RRR007: “Sweet Rain” // Stan Getz

On a night frozen through, bitter and solid, I listen to an album called Sweet Rain.

It is what its title promises, the sounds of sweetness mixed with rain, happiness contained in flying, stinging droplets of water. Like water, happiness takes on the shape of its container. Like water, it flows according to physical laws over which we have no jurisdiction.

“Litha,” the opener, is life’s two-stage development process: periods of frenetic effort followed by moments of respite during which you reflect and process. Each frenzy has you seeing the challenges a bit differently, just as each uptempo section has Getz re-vocabularizing the fleeting visions of a life happening at an ever-faster pace. The more you hope to understand and savor it, the faster it runs. The album art suggests to me that this is a record from a man who is thinking about his family. Am I reading into things? Perhaps.  

“Litha” ends on a pensive, unresolved note, unprecedented within the song, as if to say the life phases portrayed in the preceding story are just shadows of what may be. In the end, you’ll be left with…well, you’ll be left with whatever it is you’re left with. It won’t be neatly structured or packaged, won’t be one thing or the other. It will be mysterious as night, just as beautiful, just as unknowable, probably twice as frightening.

My copy of this record is old, and oh how that fits. It is beautiful and burnished. This is music that demands to be heard on vinyl. It is the sound of mid-life. That may scare you, may turn you off, or may be a statement you understand better than you’d like.

Put differently, hey, you might be going through a weird phase. You might be staying up late, long after your wife and kids go to bed. You might be lighting candles and drinking a bit of brandy and listening to jazz records, wondering about the big things. You turn them up, those records, loud as you dare without waking anyone upstairs, which isn’t very loud in this tiny, ancient house. You crack a window to remember what a -7 wind chill feels like and then quickly close the window back up to appreciate how spoiled, how domesticated you’ve become.

Tonight, looking out that window, you do not see soft falling snow backlit by a full moon, for that is not the type of night tonight is. Tonight is a night made of thick cut ice crystal, old leaded glass, blue-black ink dredged from the murky bottom of the deepest, most remote channels of the solar system. It is a night that approaches absolute zero, when the past, like a glacier, juts its way into your present. And you remember all the cold winter nights of a life lived in the cold places. It’s a lot of nights.

It’s so cold you see prisms of chiseled blue ice in the sky, frozen shot stars. The moments in the song “Sweet Rain,” the ones where Stan’s tenor sax magically morphs into a flute-like presence and then floats away, those moments bring tears to your eyes for reasons you can’t understand and don’t need to anyway.   

Profound and sublime are overused words, at least in my neighborhood. But what else can you say about this record? It is the sound of four people figuring out a series of true magic tricks all at once. An academic way of saying it would be that this record, these songs, these players bring out a humanity in Getz’s playing that you don’t hear in a lot of his work. This is the horn player who is just too damn good, too smooth, absolutely to a fault. His tone and pitch and articulation are so flawless as to be bloodless at times, and he is nothing but a sound, a meme, a stereotype. But none of that is true here. Here, he is vulnerable, damaged, sad, happy, nostalgic, optimistic, sentimental, defeated, old, young, giving up, trying hard, burning in a blue flame.

The record ends on “Windows,” another Armando “Chick” Corea composition (he composed “Litha” too). I’ll be spending the rest of my life trying to remember where I had heard this song before. It is just like that, mysterious and familiar and on the edge of everything.