Stan Getz - Sweet Rain

If you've never heard Stan Getz, the general consensus is that his 1967 album Sweet Rain is the cream of the crop. They call him "the sound" because, well, he's about the smoothest sax player ever. Not lightweight or boring, but double-digit aged whisky smooth.

He's heavily influenced by South American music, and a pioneer of Samba and Bossa Nova based improvisation. Notable highlights from the nastier side of his life include going to prison for robbing a pharmacy for morphine, being abusive to his actual wife and children, and stealing João Gilberto's, the "inventor" of bossa nova, wife. He didn't kidnap her or anything, she just ran away with him when he went back to the states. They didn't actually marry because his real wife didn't want to be bankrupted by divorce (yes, that did frequently happen in a world where businesses didn't hire women to do anything more than answer the phone or type letters).

It's generally hinted that he was borderline mentally unstable, and you might be tempted to read that into his penchant for wild shifts in tempo and style. I've already mentioned that i don't put much stock in that kind of pseudo psycho-musicology, but it's definitely true that he frequently indulges in structural freedom.

The first track is the craziest, but the quartet achieves those radical transitions in a consistent way: the shifts in tempo/meter always follow from an out of kilter riff by Stan himself, or Chick Corea. Like the liner notes describe, it's more a chasing butterflies approach to music that anything inherently schizophrenic.

I find this record quite soothing as the polar opposite of Pharoah Sanders. Getz is squirrely, but in a "oh that's pretty, let's go that direction" kind of way.

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