Stanley Getz was born February 2, 1927, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Alexander and Goldie Gayetski, whose family had shortened its name from Gayetski to Getz after emigrating from London to escape antisemitic pogroms in Ukraine. The family moved to the Bronx during the Depression, where Getz received a harmonica at twelve and his first saxophone, a $35 alto, at thirteen. He practiced for hours a day, took roughly six months of formal lessons from Bronx teacher Bill Shiner, and by 1941 had won a spot in the All-City High School Orchestra of New York, earning free tutoring from New York Philharmonic bassoonist Simon Kovar. He never formally studied harmony or theory.

At sixteen, Getz left James Monroe High School to join trombonist Jack Teagarden's band, and Teagarden became his legal guardian given his age. Over the next several years he passed through the bands of Nat King Cole, Lionel Hampton, Jimmy Dorsey, and Benny Goodman, and briefly worked for Stan Kenton before quitting after Kenton dismissed his primary influence, Lester Young, as too simple. From 1947 to 1949 Getz was a featured soloist in Woody Herman's Second Herd, where he, Zoot Sims, Serge Chaloff, and Herbie Steward made up the saxophone section nicknamed "The Four Brothers." His eight-bar solo on "Early Autumn," recorded with the Herman band on December 27, 1947, became a hit the following year and made Getz, at twenty, one of the most recognized tenor voices in jazz.

Getz launched his own career in 1950, hiring pianist Horace Silver's Hartford trio for touring work after discovering Silver at a club date, though the association ended in 1952 when Getz, deep in heroin addiction, failed to pay the band. In 1952 he scored a hit single with "Moonlight in Vermont," recorded with guitarist Johnny Smith, and signed with producer Norman Granz's Clef and Norgran labels (folded into Verve by 1956). The mid-1950s brought a run of important quartet and quintet dates: 1953's Diz and Getz with Dizzy Gillespie, Oscar Peterson, Herb Ellis, Ray Brown, and Max Roach; the earlier quartet sides with guitarist Jimmy Raney and pianist Duke Jordan later compiled as Stan Getz Plays; and 1955's West Coast Jazz, cut in Hollywood with Conte Candoli, pianist Lou Levy, bassist Leroy Vinnegar, and drummer Shelly Manne. The addiction that shadowed this period surfaced publicly in 1954, when Getz held up a Seattle drugstore for narcotics and attempted suicide after his arrest. He married singer Beverly Byrne in 1946 (three children, divorced 1956) and later married Monica Silfverskiöld, daughter of a Swedish physician, who became both his manager and, for years, his steadying influence.

Seeking distance from the American drug scene, Getz moved his family to Copenhagen in 1958, working steadily around Scandinavia, including a February 16, 1958 Chicago session with Chet Baker issued as Stan Meets Chet. Returning to the United States in 1961, he recorded what he would later call his own favorite among his records: Focus, a suite of Eddie Sauter string arrangements set against Getz's improvising, cut at Webster Hall in New York with pianist Steve Kuhn and drummer Roy Haynes and released on Verve in early 1962. Critics have since ranked it among the era's most fully realized fusions of jazz and orchestral writing.

Later in 1962 Getz teamed with guitarist Charlie Byrd, freshly returned from a State Department tour of Brazil, for Jazz Samba, whose hit single "Desafinado" ignited the American bossa nova craze and won Getz a Grammy. He followed it the same year with Big Band Bossa Nova, arranged and conducted by Gary McFarland with Jim Hall and Hank Jones in the band, and in early 1963 with Jazz Samba Encore!, featuring Brazilian guitarist Luiz Bonfá and pianist/composer Antonio Carlos Jobim. The peak came in March 1963, when Getz, Jobim, guitarist João Gilberto, and Gilberto's wife Astrud recorded Getz/Gilberto for Verve; released in 1964, it produced the crossover hit "The Girl from Ipanema" and became the first non-American record to win the Grammy for Album of the Year, alongside three additional Grammys. Astrud Gilberto and her family later disputed Getz and producer Creed Taylor's account of how she came to sing on the session, alleging it was constructed to deny her rightful royalties. Getz documented the same period further with the October 1964 Carnegie Hall concert Getz/Gilberto #2, which added vibraphonist Gary Burton, and with the club recording Getz Au Go Go.

Getz spent the early 1970s leading a European quartet built around organist Eddy Louiss, guitarist René Thomas, and drummer Bernard Lubat, documented on the 1971 live album Dynasty, while pursuing more modern settings with American players: 1967's Sweet Rain, a quartet date with a 25-year-old Chick Corea on piano alongside Ron Carter and Grady Tate, and 1972's Captain Marvel, recorded with Corea, Stanley Clarke, Airto Moreira, and Tony Williams but held back by Columbia until 1975. His personal life grew turbulent again in the early 1980s: relapses into addiction led to two separate arrests over illegal firearms in the presence of his family, a 1981 divorce filing from Monica that the couple briefly reconciled before it finalized later in the decade, and a court-ordered course of treatment. He nonetheless kept working, teaching as an artist-in-residence at the Stanford Jazz Workshop through 1988, entering the DownBeat Jazz Hall of Fame in 1986, and in 1988 recording the saxophone solo on Huey Lewis and the News's "Small World," a minor pop hit. Diagnosed with cancer in 1987, Getz continued to perform and record: the 1987 Copenhagen concerts at the Jazzhus Montmartre yielded the albums Anniversary! and Serenity, the latter earning him a posthumous Grammy for Best Jazz Instrumental Solo on "I Remember You." His final engagement, a March 1991 stand at the Montmartre with pianist Kenny Barron, was recorded as he battled the liver cancer that would kill him; despite severe pain that cut his final set short, he insisted on completing the run, later released as People Time. Stan Getz died June 6, 1991, in Malibu, California, at age sixty-four; his ashes were scattered from his saxophone case off the coast near Marina del Rey.

Getz built his reputation on what critics and fans came to call simply "The Sound": a warm, breathy, vibrato-light tenor tone drawn directly from his idol Lester Young, applied with a melodic fluency and harmonic sophistication that made him equally at home in bebop-tempo blowing sessions, orchestral third-stream writing, and the gentler rhythms of bossa nova. That combination let him move across settings that stylistically had little in common (the Woody Herman big band, Eddie Sauter's string charts on Focus, Charlie Byrd's classical guitar, Chick Corea's more modern postbop harmony) without ever sounding like a visitor in any of them, and it made him the improviser most responsible for bossa nova's mainstream American breakthrough in the early 1960s. He was not, by most accounts, an easy colleague; drummer and longtime associate Zoot Sims once summed him up as a study in contradictions, an unpredictable temperament that ran alongside decades of documented struggles with heroin and alcohol. Musically, though, his influence on generations of tenor players who prized tone and lyricism over sheer power was direct and lasting, and he remained a working, evolving improviser into his final months, playing through terminal illness rather than stopping.