Tenor saxophonist Stan Getz was one of those jazz musicians lucky enough to enjoy a certain amount of popular success without compromising his playing. True, Getz's greatest popularity came not from his post-bop sides but from his forays into Brazilian music, and yet even during those sessions he displayed his customary subtlety of phrasing and the achingly cool tonality that had become his trademark.

Getz was born in Philadelphia in 1927 and played with a string of major pre-bop artists while still a teenager: Jack Teagarden ('43), Stan Kenton ('44-'45), Jimmy Dorsey ('45) and Benny Goodman ('45-'46). But it was his stint with the bop-oriented Woody Herman's Second Herd ('47-'49) that put him on the jazz map. Now a leader, he spent the '50s perfecting a style that was alternately breathy and cool and lashingly passionate. He was a constant jazz poll winner and his collaborations with trombonist Bob Brookmeyer were especially popular. After making an extraordinary album playing against (or amongst) string arrangements by Eddie Sauter--Focus (Verve, '61), which defied the truism that strings on a jazz album are a bad idea--he made history with Jazz Samba ('62), launching the bossa nova craze in tandem with guitarist Charlie Byrd and composer Antonio Carlos Jobim. "Desifinado" from that album was a big pop hit, and his next bossa effort Getz/Gilberto yielded the even huger selling "The Girl From Ipanema."

But Getz was too much the jazz artist to milk the bossa nova cash cow ad infinitum, and so spent the rest of his career refining the romantic-yet-substantial style he'd arrived at in the '50s. He died on June 6, 1991, three months after his last recording.

This Biography was written by Richard C. Walls