Getz Reaches for the Children, Finds Pop Instead
Getz's cool tenor stays in fine form, but the poppish material and keyboard excess make this a forgettable experiment.
Stan Getz recorded Children of the World (1978) during sessions in 1978, assembling a lineup heavy on keyboards and guitar—Andy LaVerne on electric piano and Fender Rhodes, alongside other contemporary players—to fulfill a concept album commission. The project was meant to commemorate the International Year of the Child through compositions by Lalo Schifrin, a reliable Hollywood hand with a gift for commercial melody. The Peanuts cartoon cover, featuring Snoopy on saxophone, signaled the album's crossover intent from the start.
What happened in the studio reveals the central tension: Getz's tone remained exactly what it had always been—cool, elegant, commanding—but the material working against him was weightless. Schifrin's tunes included the theme from Evita and other poppish numbers that felt safer and slighter than anything Getz's best work demanded. The arrangement choices compounded the problem. Too many keyboards, too many guitarists, not enough air. Even when Getz reached for something genuinely exploratory—he used an Echoplex sparingly, a rare nod to experimentation in his later years—the surrounding texture smothered any real risk.
This is not a disaster, just a misfire. AllMusic reviewer Scott Yanow acknowledged that Getz deserves credit for trying something new, for chasing a commercial audience late in his career. But the results simply do not stick. It remains a footnote to his discography, a record for completists only, not the place to encounter what made Getz matter.
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