Stan Getz Explores Another World Shock!

Strange as it sounds, right now Stan Getz is getting all modern and spaced-out, really working the Digital Delay with Moog Echoplex on a piece called ‘Another World’ from the 1977 album of the same name.

   Yes, Stan has left Earth for a trip on the Moog thanks to engineer Dave Richards who, according to Stan’s sleeve notes, wired him up whilst the band were taking a break. Stan wasn’t one for overdubbing, which he called ‘trickery’, but once he discovered that the delay allowed him to build note-upon-note, chord-upon-chord, he ‘felt transported’. That’s the spirit Stan! Unfortunately, when Richards suggested he take the Echoplex on tour with him Stan declined, he was ‘not quite ready for that yet,’ – oh Stan you old fart – still, you know, he was getting on a bit when he surrounded himself with young players for this fusion-tinged date. He was willing to accept Andy Laverne playing an Arp and Mini Moog, so he wasn’t totally adverse to the New Thing. But as you might suspect, this isn’t Stan’s answer to Herbie’s ‘Thrust’ or anything like it.
   There’s decent Fusion stuff here, along with a plain standard or two, and nothing awful to complain about, but ‘Another World’ is the track that causes the most interest (for anyone under...60?). God knows what his old die-hard fans would have made of it, but then, I doubt they’d be too enamoured with Fusion and it’s terribly modern use of the Fender Rhodes.

   The synths crop up here and there to add a little colour, a shade of ‘the new’, but this is not Stan stepping into tomorrow (well, by ’77, synths were hardly tomorrow’s world). The track, ‘Another World’, though, which is just Stan with echo and delay, works brilliantly. This one flight, sadly, was enough for him. He paid a six-minute visit to another world, but decided not to really explore it.