This deep dive explores the life of jazz saxophonist Stan Getz, born in Philadelphia in 1927 to Jewish immigrants who had fled pogroms in the Russian Empire. With only about six months of formal lessons and no training in music theory, he practiced eight hours a day on a $35 alto saxophone his father scraped together money for during the Great Depression, developing the pristine tone that led the jazz world to call him simply “The Sound.” He dropped out of high school, was touring with a major bandleader by 16, and by 1952 his recording of “Moonlight in Vermont” made him a pioneer of the cool jazz movement that pushed back against bebop’s frantic complexity.

Behind the effortless music was heroin addiction, a 1954 attempted pharmacy robbery in Seattle, and a suicide attempt in his cell. The episode examines how his second wife, Monica, the daughter of a Swedish Olympian, took over as manager, unified his fractured family, and moved everyone to Copenhagen as a kind of quarantine. It follows his return to America, the 1962 jazz samba record that sparked the bossa nova craze, the 1963 collaboration with Brazilian musicians that won Album of the Year and Record of the Year, and the disputed “discovery” narrative around the album’s vocalist. It closes with his 1980s relapse, an order of protection, lasting sobriety in 1983, teaching in California, a hit solo on a Huey Lewis and the News track, and his death from liver cancer in 1991.

• How a cheap $35 saxophone forced him to build the embouchure behind his famous tone
• Why cool jazz emerged as a counter-movement to bebop, and how his breathy tone fit it
• Monica Getz as an “executive function surrogate” and geography as crisis management
• The 1963 Grammy-sweeping bossa nova album and the fight over its singer’s credit and royalties
• Monica’s founding of a national coalition for family justice after the divorce