Spin And Groove

The Midem music industry conference in Cannes isn’t exactly where you’d expect to hear one of the most unusual jazz sets of 1980. But that’s where this record comes from — January 23, 1980, at the Palm Beach Casino, Stan Getz sharing a stage with Paul Horn and Mike Garson in a collaboration that didn’t have an obvious precedent and probably couldn’t have been planned very far in advance. What came out of it is strange and wonderful in roughly equal measure.

Three Musicians, Three Worlds

The lineup here is genuinely unusual. Stan Getz needs no introduction to anyone who’s read anything else on this site — tenor saxophone, one of the defining voices of post-war jazz, by 1980 at the peak of his mature creative powers. But Paul Horn and Mike Garson come from different places entirely.

Paul Horn was a flautist who had gone from being a sideman in Chico Hamilton’s quintet to recording solo flute improvisations inside the Taj Mahal and the Great Pyramid. New age before new age had a name. Deeply influenced by transcendental meditation — he’d been part of the same Maharishi retreat as the Beatles in 1968 — Horn’s music was meditative, spacious, more interested in resonance and atmosphere than conventional jazz structure.

Mike Garson is a pianist best known, even today, for the discordant atonal piano solo on David Bowie’s “Aladdin Sane” in 1973. One of the great jazz-trained pianists who ended up in rock contexts. Classically schooled, harmonically adventurous, not afraid of dissonance.

Put these three in a room together with no fixed agenda and you get something that resists easy categorisation. Which is exactly what happened.

The Record

Released initially in 1980 on RCA France as Live at Midem ’80, and later reissued under the Midem Live ’80 title with Horn and Garson’s names given more prominence, this is the version I have — the Personal Choice Records reissue. Seven tracks across two sides, drawing on standards, originals, and at least one piece of pure improvisation.

Track by Track

“Heartplace” opens things gently — a slow, almost meditative build, Horn’s flute and Getz’s tenor circling each other without obvious hierarchy. It sets the tone for the whole record: this isn’t going to be a conventional jazz session with a leader and sidemen. The three instruments coexist.

“Kall-Au” is looser and more rhythmically open. Garson’s piano is restless underneath, while Getz and Horn trade phrases in a way that occasionally sounds like an experiment and occasionally sounds like telepathy. You can hear the live audience in the silence between phrases.

“Chappaqua” closes Side 1 and is probably the strangest track on the record. It’s named after the town in New York, and has a quality of suspension — harmonically unresolved, drifting, until it suddenly finds a landing point.

Side 2 starts with “Nature Boy” — the Eden Ahbez standard, one of the most harmonically peculiar songs in the Great American Songbook — and it suits this particular trio perfectly. Getz plays the melody with characteristic warmth, and Horn’s flute weaves around it like a separate voice thinking its own thoughts. Beautiful. Genuinely beautiful.

“Work Song” closes the record on more familiar ground — Nat Adderley’s blues-based composition, swinging and purposeful, a reminder that beneath the more exploratory passages on this record are three musicians with deep roots in jazz tradition.

Why This Record Is Underrated

It doesn’t get mentioned much. Rate Your Music has relatively few reviews for it, which probably reflects its limited distribution more than its quality. It exists in a gap between categories — too meditative for straight-ahead jazz listeners, too jazz-structured for the new age audience Paul Horn might have brought. It fell through the cracks.

That’s a shame. This is a genuinely original record. Three musicians at the peak of their individual powers, meeting in an unusual context, making something that couldn’t have existed with any other combination of people. Those records are rare.

Equipment Used

Turntable is the Technics SL-1200 MK3D, with the Ortofon DJ Mk1 and Arkiv stylus. Phono stage: Yamaha HA-5. Into the Roland GO:MIXER PRO-X for USB digital conversion, and video on the iPad Pro 2020.

For a record like this — acoustic instruments, wide dynamic range, a lot of quiet space between phrases — a clean, transparent signal path matters. The Yamaha HA-5 is exactly the right tool. It doesn’t colour the sound. The quiet passages stay quiet, the pianissimo flute stays delicate, and when Getz opens up on “Work Song” the headroom is there.

Final Word

Give it a full listen without doing anything else. This record doesn’t reward background listening. But on a quiet evening, with the volume set somewhere between low and medium, it does something very specific to the atmosphere of a room.

I can’t tell you exactly what it does. That’s why it’s worth finding out for yourself.