With Cal Tjader Sextet

An amazing ad-hoc session, thrown together in a San Francisco studio with now legendary personnel from two different groups. The lineup says it all -- a meeting of the Latin jazz maestro and the future champion of Brazilian jazz, plus, from Tjader's group, Vince Guaraldi on piano and guitarist Eddie Duran, and from Getz's band, the then unknown teenager Scott LaFaro on bass and Billy Higgins on drums. A moment for the history books is an 11-minute workout on Guaraldi's pentatonic souvenir of Tokyo, "Ginza Samba," where the fast-samba theme finds Getz blowing to a Brazilian rhythm four years before "Desafinado." The jamming, though, is in a straight-ahead bebop groove where Getz's eloquence unfolds with almost unearthly ease. The rest of the album alternates between lyric ballads and solid, though non-Latin, swinging where Tjader, Guaraldi, and Duran graft onto the great Getz rhythm section like they've been playing together for decades (check out the funky combustion on "Crow's Nest"). Collectors' note: when Getz became a bossa nova star, this album was reissued in 1963 as Stan Getz With Cal Tjader with a different set of liner notes and remains available on LP and cassette in this form. ~ Richard S. Ginell|