Jeepers Creepers – Stan Getz
Before he became synonymous with jazz Bossa Nova, Stan Getz was part of the west coast cool jazz school. In fact after his love affair with Astrud Gilberto brought an end to his musical partnership with her and her husband João, and he began to move away from bossa nova and back to cool jazz.
Born Stanley Gayetski in 1927, he started playing saxophone at age 13, and by the age of 16 he had dropped out of school and was accepted into Jack Teagarden's band, and because of his youth he became Teagarden's ward. Throughout the forties he played for bandleaders such as Stan Kenton, Jimmy Dorsey, and Benny Goodman, eventually playing as a soloist in Woody Herman’s band. He was the leader on almost all of his recording sessions after 1950.
Like his cool jazz peers Art Pepper and Chet Baker, Getz struggled with addictions, including heroin. Reportedly when Stan Getz and Chet Baker played together, they took an instant dislike to each other, and depending on the reviews you read it either showed up in their music, or they were brilliant in their playing and improvising despite it. Some of the friction involved drugs. Despite his own experiments with heroin, Baker could still show a moralistic disdain for addicts, and he considered Getz a slob of a junkie.
In the mid to late 1950s working from Scandinavia, Getz became popular playing cool jazz with Horace Silver, Johnny Smith, Oscar Peterson, and many others.
Jeepers Creepers was written by Harry Warren for the 1938 film Going Places and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song that year. Louis Armstrong debuted the song, and it has become a jazz standard.
This track was recorded in Stockholm in December 1955, with Stan Getz on tenor saxophone, Bengt Hallberg on piano, Gunnar Johnson on bass, and Anders Burman on drums.
– Bozzie 🎷
