Some rather late Stan Getz, and a very late release for Verve - they'd be absorbed into the Polygram conglomerate the following year. Not quite the end of the line for Getz; he'd continue recording pretty much up to his death in 1991.
The tune is "Dynasty," and it's part of a double-elpee recorded at Ronnie Scott's jazz club in London in March 1971 and released as Dynasty the same year. The backing musicians are all Europeans, and they're pretty good - Eddie Louiss on the organ is the one to pay attention to. Unfortunately the recording isn't the best, and his quieter moments get kinda lost in the ether. But he's a monster on this track (the only one I've heard from the album, actually - I have it on a Getz comp), one minute vamping like a seedier Booker T, the next sounding like Keith Emerson in a poker game against Gregg Allman. A whole different bag than Getz's labelmate Jimmy Smith.
And Getz himself - well, if you still think of him as Mr. Bossa Nova and little else, then you really owe it to yourself to listen to this track. He's clearly been listening to Coltrane, and brings both the soulful-wailing and polymathematical-abstraction aspects of Saint John into his soloing here, but he does it without losing the essential personability, the accessible emotion, the heartbreaking gentility of tone, that always marked Stan's own playing.
In other words, this is a cool nine minutes.
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