Stan Getz - Stan Getz Quartets (1979 Japanese Prestige Mono Vinyl LP)

Stan Getz - Stan Getz Quartets | Vinyl LP - 1979 Japanese Prestige Mono Reissue (SMJ-6600, Prestige Jazz Masterpiece Series, Victor Musical Industries)

Before the bossa nova, before Getz/Gilberto and the fame that came with it, Stan Getz was a young cool-tenor prodigy who had just made his name. His feathery solo on Woody Herman's "Early Autumn" in 1948 announced a new sound, light and airy and floating high above the beat, and these Prestige quartet sessions, cut in 1949 and 1950 when Getz was still only twenty-two or twenty-three, are where he first stretched out as a leader. The music is cool jazz at its most graceful. Getz glides through standards like "I've Got You Under My Skin" and "What's New?" and a handful of his own tunes with a tone so smooth it can disguise how much is going on underneath. The bebop pianist Al Haig, his regular partner in this period, is on most of the record, and the supporting cast is a roll call of the era, a young Roy Haynes on drums for one session, Percy Heath, soon of the Modern Jazz Quartet, on bass for another. It is the sound of a major voice arriving fully formed.

Getz would go on to become one of the most beloved saxophonists in jazz, cutting classic albums in every decade and reaching a huge audience with the bossa nova records of the sixties, but he never sounded more purely himself than he does here, at the very start. Records like this one were assembled by Prestige to gather his scattered early sessions in one place, and they remain the best way to hear where it all began.

This is the 1979 Japanese mono reissue on Prestige, part of the Jazz Masterpiece Series, manufactured by Victor Musical Industries, catalogue number SMJ-6600, of the compilation originally issued as Prestige LP 7002.