Stan Getz on "East of the Sun (And West of the Moon)" (1955)

I've always been partial to this cover art, for some reason.

Two months ago I posted a transcription of Stan Getz playing over "East of the Sun (And West of the Moon" from his final live record, People Time (1991), a collection of duets with Kenny Barron at Café Montmartre in Copenhagen, Denmark. That particular record had a major influence on my approach to saxophone sound, but another record that I ended up listening to a lot when I was younger is West Coast Jazz, a 1955 studio date in Los Angeles with a slightly tongue-in-cheek title, referring to critics' discourse over the supposed "West Coast v. East Coast" dichotomy in jazz playing (NB also that all the musicians on the record were based out of the East Coast). This was one of the first Getz records I picked up (probably from Borders, another distant memory), and I had it playing all the time in the car to and from swim practices and other pre-post-secondary institutional extracurricular activities. 

Getz's sound on this record is fascinatingly light-sounding—"hollow" isn't the right word, but it's more like the core of his sound is extraordinarily pale and wafts rather than is dragged about in a more hefty manner, e.g., Dexter Gordon. Many of these earlier '50s Getz records display this similar sonic approach (Complete Roost Sessions, The Steamer), but then, seemingly all of a sudden, Getz's tone deepens with a more vivid and focused core—to my ears, I can hear the gradual transformation in Getz Meets Mulligan in Hi-Fi! and by Live at the Opera House, his mature sound is pretty much all there through to the end of his career, although his sound on People Time has the most direct, glass-like quality of all his records. In any case, here's the transcription in case you'd like to compare Getz playing the same tune over 35 years later.

PDFs:

—C

—Eb