SOURCE: “Life in the Jazz Lane: The Misery of Stan Getz, the Loneliness of Dark Rooms and the State of the Music,” in Chicago Tribune Books, April 7, 1996, p. 5.

In the following excerpt, Litweiler offers an unfavorable assessment of But Beautiful.

Beauty of melody, purity of sound—these are the obvious qualities of tenor saxophonist Stan Getz's music at the beginning of his 49–year career, at the end when he was wracked with cancer, and usually in between.

Indeed, throughout the bop era and into postmodern times, has any other jazz artist been so thoroughly identified with romance? Yet Stan Getz, by Donald L. Maggin, is the most sordid book about jazz since the Miles Davis and Art Pepper autobiographies appeared in the 1980s. Because Getz lacked the self-awareness and humor of Davis or Pepper, his life was almost unrelievedly sordid, until near the end. Maggin has done an...