downs.....highs and lows...no punches pulled. Informative and well written, the book covers all the important events in Stan's life right to the end. The final period when he became sober, attempting to make amends to as many people as he could for his apalling behaviour is well documented. A tortured genius but the author covers in full the power and artistry of this great unique musician.