Discourse that allows us to express a wide range of ideas, opinions, and analysis that can be used as an opportunity to critically examine and observe what our experience means to us beyond the given social/cultural contexts and norms that are provided us.
Alto saxophonist Gary Bartz attended the Juilliard Conservatory of Music and became a member of Charles Mingus' Jazz Workshop from 1962-1964 where he worked with Eric Dolphy and encountered McCoy Tyner for the first time. He also began gigging as a sideman in the mid-'60s with Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach, and later as a member of Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers. His recording debut was on Blakey's Soul Finger album. Tyner formed his famed Expansions band in 1968 with Bartz on alto. In addition, Bartz also formed his own bands at this time and recorded a trio of albums for Milestone, and continued to tour with Max Roach's band. In 1970, Miles Davis hired Bartz and featured him as a soloist on the Live-Evil recording. Bartz
formed the Ntu Troop that year as well, an ensemble that fused soul and
funk, African folk music, hard bop, and vanguard jazz into a vibrant
whole. Among the group's four recordings from 1970-1973, Harlem Bush Music: Taifa and Juju Street Songs have proved influential with soul jazzers, and in hip-hop and DJ circles as well. From 1973-1975 Bartz was on a roll, issuing I've Known Rivers and Other Bodies, Music Is My Sanctuary, Home, and Another Earth, all stellar outings. He meandered for most of the 1980s, coming back in 1988 with Reflections on Monk. Since that time, Bartz has continued making records of quiet intensity and lyrical power -- notably Red & Orange Poems in 1995 -- and has with it become one of the finest if under-noticed alto players of his generation.
With the splash of his New York debut solidly behind
him, Bartz soon joined Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. According to the
story, Gary's parents owned a club in Baltimore, the North End Lounge.
When his father hired Blakey for a gig, Gary grabbed the opportunity to
fill a sax player vacancy in the band. After his performance that night,
the young Bartz was officially hired to join the Jazz Messengers; in
1965, he would make his recording debut on Blakey's ‘Soulfinger’ album. From
1962-64, Gary joined Charles Mingus' Workshop and began practicing
regularly with fellow members of the horn section, including Eric
Dolphy. In 1968, Bartz began an association with McCoy Tyner, which
included participating in Tyner's classic ‘Expansions and Extentions’
albums. Work with McCoy proved especially significant for Bartz because
of the bandleader's strong connection to John Coltrane — who Gary
succinctly cites as a profound influence. During his first two
years with Tyner, Gary was also touring with Max Roach and taking some
time out to record on Max's Atlantic Records release, ‘Mermbers Don’t
Get Weary’. “With Max, there was that bond with Charlie Parker,”
declares Bartz. “Charlie Parker is why I play the alto saxophone.” Bartz
received a call from Miles Davis in 1970; work with the legendary horn
player marked Gary's first experience playing electric music. It also
reaffirmed his yen for an even stronger connection to Coltrane. In
addition to working with Miles in the early '70s - including playing
the historic Isle of Wight Festival in August, 1970 - Bartz was busy
fronting his own NTU Troop ensemble. The group got its name from the
Bantu language: NTU means unity in all things, time and space, living
and dead, seen and unseen.Outside the Troop, Bartz had been recording as
a group leader since 1968, and continued to do so throughout the '70s,
during which time he released such acclaimed albums as, ‘Another Earth’,
‘Home’, ‘Music Is My Sanctuary’ and ‘Love Affair’, by the late '70s, he
was doing studio work in Los Angeles with Norman Connors and Phyllis
Hyman. In 1988, after a nine-year break between solo releases, Bartz
began recording what music columnist Gene Kalbacher described as “Vital
ear-opening sides,” on such albums as ‘Monsoon’, ‘West 42nd Street’,
‘There Goes The Neighborhood’, and ‘Shadows’. Bartz followed
those impressive works in 1995 with the release of his debut Atlantic
album ‘The Red and Orange Poems’ a self-described musical mystery novel
and just one of Gary's brilliantly conceived concept albums. Back when
Bartz masterminded the much-touted ‘I’ve Known Rivers’ album, based on
the poetry of Langston Hughes, his concepts would be twenty years ahead
of those held by some of today's jazz/hip hop and acid jazz combos. So
it continues with ‘The Blues Chronicles: Tales of Life’ A testimonial
to a steadfast belief in the power of music to soothe, challenge, spark a
crowd to full freak, or move one person to think. It adds up to a shoe
box full of musical snapshots from a life lived and played with passion
and stirred - with both joy and sadness - by the blues. Gary's
release ‘Live at the Jazz Standard Volume 1 – Soulstice’ is the first of
a series of recordings documenting his legendary, non-stop style, live
performances. This initial release on his own OYO label bares testimony
to Gary's continuing growth as a composer, group leader, and master of
both the alto and soprano saxophones. A quartet session recorded in
1998, was followed by ‘Live at the Jazz Standard, Volume 2’ released in
2000, which features Gary's exciting Sextet. His follow up release
‘Soprano Stories’ Gary exclusively performed on the soprano saxophone in
a studio quartet setting. His follow up album to the highly
acclaimed Volume I of the Coltrane Files, Toa Of A Music Warrior, will
be released in early 2015 along with his album honoring Woody Shaw
entitled ‘Two MF’s’. Gary Bartz continues taken his rightful place in
the pantheon of jazz greats and has his sight is set on releasing more
music on his label OYO Records.
One of jazz culture’s many graces is that a musician’s value—his
or her relevance, to use a deeply flawed term—has little to do with age.
A brilliant example of this is Gary Bartz, who seems to have hit upon
yet another apex. At 78, the Baltimore-born, Oakland-based saxophonist,
composer, and educator is in a rare position to be all things to all
jazz people. To start, he’s one of the most reliable living narrators of the
music’s history, an intermediary between the bop and fusion generations
with oodles of memoir-worthy firsthand accounts. A nice haul of those
tales appears below, but this interview yielded much more: a
recollection of the time Bartz’s hero Jackie McLean taught him to never
leave his horn with a tough-love prank; the memory of meeting Bud
Powell, after a Brooklyn club owner thought the genius pianist was a
vagabond, and playing with him; anecdotes from Ornette Coleman’s
historic Five Spot stand; and reflections on Sun Ra’s sprawling
two-night Omniversal Symphonic on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in 1984.
To name but a few.
Lately, as artists like Kamasi Washington and an ascendant London
scene have made jazz’s longstanding relationships to R&B, social
justice, Afrocentric spirituality, cosmology, and DJ culture seem new,
Bartz’s status as a crucial forebear has become clearer. His
performances at this year’s NYC Winter Jazzfest—especially a
50th-anniversary celebration of his LP Another Earth at Le
Poisson Rouge, featuring Pharoah Sanders—felt like showcase gigs by a
breakout star. And for good reason. Bartz’s playing continues to deliver
a distinctive meld of the many lodestars he’s spent a lifetime
studying, among them Bird, Trane, Ornette, Wayne Shorter, and Jackie
Mac. At New York’s Blue Note in March, Bartz joined Charles Tolliver,
Vijay Iyer, Buster Williams, and Lenny White to mark the half-century
anniversary of Tolliver’s Paper Man. Again and again, regally
dressed and gripping his alto in a power stance near the edge of the
stage, he offered perfectly charted lines that surged in fervor until
the applause and smartphone cameras rose to meet them. A couple of days
later, he sat down in the breakfast nook of a Greenwich Village hotel to
take the Bright Moments challenge, using various recordings from
throughout his career to summon up stories and invaluable wisdom. Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers Soul Finger (Limelight, 1965) Blakey, drums; Bartz, alto saxophone (originally uncredited); Lucky
Thompson, soprano saxophone (on “Spot Session”); Freddie Hubbard, Lee
Morgan, trumpets; John Hicks, piano; Victor Sproles, bass That was my first recording. My dad had a nightclub in Baltimore
called the North End Lounge. I worked there for years, learned how to be
a bandleader. I was commuting from New York down to Baltimore on the
weekend. [Messengers] Lee Morgan and John Hicks, who was one of my best
friends, they had been trying to get me in the band. [The Messengers]
were at my dad’s club. My dad found out that John Gilmore was leaving,
so he called me in New York. He said, “Why don’t you come down and sit
in with the band? I hear his horn player is leaving.” I did that, and Bu
[Blakey’s nickname] liked me, so I ended up joining the band there. We did all the touring and went out west. Coming back from
California, it was 1965 and we left three days before the Watts riots. I
felt the tension in L.A. I didn’t like L.A. at that time. I later fell
in love with L.A. and actually moved there. So we get back to New York and Lee disappeared. Couldn’t find Lee for
the record date because we didn’t know we had a record date until we
got back. We get to the record date, and Bu hadn’t heard from Lee so he
called Freddie. But Lee showed up! That’s why the two trumpets are on
that album. But what an auspicious first record. To have two of the
greatest trumpeters, Lee Morgan and Freddie Hubbard—are you kidding me?
That’s my big memory of that particular record. And Art Blakey tried to
take one of my songs—that was another memory. “Freedom Monday.” I got it
back. I knew nothing about publishing. Freddie was trying to tell me I
got to sign a “notice of use” and all that. But by the time I found all
that out, the recording was out and Art Blakey’s name was on my song. [On the fact that his name was left off the original credits, although it appeared in the liner notes and DownBeat’s review] My first album! Are you kidding? I was more than upset—I was mortified. But I got over it [laughs]. Max RoachMembers, Don’t Git Weary (Atlantic, 1968)
Roach, drums; Bartz, alto saxophone; Charles Tolliver, trumpet;
Stanley Cowell, piano; Jymie Merritt, bass; Andy Bey, vocals (title
track) I had met Max in Baltimore when I was about 14. My dad took me
down to the Club Casino in Baltimore, and I sat in. I think that’s when I
met Clifford Jordan, who ended up being one of my best friends. I sat
in and they called the fastest thing they could, “Cherokee.” I’m a
Charlie Parker nut, so that’s what started me off. I knew “Cherokee,” even though I didn’t know anything about
harmony and theory. I wasn’t playing wrong notes; I was playing the
right notes, I just didn’t know why. Which is why I ended up moving to
New York to go to Juilliard—to find out what this harmony was about. Max
was very gracious. I guess he liked what he heard, and he said to look
him up when I moved to New York. I started going by his house, and we
would play chess and talk and listen to music. I moved to New York in
’58 and in ’64 he asked me to join the band. My first airplane flight
was with Max. [Members, Don’t Git Weary] turned out to be a good,
lasting record. I knew Andy from Andy & the Bey Sisters. We would
see each other around, and I used to hang in Newark, New Jersey [where
Bey was born and raised] with my friend Grachan Moncur. Gary BartzAnother Earth (Milestone, 1969) Bartz, alto saxophone; Charles Tolliver, trumpet; Pharoah Sanders,
tenor saxophone; Stanley Cowell, piano; Reggie Workman, bass; Freddie
Waits, drums That was my second record [as a leader]. I’d been reading about
Beethoven, and Beethoven would write a piece that was a light piece,
like the Pastoral Symphony, then he would follow that with a heavy
piece, and go back and forth. I liked that concept. I had done Libra, and that was more of a light record. So I said, okay, now let me do a heavy piece. I had gotten into astronomy through studying astrology. I was
drawing charts for myself and other people, and I realized that a chart
is just a photograph of the sky at a particular moment. That got me into
astronomy, because now I wanted to see it. So I got my telescope and I
got into it, and that inspired the Another Earth music, which
is still going because I’ve added some new things. What was missing from
the Le Poisson Rouge [performance were] films and footage of space that
I wanted to have going. Hopefully when we do it elsewhere, we’ll get
that going. Pharoah and I had met in the early ’60s, when he first came to
town. I had already been here, and so we started hanging out together
and practicing. Actually, Pharoah taught me how to do circular
breathing. We used to go to a park and practice, and try to play as loud
as we could. We’d go out there to try to open up our sounds.
Gary
Bartz with early employer McCoy Tyner (left) and bassist Gerald Cannon
(right) at the Blue Note, New York, September 2016 (photo: Alan
Nahigian)
McCoy TynerExpansions (Blue Note, 1969) Tyner, piano; Bartz, alto saxophone, wooden flute; Woody Shaw,
trumpet; Wayne Shorter, tenor saxophone, clarinet; Ron Carter, cello;
Herbie Lewis, bass; Freddie Waits, drums Wayne was my hero. One night, Lee Morgan said, “Come on, Gary, I
want you to hear this tenor saxophone player. I got this gig in Newark.”
And we went over and I had my horn; I was going to go play with him.
That’s the night I met Wayne Shorter, and it changed everything about my
outlook. I was trying to hide my horn after hearing Wayne [laughs].
I’ve been following him ever since. I think he’s America’s great
composer. He’s in the same vein as a Duke Ellington or a Charles Mingus …
or Beethoven. He’s our Beethoven. I learned so much working with McCoy. When I met McCoy he was
working with Benny Golson and Art Farmer’s Jazztet. I had known him for a
while, before he went to John [Coltrane]. So when he asked me to join
the band I was very happy. Now I’m in the role of the Trane. [McCoy] and John Hicks were the first two pianists I knew of who
knew how to play with soloists when they were playing free, not
necessarily following the harmonic structure. Because McCoy had done
that with Trane. They figured out a way through Trane studying with
Ornette. I loved John Coltrane so much. The alto saxophonists I like play
like tenor players, and the tenor players I like play like altos, which
would be John Coltrane. He started out on alto, and he always to me
played like an alto player.
On Wayne Shorter: “I think he’s America’s great composer. He’s our Beethoven.”
Miles Davis Bitches Brew Live (Columbia/Legacy, 2011)
[portion recorded August 1970 at the Isle of Wight Festival]
Davis, trumpet; Bartz, alto and soprano saxophones; Chick Corea,
electric piano; Keith Jarrett, organ; Dave Holland, electric bass; Airto
Moreira, percussion; Jack DeJohnette, drums
Miles DavisThe Cellar Door Sessions 1970 (Columbia/Legacy, 2005)
Davis, trumpet; Bartz, alto and soprano saxophones; John McLaughlin,
electric guitar; Keith Jarrett, electric piano, electric organ; Michael
Henderson, electric bass; Airto Moreira, percussion; Jack DeJohnette,
drums When Miles called me, I was disappointed because I knew he was playing that electric music from Bitches Brew,
and I knew all the music from his bands before that. I knew all those
songs, and that’s the band I wanted to be in—the quintets, especially
the first quintet with Trane. But I said, I can’t turn Miles Davis down,
that’s the gig everybody aspires to, so I’ll give it a few weeks. We
had one rehearsal and I began to see what he was doing. And really, in
essence, he wasn’t doing anything different than he had been doing. He
had already gone modal with Kind of Blue, but now he had changed the rhythms. Everything around him changed, but he didn’t change. I didn’t have to do anything but play the way I always play. I
felt very free. [But] Keith [Jarrett] and I always had a problem. I
didn’t like the way Keith comped behind me. I didn’t think he was
listening to me, and above all we have to listen. I could go out and
play without listening to everybody and just play what I want to play,
but that’s not a band. The greatest thing about Miles is that he knew
how to listen. Because he listened from the inside. Hearing is like a
fingerprint; everybody hears differently. We have to find out how we
hear. That’s our job, to find out what it is that only we can hear—and
for that we have to go inside ourselves. Miles was always inside of
himself. Whatever he heard on the outside, he could then bring that into
what only he could hear and meld it with that. So with Keith—and I love Keith—he just wasn’t listening because
he was so excited and he’d do his stuff. And it bothered me, because I’m
trying to go where I want to go, but he’s trying to take me where he
wants me to go—and it’s my solo. So I would complain to Miles about that. [On the various reactions to Miles’ electric music] I
remember the Modern Jazz Quartet came in one night at Paul’s Mall in
Boston. Milt Jackson, Percy Heath, and I think Connie Kay may have been
there. Percy, he didn’t like it: What the hell are you doing? But
Milt Jackson said to me, “You ain’t doing nothin’ but playin’ the
blues.” I said, “Yeah, that’s what we’re doing.” It ain’t no different;
it’s just the rhythms are different. What we’re doing is no different
from what Bach did, Beethoven, Mozart. They just didn’t have a rhythm
section, so they could only do theme and variations by themselves. We
figured out a way to do theme and variations with a group of people, and
changed the whole pathway of music. Woody ShawBlackstone Legacy (Contemporary, 1971)
Shaw, trumpet; Bartz, alto and soprano saxophones; Bennie Maupin,
tenor saxophone, bass clarinet; George Cables, piano, electric piano;
Ron Carter, Clint Houston, electric bass; Lenny White, drums At that time, Woody, George Cables and I were like three peas in a
pod. We’d see each other every day. We would hang out, work on music,
go eat and talk. So that’s how that record came about. When he got a
record date, of course we’re with each other every day creating music
anyway. So he brought these songs and [two tracks of] George’s
writing—he’s a great, great composer himself. [On the album’s themes of black freedom] We all were
[thinking about social-justice issues] in the ’60s. I mean, they killed
the president; they killed our leaders. Our leaders were assassinated in
the ’60s, and we act like it was just a footnote in history. But that
was traumatic. I was going to stop playing music because I didn’t think
the world needed another musician. I thought, we got more problems than
what a musician can solve, even though as I got to know Max and Mingus
and different people, I saw that you can address social ills through
music. That’s the only thing that kept me out of the Black Panthers.
Gary
Bartz with George Cables (right) at the Roy Hargrove Musical
Celebration, Jazz at Lincoln Center, January 2019 (photo: Alan Nahigian)
Gary Bartz NTU TroopHarlem Bush Music – Uhuru (Milestone, 1971)
Bartz, alto and soprano saxophones, piano and vocals on “Blue”; Juni
Booth, bass (on “Vietcong”); Ron Carter, bass, electric bass; Nat
Bettis, percussion; Harold White, drums; Andy Bey, vocals [The NTU Troop recordings were a] result of me listening to “Fables of Faubus” and We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite and all of that. That’s when I came up with the concept of the NTU Troop. [My friends and fellow musicians and I] used to go to the Shabazz
restaurant near the mosque uptown off 116th Street just to see Malcolm X
come in. We knew what time he came into the restaurant, and then we’d
follow him. He’d walk through the streets of Harlem, talking to the
prostitutes and pimps, drug addicts and drug dealers. He would talk to
everybody and say, “Brother, that’s not the way to go.” There are two people I’ve been around who had a Christ-like
effect, or a Buddha effect; you just felt their aura of peace and
goodness. Malcolm was one of them, and John Coltrane was the other. [Harlem Bush Music is dedicated to the memories of both men.—Ed.] Everybody respected Malcolm X—everybody. They knew Brother Malcolm. He was ready to die for this. And he did. It was a very important time. Gil Scott-Heron, we used to do gigs
opposite each other, and then there were a lot of Black Student Unions
during that time, all over the country. They had budgets for the music …
and they would say [to the college and university administrations],
“Well, you’re bringing these other groups, these rock groups and country
groups. What about us?” So that’s why they started bringing in Gil
Scott, the Last Poets, NTU, Max Roach. Gary Bartz NTU TroopI’ve Known Rivers and Other Bodies (Prestige, 1973)
Bartz, alto and soprano saxophones, vocals; Hubert Eaves, electric
piano, piano; Stafford James, electric bass, bass; Howard King, drums I actually started practicing and trying to learn the guitar, and
that’s how I wrote “I’ve Known Rivers.” I was always into poetry. We
had studied Paul Laurence Dunbar and Langston Hughes in school, Countee
Cullen, poets like that. We had Black History Month; then, when I was in
school, it was Black History Week. Probably the generation before me it
was Black History Day. It’s not Black History Month, it’s White History
Month, because we know all that stuff. It’s not for us. The other
community needs to find that out. Andy [Bey] had left. I’m not a great vocalist, but I always loved
to sing. I didn’t have anybody, so I said I guess I gotta sing [“I’ve
Known Rivers”] myself.
“I’m not an improviser. I resent when somebody says I’m improvising, because improvising means you’re just making stuff up.”
Gary BartzThe Shadow Do! (Prestige, 1975)
Bartz, alto and soprano saxophones, synthesizer, lead and background
vocals; Reggie Lucas, guitar; Hubert Eaves, piano, clavinet,
synthesizer; Michael Henderson, bass, backing vocals; Mtume, percussion;
Howard King, drums, synthesizer; with Larry and Fonce Mizell, producers Gary Bartz Music Is My Sanctuary (Capitol, 1977)
Bartz, alto and soprano saxophones, piano, electric piano,
synthesizer, vocals; Ray Brown, Eddie Henderson, trumpet; Juewett
Bostick, John Rowin, David T. Walker, Wah Wah Watson, guitar; George
Cables, piano; Welton Gite, Curtis Robinson Jr., bass; James Gadson,
Howard King, Nate Neblett, drums; Bill Summers, Mtume, percussion;
Sigidi, Syreeta Wright, vocals; with Larry and Fonce Mizell, producers The Shadow Do! was sampled by A Tribe Called Quest. [The
legendary hip-hop group sampled Bartz’s “Gentle Smiles” on the track
“Butter.”] I just did a show out in Los Angeles last month with
[composer/producer] Adrian Younge and [Tribe’s] Ali Shaheed Muhammad. We
played some of that music, and the sold-out crowd, they went nuts. We
played some of it [when I guested with Jon Batiste’s house band] on [The Late Show With Stephen Colbert] last week. I had been doing the Donald Byrd records, Stepping Into Tomorrow and Caricatures, and so that’s how I met the Mizells and how The Shadow Do! album came about. I ended up signing with Capitol [prior to Music Is My Sanctuary],
so now we had a big budget. I could get my strings; I always wanted to
do an album with strings. Wade Marcus did the strings. We got Wah Wah
Watson, James Gadson … great musicians. I really enjoyed doing that. I did a lot of writing for those [records with the Mizells].
Because I’m like Ornette Coleman. Ornette said he thinks of himself as a
composer, as do I. I’m not an improviser. I resent when somebody says
I’m improvising, because improvising means you’re just making stuff up.
The only time I’m improvising is when I make a mistake, because I didn’t
plan on doing it. I just call it composing, because I was a composition
major at Juilliard, and I understand what composition is. You’ve got to
have a great entrance, a great ending, good thematic material in the
middle. You’ve got to think about that; you don’t just start playing. I remember when we mixed “Ooo Baby Baby” [off Sanctuary].
This is before all this digital technology; we were still going to
tape. We had about five of us on the board. Each had a job: “Okay, right
now, you push up and you pull down.” We must have done 12 hours trying
to mix “Ooo Baby Baby.” We tried the first day, and the next day we came
back and finished it. [On the fusion of jazz and R&B] Everybody’s got to
compartmentalize. I saw Marvin Gaye with Harvey and the Moonglows. I saw
Fats Domino; I saw Little Richard; I saw Jackie Wilson. I grew up with
that. My friend [pianist] Albert Dailey was in the house band [of
Baltimore’s Royal Theatre], so I would go and see all of that. It was no different, for me, going to see John Coltrane and going
to see Little Richard. It’s all the same music. We all came out the
same neighborhoods, all learned the same things. James Brown could have
grown up right next door to John Coltrane, been best of friends, hung
out, played baseball, whatever. And still James Brown would have played
the music he played, and Trane would have played the music he played.
Because it’s no different; it’s the same music. It’s just how you think
about it. Norman ConnorsYou Are My Starship (Buddah, 1976)
Extensive personnel including Norman Connors, drums, producer and
arrangements; Bartz, Carter Jefferson, saxophones; Michael Henderson,
bass, vocals; Phyllis Hyman, vocals; Onaje Allan Gumbs, electric piano,
synthesizer; Keith Loving, Lee Ritenour, guitar; Anthony Jackson, Larry
McRae, bass; Don Alias, Neil Clarke, percussion [Norman] wouldn’t do a record without me [laughs]. He
felt I was a good luck charm. I met him one Sunday afternoon, I think it
was the Aqua Lounge [in Philadelphia] with Max Roach. We used to do
these matinees. This little 14-year-old kid came in, and Max let him sit
in because he had met Max. That’s when I first met Norman. So we were
friends from the time he was a young teenager. He said, “I got this record date.” He had discovered this great
vocalist Phyllis Hyman. My goodness. I got Michael on the gig. I had
moved out to Los Angeles. I was out there from ’74 to ’79. He flew me in
[to New York] from California and Michael from Detroit. I met Phyllis on that record, Starship. I knew that was
going to be a good record, and that record also taught me something. We
were rehearsing and we were ready to record when New York got hit by
this huge blizzard. The studio was closed because the engineers couldn’t
get into town. So we rehearsed and worked on that music for an extra
week—and that record came out great. Ever since then, I make sure I’m
prepared when I go into the studio. Each time I go into the studio I
learn something, even today.
Gary Bartz at Cooper Union, New York, October 1984 (photo: Alan Nahigian) Gary BartzThe Red and Orange Poems (Atlantic, 1994)
Bartz, alto saxophone; Eddie Henderson, trumpet, flugelhorn; John
Clark, French horn; Mulgrew Miller, piano; Dave Holland, bass; Steve
Kroon, percussion; Greg Bandy, drums There was a record of Curtis Fuller’s called Sliding Easy,
and I love this record. Curtis is my favorite trombonist. The personnel
was Curtis Fuller, Hank Mobley, Lee Morgan, Tommy Flanagan, Paul
Chambers and Elvin Jones, and Benny Golson [and Gigi Gryce] had done the
arrangements. I wanted to do a record like that. I called Curtis, but he couldn’t do it for some reason, and I
couldn’t think of another trombonist that would give me what I wanted. I
thought, well, the French horn gives me that kind of sound, so I
thought of John Clark, a great, great musician. I called Benny to do the
arrangements. He said, “Gary, you’re a great arranger—you do it!” I
still don’t think I can arrange as good as Benny Golson, but I did the
best I could. Tony Williams was supposed to be on that record, but at the end
we couldn’t finalize a deal. So that’s how I got with Greg, and Greg
worked with me for years after that. Gary Bartz Coltrane Rules (Tao of a Music Warrior) (OYO, 2012)
Bartz, alto and sopranino saxophones, bass clarinet; Barney McAll, piano; James King, bass; Greg Bandy, drums
I’ve been studying Trane all my life, it seems. That was a
working band, so we’d been working on the material on the road. Most
everything we did was one take. And one album was not long enough to
give my whole take on how I’ve felt about John and his music, so that’s
why it ended up being a double album. The second volume will be coming
out this year. I didn’t want to do a recording where I just played his songs. I
wanted to show how he influenced me and other musicians. For instance, I
did a song called “Birdtrane.” Trane had written “26-2,” which is based
on Charlie Parker’s “Confirmation.” I took part of “26-2” and part of
“Confirmation,” and combined the Bird and the Trane. I was doing things
like that to show the continuum of the music. Now I’m working on [preparing for my] Charlie Parker/Ornette
Coleman recording. Ornette understood Charlie Parker like nobody else I
know of. Because he didn’t try to play like him. He just took his
concepts and his approach, because he could hear it from the inside.
When you can hear from the inside, you will only sound like yourself and
bring your ideas. Every picture you ever see of Ornette Coleman and
every picture you ever see of Charlie Parker, they both stand the same
way. They’re both standing straight, because their breathing is correct.
You can only do that kind of articulation when you really know how to
breathe. And they both did. Ornette really got Bird.
The Warriors in 2012 (left to right): Greg Bandy, Barney McAll, James King, and Gary Bartz (photo: Alan Nahigian)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Evan Haga worked as an editor and writer at JazzTimes from 2006 to 2018. He is currently the Jazz Curator at TIDAL, and his writing has appeared at RollingStone.com, NPR Music, Billboard and other outlets.
A native of Baltimore, Gary Bartz ventured to New York City
to attend the Juilliard School in 1958. At the time, performers such as
Thelonius Monk, Ornette Coleman, and Miles Davis were playing at
Birdland and the city’s other premiere clubs every night, and Bartz
regularly snuck in to see them. In the 1960s, Bartz joined the Max Roach/Abbey Lincoln Group and the
Charles Mingus Jazz Workshop, quickly earning a reputation as the
greatest alto saxophonist since Cannonball Adderley. In 1965, after
meeting the group at his parents’ nightclub, Bartz joined Art Blakey’s
Jazz Messengers and recorded Soulfinger, his recording debut.
Around the same time, he began working with McCoy Tyner, and their
relationship deepened the influence of John Coltrane on Bartz. In 1970, Bartz received a call from Miles Davis, who asked Bartz to
perform with his band at the historic Isle of Wight Festival. In the
same year, Bartz also formed his own group, Ntu Troop, after the Bantu
word for “unity.” Ntu blended soul, funk, African folk music, hard bop,
and avant-garde jazz on such albums as I’ve Known Rivers and Other Bodies, based on the poetry of Langston Hughes, as well as Music is My Sanctuary, Love Affair, Another Earth, and Home. Overall, Bartz has recorded more than 40 solo albums and over 200 as a guest artist. More recently, he released Coltrane Rules: Tao of a Music Warrior, Live at the Jazz Standard Volume 1 and Volume 2,
and several others, on his own label, OYO, which is named for the
Nigerian tribe and the acronym “Own Your Own.” He was also spotlighted
in the “Blindfold Test” section of DownBeat magazine in January 2008, and he continues to perform with McCoy Tyner in such cities as Tokyo and Los Angeles.
With saxophonist Gary Bartz, bassist James King, drummer Greg Bandy, and guitarist Paul Bollenback Gary Bartz is a GRAMMY® Award-winning saxophonist and educator who
has played with legends like Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, Max Roach, and
McCoy Tyner. He can be heard on dozens of albums as a leader and
hundreds as a sideman, and he continues to record on his own label, OYO
Recordings. At 75, Bartz continues to be a lithe soloist, and in his
playing is the experienced sound of having learned from, worked with,
and inspired many of jazz’s greatest players. In October, following this
performance Bartz will deservedly be honored with the BNY Mellon Jazz
2015 Living Legacy Award at the John F. Kennedy Center for the
Performing Arts. This event is part of the sixth annual Coca-Cola Generations
in Jazz Festival, a multi-generational meeting of legendary masters and
emerging artists. Download the full schedule here.
Gary Bartz (born September 26, 1940) is an American jazz saxophonist.
Biography
Bartz studied at the Juilliard Conservatory of Music. In the early 1960s, he performed with Eric Dolphy and McCoy Tyner in Charles Mingus's Jazz Workshop. He worked as a sideman with Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln before joining Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. In 1968 he was a member of McCoy Tyner's band Expansions.
In mid-1970 he joined Miles Davis's band, performing live at the Isle Of Wight festival in August, and at a series of December dates at The Cellar Door club in Washington, D.C. Portions of these shows were initially released on the 1971 Live-Evil album, with the entire six performance/four night run eventually released in full on the 2005 Cellar Door Sessions box set.
He later formed the band Ntu Troop, which combined jazz, funk, and soul.[1] Bartz was awarded the BNY Mellon Jazz 2015 Living Legacy Award, presented at a special ceremony at The Kennedy Center.[2] In the liner notes to the album The Red and Orange Poems, jazz critic Stanley Crouch called Bartz "one of the very best who has ever picked up the instrument".
In 2019, Revive Music and Bartz celebrated the 50th Year
Anniversary of his "Another Earth" album at Winter Jazzfest in NYC
alongside original member Pharoah Sanders.[3]
Gary Bartz has been active on the
New York music scene and throughout the world since the '60s, working
with such legends as Miles Davis and Art Blakey. To preface our
interview, we began by a surprise phone call that I had arranged with Dr.Yusef Lateef, whom Mr.Bartz had not spoken with for some time. This set the tone for most of the following conversation. All About Jazz: So I'll start out by asking you about your beginnings in music. Was it always the saxophone for you?
Gary Bartz:
Actually, I was torn between the drums and the saxophone. But Charlie
Parker just took my heart away, so I ended up with the sax, with the
alto and always the alto from the beginning. When I first started I
heard this music when I was six years old. So at that time, you don't
realize what a tenor and what a soprano I didn't even know about a
soprano but I didn't know the difference between the alto and the tenor,
I just liked what Charlie Parker was doing, I liked what Louis Jordan
was doing, so that's what I wanted.
AAJ: You never had a desire to play any of the other instruments as you got older?
GB:
No. I mean, the piano, of course, but I think the piano should be
taught in school just like mathematics, just like reading, writing and
arithmetic. I'd say reading, writing, arithmetic and rhythm. But that
should be a prerequisite, because then the quality of music in the world
at least in the United States, would be much better, if everyone knew
something about the piano and about music, they would know this is not
good. Right now, there is so much music out that's not good, but no one
knows the public doesn't know.
AAJ: Right. So
of course, Charlie Parker was your influence. But from what I've read,
you grew up going to shows on 52nd Street. Who else influenced you?
GB: Im not that old.
AAJ: Oh, I thought you were.
GB: (Laughs) No, I came to New York in 1958, and so 52nd Street was gone by then.
AAJ: But you hung out at Birdland.
GB: Birdland was definitely yes.
AAJ:
So those shows, outside of Charlie Parker, who were some of the
favorite people you were seeing, and maybe some of your more memorable
obscure pairings of musicians of that time?
GB:
Well, of course, Miles Davis span, but I and just speaking to Yusef
brought back a memory of the first time I saw Yusef was at a cabaret
down on the Lower East Side. And they used to have these cabarets, and
you'd get a flyer. They'd put the flyers out with like rows of names of
the most famous musicians, like three rows of names. And everybody
wouldn't show up, but they had all these names. And so Chet Baker,
Philly Joe Jones, Yusef, Red Garland, Hank Mobley, Lee Morgan, Donald
Byrd, you know, just all and so you can't wait to go to see all of these
people, because I hadn't seen a lot of them at that early age. I was
seventeen when I came to New York. So seventeen, eighteen, my teenage
years, I used to go see them. The first time I saw Yusef was at one of
those places. The first time I saw Chet Baker and Philly Joe Jones, I
saw them talking to each other, whispering in each other's ear, and I'm
thinking, oh, isn't that cute? Later on I found out.
AAJ: Found out what they were talking about.
GB: ...(Laughs) what they were probably talking about wasn't so cute, but...
AAJ: Right.
GB: because they got up and left and but as a teenager, you know...
AAJ: So your first big gig then was with Art Blakey?
GB:
No, actually, Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln, yeah, 64, (Inaudible).
Because I had met Max, and I probably met him in 1954 when I was about
fourteen. My dad used to work on the railroad, but he owned a nightclub
in the 60s, and he used to take me around to the different clubs in
Baltimore, sit in and tell people, You know, my son plays (Inaudible) me
up there. Unbeknownst to me, one time we went to see Sonny Stitt at the
Comedy Club in Baltimore. And my dad had talked to Sonny and said,
Well, my son, you know, he plays. And so Sonny Stitt comes out and says,
Well, we have this young man that would like to come and which I did
not would like to come up, you know (Inaudible) would like to come up
and play. And so he called me up, and my dad went and had the horn in
the trunk of the car. I didn't even know about all this. Anyways, so I
went up and played with him. And being Sonny Stitt, he took me through
all the keys on the blues. And fortunately for me, I didn't know one key
from the other, I was just really ear at that time, so I didn't have no
problem. So we struck up a friendship from that moment on. But yeah, he
used to take me out, and finally bought a club in 1960, which is where I
really met Yusef.
AAJ: How hard was it for you to find your own voice at such a young age, being with Max Roach?
GB: Mmmm.
AAJ:
And not to say like, I am going to play the best Charlie Parker
imitation I can play. Because a lot of people now that I see in New
York, they can play the best Charlie Parker imitation you've ever heard.
GB: Yeah.
AAJ: but I'd rather just listen to Charlie Parker.
GB: Sure.
AAJ: How hard was it to be yourself?
GB:
Well, when I look back on it, that is what we were trying to do, that
was our focus was because we realized that there is already a Charlie
Parker, there is already a Jackie McLean, there is already a Cannonball
Adderley, there is already an Eric Dolphy. So whatever they did to find
their voice, that is what I had to do to find my voice. And from my
generation, that was how our main focus was looking for our own voice,
because we realized that that would be where we would be most
successful. Because if you want Charlie Parker, you called Charlie
Parker. Of course, there is a market for people that sound like Charlie
Parker if Charlie Parker can't make the gig, then, okay, give me
somebody who sounds like Charlie. But we were not interested in that, we
were interested in finding our own voice. So we just did whatever we
could and whatever we could think of to do. And I don't know whether it
was I couldn't even say how, you know, I couldn't say you how. All I can
say is the how was the knowledge that that's what we needed to do. So
that's what we were striving for.
AAJ: Do you
agree with the way music schools are putting out kids now, that they're
teaching them that, This is exactly what so-and-so was doing in 1958?
And I think a lot of the kids coming out of the schools aren't having
that experience you had of like I needed to find my own voice. They were
saying, I can play.
GB: Uh-huh.
AAJ:
I mean, I see so many young people at jam sessions and concerts now,
and each person sounds like they came straight out of Coltrane or
GB: Right.
AAJ: straight out of Charlie Parker, and they haven't found their own voice. And I wonder if the music school is at fault for that.
GB:
No, I don't think its at fault. I think what's going on now is that
everything is turned around. Whereas we see, because we didn't have
music schools. And so we had to learn the best way we could, and so
everybody learned in a different way. I didn't learn like somebody you
know, the next alto player learned. Even though we worked (Inaudible)
like I used to practice with Eric Dolphy every Wednesday. We had a
standing engagement for every Wednesday. I would go down to his loft and
we would practice. But I met Eric when I would do some things Mingus.
And he had this experimental big band that he would do at the Village
Gate. And I didn't get paid. Eric probably got paid. (Laughs) You know,
Rahsan Roland Kirk was in the section, I remember. I think Julian
Priester was in there. I don't remember who else was in there.
AAJ: Was Ted Curson(?) there?
GB:
Ted might have been, too, yeah. But it was a big band. And Mingus would
just (Inaudible). He would start a song. He would come over to Eric.
Eric was the leader of the sax section, and he would hum a melody or
something for him to play, then Eric would give it to us, and we would
play it, and then he'd do the same, Mingus would do the same to the
trumpet section, to the trombones. So it was an improvised big band,
which was (Inaudible).
AAJ: This was the Jazz Workshop?
GB:
Yeah, it was definitely a workshop, yeah. (Laughs) But like I said, I
used to practice with Eric and the reeds. But what we would practice we
weren't practicing it, we were practicing technique, because we found
out I love to do duets, but I didn't find many people that enjoyed doing
duets with me. So I mentioned this to Eric, and Eric said, Well, I love
doing duets, too, and I have the same problem. So that's when we
started our standing Wednesday engagement at his loft. And so then we
couldn't find music hard enough to challenge us, because saxophone
music, there's not a big backlog of saxophone music. So we ended up with
oboe music. So we got the Bach Fugues, you know, oboe, because oboe is
the same range, B-flat to high-F. And so we started we would have so
much fun doing that. But we weren't even talking about style so much as
we were trying to learn the instruments. That's what I was doing at that
time. And that comes. So and back to your question, I think the schools
are a good thing, but everything is backwards now. We found the style
while we were looking for our technique. What happens now is in the
schools they learn the music, and then when they come out, then now they
have to find their style. So I don't think it's a detriment, it's just a
different way of doing it. And I see them now as they get older, they
develop their styles, their own styles.
AAJ: Right. If only you had a tape of one of those duets with Eric Dolphy.
GB: Oh!
AAJ: You could make a million dollars off of that.
GB: I know. [Laughter]
GB: Yeah.
AAJ: Was it difficult working with Mingus? Because I know he had a very strong personality.
GB: Yeah, he did.
AAJ: at times. Was that a difficult experience?
GB:
Most of the time, no. Most of the time, no. He was a gentle man. I
mean, everybody had their peccadilloes and things that they but for the
most part it was only one time I thought he was going to I didn't know
what he was going to do, I thought he might knock me out. I heard all
these stories about him punching Jackie McLean in the mouth.
AAJ: And John Handy, I think, punched him in the mouth.
GB:
Yeah, so I thought, Well, okay. This is my night to be punched in the
mouth.?"] (Laughs) But fortunately, it didn't happen, and he yeah.
That's another story. I'm writing a book, I'm writing an autobiography,
so all of that is going to be in the book. But this had to do with the
time he had a month-long engagement at the Mercer Street Playhouse. I
guess that would have been back in the 70's I'm not sure, 70's or 80's.
And we'd had a problem. It was a long time (Inaudible)...
AAJ: We will leave it at that.
GB: Yeah.
AAJ: And after that you were in with Art Blakey?
GB:
Well, after Max. I had worked with Max for about a year Max and Abbey
Lincoln, because that was the band, it was Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln.
AAJ: And was that was with Coleman Hawkins as well?
GB:
No, no. That was a record date. No. The band that I joined of Max and
Abbeys was Julian Priester on trombone, Ronnie Matthews on piano, and
Bob Cunningham on bass. That was my first professional job.
AAJ: Wow, that sounds like a great first professional job.
GB: Yeah, it wasn't shabby. Then I moved on to Art Blakey.
AAJ: Who was in the band with Art Blakey?
GB:
John Hicks, Lee Morgan, Victor Sproles and John Gilmore was I was
taking John Gilmores place. So he stayed on for a while while I learned
the book, because we never rehearsed. I never rehearsed with Art Blakey.
I think the one rehearsal I ever did with him was a big band, because
he had a big band. And he would rehearse at his sons loft sometimes, at
Sonny's loft.
AAJ: I bet it was great playing with John Gilmore.
GB: Oh, yeah, I love John. AAJ: He taught Coltrane some things, I think.
GB: Well, everybody teaching everybody things.
AAJ: Yeah.
GB:
You know when you say teach someone, I don't know whether he taught him
as much as John heard some things that he later developed. I mean, you
learn from everybody, I think. I learn from non~ musicians as well as
musicians. You are learning how to play your music and create, create
sounds.
AAJ: What are some of your memories of playing with Art Blakey, maybe one in particular?
GB:
Well, the one thing is that I joined Art I joined the Messengers from
my dads club, because I was in New York. I was living in New York. Like I
said, I went to Julliard for two years, 1958 and 1959. And so I was
living in New York. And my dad bought a club in 1960. So I started
commuting down to Baltimore to do the weekends down there, and whenever I
wanted to, probably. And then after he got it really up and running, he
started bringing big name groups to the club. And so I worked there one
time with Max, like I said, Cannonball. I don't think Cannon worked
there, but I know he came there one time. He was doing a concert
somewhere. And he came by because my mom would cook, you know, and they
would come by and eat. And Cannon and Yusef definitely liked to eat in
those days. (Laughs) And Art Blakey was working at my dads club. The
North End Lounge was the name of the club. And John Hicks is a good
friend of mine for many years. And so he was trying to get me in the
band, because he knew John Gilmore was leaving. So he was saying,
[whispering] You should get Bartz. So my dad got wind of that, and he
called me in New York, and said, Why don't you come down to Baltimore
and sit in with Art, because Art had never heard me. And so I came down
and sat in. And Lee was the straw boss, he co-signed it. I wouldn't have
been in the band without if Lee didn't want to play with me, he would
have gotten somebody else. But so Lee said, Yeah.
AAJ: What year was that?
GB: That was 1965. And so that's how I joined that band. So that was a memorable thing for me because of the way it happened.
AAJ:
I just am imagining, not having heard the music, but I have a pretty
good idea of what it sounded like, just from what Art Blakey was doing
around that time.
GB: Well, I'll tell you, my
first record was with that band, with Lee Morgan, John Hicks, Victor
Sproles and Freddie Hubbard, because at that time Lee was not as
reliable as he could have been, so Art wasn't sure he was going to show
up for the record. And he called Lee. Lee knew about it, but he called
Freddie to come just in case Lee didn't show up so that we wouldn't blow
the date. And they both showed up, so my first record date was with
Freddie Hubbard and Lee Morgan.
AAJ: Wow.
GB: (Laughs). AAJ: Were you ever drawn to wanting to participate in the avant-garde stuff.
GB: Oh, yeah.
AAJ: The loft scene of the 70's.
GB: Yeah.
AAJ: or was it more like you just wanted to be in the straight-ahead world (Inaudible) did you want to (Inaudible).
GB:
Oh, no. I have never really looked at it. I don't look at music like
that. So you know, labels are for people who I don't want to put anybody
down, but for non-musicians, that's what labels are for.
AAJ: Exactly.
GB:
because musicians don't have labels. But yeah, I mean, I played with
everybody. We did the loft things. I remember one time we used to go
down to Kiani Zawadi's loft. And I think Grachan Moncur, he was working
Somewhere... Grachan Moncur III. And he is a good friend of mine. I met
him at Julliard. He and Andrew Cyrille , we used to hang out a lot..
AAJ: I just saw Andrew the other night.
GB: Oh, really?
AAJ: With Joseph Jarman and Ornette Coleman
GB:
See, so I mean, we came up together. We went to school together. We
came up together. And he can play anything. We play music. I don't know,
labels mean nothing to me. I mean, I know what they mean, of course.
AAJ: I wish they meant nothing to the rest of the world.
GB: Yeah, I do, too.
AAJ: Its so hard too.
GB: But that's the business, you have the business people.
AAJ: Sometimes you have to say like, I like jazz. Or even this website is called...
GB: (Inaudible)...
AAJ: All About Jazz.
GB: I abhor that word.
AAJ: Oh, me, too, but I mean, you can't get around it.
GB:
Well, I get around it. I don't accept it. It's like they say, well, the
n word, for instance, you can't get around people going yes you can.
You can get around it. You can get around anything.
AAJ: I know Yusef hates it. And I prefer creative improvised music.
GB: Well, yeah. I call it composing that's what we do.
GB:
Composing. We compose music on the spot. That's what we do. So we've
raised the bar. Most composers sit and write, and you know, months and
years, sometimes, on a piece, where we [snaps fingers] do it just like
that.
AAJ: Yeah.
GB:
And I don't think there is any music that has ever reached that higher
level. Maybe Indian music. A lot of Indian music is improvised. I mean,
there are improvised musics around the world. But this is, I think, the
highest.
AAJ: Definitely, for a lot of reasons. [Laughter]
GB: Yeah.
AAJ:
I'll skip around for a second, I'll go ahead and then come back. With
your work with Sphere, what was it about Thelonious Monk that made you
want to devote a band to that repertoire?
GB:
Well, Monk, like any great composer from Beethoven on, John Coltrane,
Duke Ellington, Mingus, Mozart any great because, see, I don't know for
me, it's musicians. It's not genre, it's music. And so I studied music.
But any great composer, their songs are lessons. But I'll say any great
song is a lesson, which is what makes that song a hit and makes it so
popular, is that there is something about that song that no one ever
heard before, and so this is a new thing you have to learn. And so each
song now, I realize with Monk and Trane, especially, and then when I go
back, I see it with other musicians, too, is if you have a musical
problem, the best way to work that problem out is to write a piece of
music addressing that problem. And so then when you learn that
particular piece of music, you then have added something to your musical
knowledge that you didn't have before. And so that's why Monk is so
important, because his music I mean, almost every song he wrote was like
a musical problem. And once you solve it you have to figure out the
key, you have to unlock this key, and once you unlock it, then you can
play that song, you understand that song, and you understand how to
apply that to other songs. So that is why he's so important for me.
AAJ: So this kind of goes back to what I was talking to Yusef about, earlier today, is we as musicians I play bass so...
GB: (Inaudible).
AAJ:
what can I told Yusef if I go to Time Square right now, and stop 100
people and ask them, Who is Charlie Parker, maybe one of them is going
to know.
GB: Yeah.
AAJ: So what can we as musicians do to change that?
GB: I'd say maybe two would know because (Inaudible)...
AAJ:
what can we do to get people to know? And does that bother you, the way
popular music is going now, that it is just more and more everything is
influenced by that music, but people don't realize who they were.
GB: Where it comes from.
AAJ: It's only a short time ago, like forty years ago.
GB: Yeah.
AAJ:
And you can go back thirty years into rock music, or whatever you want
to call that, and people can tell you who was doing what, but if you go
back just ten years before that, they are going to say, Well, who is
that?
GB: Yeah.
AAJ: What can we do to further that legacy?
GB:
Well, I think the problem is the problem of the world. I don't think
it's necessarily an isolated problem just dealing with music. I think
that there is a problem in the world, and that is why that is going on,
because education I mean, what's called education is not education.
What's called news is not news. People are so I don't want to use the
word brainwashed, but that is probably what it is. I mean, you go to
school, they teach you, George Washington never told a lie. Come on, I
mean, give me a break. I mean, please. This is what you are going to
teach I mean, in reality, we are human beings, we are adults. You are
going to teach young kids to grow up thinking George Washington never
told a lie. I look at my money, like especially this to me tells a lie
is that this is a bill from Belgium. If you'll see that this is a $200.
AAJ: Oh, wow.
GB: You see that, that is Charlie Parker right there.
AAJ: Wow, that is incredible.
GB:
They couldn't do it because it is a copyright infringement, so they
made a silhouette of him. But that is him, there. That is Adolphe Sax.
AAJ: Wow.
GB:
That's who invented the saxophone. Okay. When I show you our money.
slave owner, racist, killer, murderer, rapist that's who we have on our
money, rapists, murderers. That will tell you something right there.
AAJ: Are you okay with me printing that?
GB: Yeah. It's true. It's true. That's what we have on our money.
AAJ: Yeah, it's true.
GB:
So that's what this country is based on. This country is based on
racism. It's based on slavery. And so we haven't addressed that. This
country is in denial. We are in denial about that. Reparations is
something. Every other group of people have gotten some kind of
remunerations, some kind of reparations. We, the African Continent, the
African peoples, who have been abused more than any other group of
people, other than maybe the Indians, okay, who did get reparations ...
AAJ: Right. Well they (Inaudible)...
GB: have gotten nothing.
AAJ: five dollars for California, or something.
GB: Yeah, I know. I mean, they want to give us welfare. That is not going to do it.
AAJ: When you turn on the news
GB: (Inaudible) don't want to give us that(?).
AAJ: (Inaudible) 20 people died today in New York City, that's every day in the newspaper. That's not the news, that is depression.
GB: Yeah.
AAJ:
That is sadness. That's why I stopped reading half of the newspapers
around here. I read the New York Times just because they have the arts
and whatnot.
GB: Yeah.
AAJ: But it's just depressing. I feel sorry for these people who died in a car wreck yesterday, but that's not the news, really.
GB:
No, that's not the news. [Laughter] That's (Inaudible). I mean, I
always thought news was something you had never heard before. And Ill
turn on the news, I'm seeing the same thing over and over and over
again. That's not news. Give me something new. Isn't that what it means?
AAJ: So what do we do to change this, to get
like a kid, and who is five years old, in Brooklyn, to say, I want to
play like that guy, play like Coltrane or play like Charlie Parker?
GB:
Well, firstly, they need to hear it, and they need to understand what
it is. It needs to be taught in schools. It needs to be taught in the
home. For instance and in some respects, I don't think that its a true
that they don't know who Charlie Parker is, because I work with a lot of
young musicians in the so-called and once again, I don't like these
labels, but they call it hip-hop or the rap genre, the more popular
music they all know who we are, because they wouldn't be sampling us if
they didn't know who we were.
AAJ: Right, yes.
GB:
And they know who we were because their parents knew who we were, and
their parents listened to it. That was the music of their parents. You
didn't have Walkmans and things like back in those days, so you had to
listen to whatever your parents listened to. Nowadays, the kids, they
don't even listen to what their parents they're just listening to their
headphones.
AAJ: But it is interesting some of
the younger musicians, like my age, they all say, Well, my father took
me to see Rahsaan Roland Kirk.
GB: Right.
AAJ:
So that still happens. See for me, I don't worry about the music. I
think the music is a source of nature. It is a power of nature, and it
will always be, as long as we exist. I worry about the musicians,
because the musicians are the ones who are not taken care of.
AAJ: Definitely.
GB:
The music is going to be taken care of. The musicians are the problems.
I mean, we have no benefits. What goes for a musicians union has never
done anything for me or most of my friends who are musicians. And so
therefore, they have failed us. I mean, they are not even a union. They
go under the guise of being a union, but what they really are is a
musicians protective agency. I challenge anybody, look on your union
card and see what it says. It won't say you don't see union on there too
much.
AAJ: It is just a jam session on Monday nights from what I can tell.
GB:
Yeah. Big deal. I mean, if they really wanted to do something, that's
where it would start: I belong to AFTRA. AFTRA is a valid union. I mean,
that's the same union that Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Bill Cosby, Johnny
Carson, Sammy Davis, Jr. that's a big union. They have taken care of me,
too. They take care of their members. It's a real union. But that's a
problem. Another problem is that I'm insulted and embarrassed that as
much money as musicians have made and people in this industry, we don't
even own a radio station. We don't own a TV station. I mean, we have
enough money to own a TV station, a network. We could set up our own
network and have twenty-four hours of what we want to program. We would
not have to see these Kenny G.'s and I don't have anything against Kenny
G., but I'm just saying, he is not the end all of the soprano
saxophone, that's for sure, we all know that. But if you stop, like you
say, in Times Square, ten people, and you ask them, Who is your favorite
jazz musician, a lot of them would probably say Kenny G.
AAJ: Sad, but true, yeah.
GB: And so that is a problem of the media, that the radio stations, the record labels.
AAJ: That is a problem of the labeling, too.
GB: Yeah.
AAJ: because they associate Kenny G. with Gary Bartz as being the same.
GB: Yeah.
AAJ: Terrible!
GB:
I mean, we are the same in that we are musicians. And I think that is
okay. I accept Kenny G. as a musician. I accept it. But see, that is the
same thing that happens with this black, white, red, yellow, Asian, you
know I am this, I am from Russia, I am from Cuba, I am from Sierra
Leone. But really, we are from earth. Okay? When you see that, then you
love each other, because we are all homeboys, (Laughs) so to speak,
because we are all born on this planet. So that makes us the same. Why
is there division? See, divide and conquer works, and that as what is
being done over and over, constantly, it is about divide and conquer,
because then the people who control things, they can control it better,
they don't have to worry too much about as many wars as there could be.
Because we could be having more wars than ever, now. I mean, we should
not have any wars. I'm against wars, by the way.
AAJ: Oh, yeah, me too.
GB: (Inaudible).
AAJ: I don't know anybody who is.
GB: Well, obviously, there are some people who
AAJ: down 46th Street or (Inaudible) (Laughs)...
GB: There s some people who are for it. I mean, how could you send your kids off to a foreign land to fight somebody else battles?
AAJ:
Because they can't get a job doing anything else in the country, and
they want to they say $20,000, that is a lot of money, but its really
not
GB: Is that what it is?
AAJ:
I think that is what it is. I have a friend in Seattle, and she is very
smart, and she has to pay off her college loans, and she has done the
research, and
GB: Yeah. So shell go kill some people to get that money? You might as well rob a bank.
AAJ: But you tell a kid in the country, $20,000 verses five dollars an hour, and they do it.
GB:
Oh, sure. I mean, I do understand that part. But that goes back to home
training. I mean, when you're young, and they teach you the Ten
Commandments, Thou Shalt Not Kill is one of them. Okay. When does that
change? Thou Shalt Not Kill except when your government tells you its
okay.
AAJ: Then what they are talking about now
in the news is all these soldiers that are being tried for murder. It's
like it's okay sometimes, but not if it gets caught up in the media,
then you might go to jail.
GB: Right, yeah. It's okay to kill, just don't let anybody find out. Well, that's the way it is anyway.
AAJ:
Yeah. Its so screwed up. But I just want to ask you a couple more
questions. You worked a lot with Charles Tolliver in the —"60s, and now
you're working with him, again, recently. What is that like to have
since its still really fresh now like it was then, what is that, after
all the years.
GB: Well, because he is (Inaudible) he is always a musician in growth. He is always growing. So that's always challenging.
AAJ: And what about some of your other current projects, or if that might be one of your favorite current projects?
GB:
My favorite project always is my group. Yeah, that s always my favorite
and working with McCoy, I love working with McCoy Tyner, too.
AAJ: How can you not? [Laughter]
GB: Yeah, so those things. We will be in Europe touring the festivals in July.
AAJ: And what can people look forward from you in the future?
GB:
Well, you might have heard me talking to Yusef. I've got about five
albums in the can, and I am having meetings next week to do the album
covers. And as soon as the album covers are ready, I am putting them
out, because like I said, Yusef inspired me so much and he made me
realize...
AAJ: The YAL(?) records he's got 200 albums he's put out.
GB: Yes! That's right.
AAJ: Well, maybe not 200, but...
GB: He's got that many, at least, in the can.
AAJ: And he puts out like he is eighty-four, and he puts out fifteen records a year.
GB: Yes.
AAJ: That's incredible.
GB:
Yes, what an inspiration. But you see, as long as I was tuned into the
system, into the record labels, I felt that I continue record a record.
You know, I hope my record label will let me record this year, or next
month.
AAJ: Right.
GB:
Once I freed myself from them I realized I could do a record every day.
I could have done a record even when I was with the record labels. I
wouldn't have put them out because I was under contract to the record
label.
AAJ: (Inaudible) like Coltrane (Inaudible)...
GB:
But I could have had them sitting there. And you see, what Yusef told
me was that or at least he made me realize is that we don't have anybody
taking care of us, like a union, like a real musicians union, so we
don't have stocks, we don't have a retirement fund or anything. But our
masters, our recordings, that's what we leave our kids, because they
become more valuable. That's why I had felt like I cannot be a part of
an industry, and a music industry knows that you are more valuable when
you are dead than when you are alive, because then you can't get
anymore, and so the value goes up. And so I don't want to be a part of
an industry that thinks I am more valuable when I am dead. I cannot be a
part of that. And I resent that, and I think everybody should revolt
against that. But that is their choice. My choice is that a master I
would like to say this, too, because a lot of musicians just don't
realize yet a master is tape or recording in any condition, doesn't
matter what condition it is in, it is not the quality of the format, it
is the quality of the music on that format. I mean, why would you put
out that has been speeded up, it is not in the right key, but you've
made thousands and thousands of dollars off of this. Okay? It is not the
best quality, but it's Charlie Parker on that tape. That's what is
going to sell, not the quality. People don't go into a record store and
say, I want your best sounding record. They go in there looking for the
music. So a master musicians I call musicians the hidden record labels,
because we have more masters than most record labels. I've got tapes.
I've got thousands of masters, I mean, with everybody you can name, from
Miles to...] you name it, everybody I've worked with, groups you don't
even know I've worked with, I've got tapes and recordings. These are all
masters, and we have to recognize that. Once we recognize that, then
maybe we'll have some leverage to deal with these record labels. I've
got record labels coming after me trying to Can I get this tape, because
they know some of the tapes I've got. Oh yeah, I know you would like to
have it, so you can beat us out of this one. But they will never get
any of my masters, long as I am living, anyway. And I am trying to pass
that on to my kids, and to the next generation. And that is the name of
my record label, by the way, is own your own your own recordings its
called OYOR. But I think that's very important, is that we realize that
any tape that we have is a potential recording. And that's a very
important thing to know.
AAJ: Okay. Well, thank you very much for talking with me.
GB:
Thank you. Because most people don't understand see, I've been
fortunate enough to have been around the greatest musicians of the last
century and this century. And from Duke Ellington I didn't tour with
him, I was working with Miles, and so we were on the same tours, and so I
got a chance to see him and meet him and be around Duke Ellington, and
everybody that they had(?), Paul Gonzales, and Russell procope
(phonetic). I never knew Louis Armstrong, but from Diz to Miles to
Mingus to without a doubt, every musician, they hate the word jazz. And
don't accept that word.
AAJ: Totally.
GB: So what is it about that word. First of all, its a negative word.
AAJ: I know what it means.
GB:
So now negative words bring negative images. And I think that's got a
lot to do with why this music isn't as successful, because it's got a
lot of negative energies attached just through the very meaning of the
word. And that's a bad thing. Composing is what we do. We compose music
on the spot. And I challenge musicians everywhere of all types, to say
they can do that at a quality that people would actually go out and
spend money on. And that's a lofty, lofty goal. But that word I call it
the J word. I don't even say it. Its the J word.
AAJ: I agree. I haven't found a single musician who's above thirty, who says, like, "Oh, I play jazz."
GB: Yeah.
AAJ: They say, I play my name, my music
GB: Right.
AAJ: or I play creative music. Someone might put a label on it. Yusef has his audiophysiopsychic music.
GB: Yeah.
AAJ: I don't understand it, either.
GB:
Well, because we don't own newspapers, we don't own radio stations, we
don't own TV stations, we don't own magazines, we don't own record
labels. We don't own anything, so then you know, I mean, ownership means
you set the parameters. You say, Okay, this is composing, this music
where you are about to hear is called composing or improvised
composition, that is what Mingus called it, improvised composition. So
until we get to that point, we are still in the... I mean, for me,
record labels are plantations, and you've got three types of musicians
on the plantations. I've talked about this before. You've got as in any
plantation during slavery, you've got house musicians, field musicians,
and you've got free musicians. House musicians are the most successful
at the record labels, because they'll do whatever masser says, whatever
the record label wants you to do. You want me to do a tribute album to
Kenny G.? I'll do that! You know, they're going to be successful. And
all of the musicians most of the musicians successful today, I hate to
say it, are house musicians. They've either given up publishing, they've
given up their rights to choose who's on the album, the rights to say
what songs are on the album, the rights to anything about the album.
They are just house musicians Hey, boy, play this music, and we will
make you rich.
AAJ: Would you perform at Lincoln Center with Wynton Marsalis, if he asked you to, under the big billboard of that word?
GB: If we can come to the right deal, yeah. If we can come.
AAJ: It has like jazz in big letters across the stage.
GB:
Well, you know, I know that. I mean, that s the way its built. As long
as I don't accept it. I don't accept it. But in a way, it is kind of
like going to like an NAACP meeting and having nigger over top. (Laughs)
You know, you've got a black convention, and you've got nigger over
that. Okay, we go to play something here, we got jazz over there. Yeah,
it is a problem. It is a problem.
AAJ: I agree.
GB:
It is something that once you're aware of it, maybe we can work on it.
And most people don't even know. I was just in Australia about a month
ago, and I did a radio show. And we got into this very subject, because
they've never even broached the concept that musicians don't accept that
word. That was new to them. What? You don't like that word?
AAJ: If you don't hang out with musicians, you'd never know.
GB:
Right. But yeah, we've got work to do. But I am very enthused and
happy, and I am not worried about the music, because I think its going
to be in good hands, because we have as good musicians as ever. So that
is not a problem. The problem is the business end of it.
Below are the proceedings of several interviews I conducted with
alto saxophonist Gary Bartz — who turns 71 today — on WKCR on different
occasions during the ’90s. The first, from February 1997, captures his
remarks during a 5-hour restrospective of his musical production;
following it is a composite interview drawn from encounters in 1990 and
1995 (one of them—can’t remember which—was a Musician’s Show). There’s
some repetition of anecdotes and analyses, but they’re different enough
that it seems worth it to offer both.
Gary Bartz Profile (2-9-97):
[MUSIC: “Tico-Tico” (1994), “Impressions”]
The conjunction of hearing you perform music by Charlie
Parker and the ever-present influence of John Coltrane in your sound
gives me a good starting point for the interview — to talk about your
initial exposure to their music, the impact of that music on you. I know
you had contact with Coltrane. Did you ever see Charlie Parker in the
flesh as a youngster?
Actually, one of his last performances in ’55, he came to a club in
Baltimore called the Club Tijuana, which happened to be right around the
corner from where I grew up. Unfortunately, I was around 14 years old
and couldn’t get in there, and nobody could take me, so I sneaked out of
the house every night — even though I was going to school — and went
around, and tried to wait outside, hoping he would come out. I met a
lot of the musicians when they came out on a break. I met Johnny
Hodges, I met Lockjaw Davis, I met a lot of people like that. I could
hear him because there was a french fry place right next door attached
to the club which had swinging doors whenever the waitress would come
in, but the bandstand was situated so I couldn’t see him. So I never
really saw him, but I heard him live.
Well, you’d assimilated a lot of his recordings and studied
them as an aspiring saxophonist. Do you remember your first
consciousness of his music and where you were in your development?
The first time I heard Bird I was 6 years old, and I didn’t even know
what a saxophone was. I didn’t know that’s what he was doing. If
someone had told me, “That’s a piano,” I would have thought that’s what
it was. But I knew right then that I wanted to do that. Whatever it
was he was doing, it just caught me. So it was at an early age, at 6. I
didn’t get a saxophone until I was 11. But in retrospect, I realize
that I listened through those five years before I got the horn. So I
was actually studying the music before I got the instrument. Which is
why I always say a lot of people who say, “Well, I used to play” or “I
don’t play an instrument”…a lot of people are musicians who just don’t
play an instrument. I mean, their ears are just as keen as a
musician’s, and sometimes even better than a lot of musicians’ ears.
They just never worked on learning an instrument. So when you’re
playing music for a lot of people, especially the more knowledgeable
fans, I consider them as musicians also.
Your having the opportunity to hear the Charlie Parker record
so young implies that your parents were aware of him and playing the
music around the house, and I gather your mother was a pianist as well.
Well, she played in church. But actually, yes, they did have a lot
of the music around the house. We had almost everything Nat King Cole
did, and a lot of things like that. My uncle, who was my father’s
youngest brother, he was the real Bebop fan. He had the Charlie Parker
records and the Dizzy Gillespie records. He used to come to New York
and shop for clothes. He had a nickname. He was so sharp, they called
him Sharp Bartz, because he would always come back from New York with
the slickest stuff, the latest records and stories about musicians.
Baltimore was part of what was known as the around-the-world
circuit on the Eastern Seaboard for Black performers. It would be
Boston-Washington-Baltimore-New York. Would you go to hear a lot of the
acts that came through?
Yes. The first time I can remember really seeing live music was at
the Royal Theater. To this day, that for me is where music should be
presented, is in a theater. Nightclubs are close to the public, but you
don’t really have people’s undivided attention. There are other things
that are really more important when you’re working in a nightclub.
You were coming up at sort of the tail end of the big band period. What’s a sampling of who you’d see?
Louis Jordan. I was a big Louis Jordan fan. I actually think I may
have heard Louis Jordan before I heard Charlie Parker. His humor
attracted me, and the alto playing and the swing attracted me also. So
I remember definitely seeing Louis Jordan. He had a revue. He had a
chorus of beautiful women dancing — a big show. I saw Duke Ellington
there. The house was also a good band. That’s the first time I ever
saw Albert Dailey. He was in that band. I remember sitting there
watching a show, and I saw this young kid come in and ease the older guy
off of the piano bench, and he took over. I said, “Wow. My hero.”
[LAUGHS] Then I met Albert and we struck up a great friendship,
musically and otherwise.
Does this imply that as a teenager, let’s say, when I’m
assuming this happened, you started playing with various like-minded
peers, or even for small-change type of gigs around Baltimore?
Yeah. Actually, my first solo was in church. I played “I Believe.”
That was actually the real beginning. Then I played a few solos in
school, the same “I Believe.” That became my signature tune, so to
speak. Then we formed a dance band from the high school band I was in
(City College High School), and from that dance band there were various
factions who would play dances and parties and different functions. So
that’s how it started. Then I started meeting other people. I started
going out to the clubs. My father used to take me out to the jam
sessions. That’s how I met John Coltrane and Benny Golson. I met them
both together. They were in town with Earl Bostic, and I met them at a
jam session. Benny said he and John went back to New York saying, “Man,
there’s this young kid in Baltimore” — unbeknownst to me, because I
didn’t think I was doing anything. But I started meeting musicians by
going out to clubs like that.
You were able to sit in, even, at a certain point?
My father, he was pushy… One time we went down to see Sonny Stitt, of
all people (because I love Sonny Stitt), so my father went back and
spoke to him and that I played and that my horn was out in the trunk.
So of course, Sonny Stitt made me get up… I really didn’t want to get up
there, but he made me get up and play a Blues. I’m just about 14 years
old. He took me through all the keys on a Blues. Fortunately, I
didn’t know one chord from the other, they were all the same to me, so I
was just going strictly by ear — so I played all of the keys. [LAUGHS]
He liked that. So we struck up a friendship which lasted also.
Any other sitting-in experiences that come to mind as memorable?
Well, that’s actually how I met Max. I went down and sat in with
Max. Again, my father — “Yeah, he’s good.” So Max said, “I want to
hear this kid.” They’re trying to show you’re not that good. So I went
up and Max played “Cherokee”.
A classic strategy to defeat a neophyte.
Yeah. But Bird was my man, and I knew “Cherokee.” That’s when I met
Clifford Jordan, who became a lifelong friend. I think Julian Priester
was in that band. And Max also said when and if I came to New York to
look him up, gave me his number, and when I came about three years later
I did look him up, and he and Abbey looked after me and helped to raise
me, really, in my formative years in New York, and finally asked me to
join the band. That was the first professional band I was ever in.
You came up in a time when the boundaries were less strictly
defined or stratified between the Art aspect of Jazz and the popular
function of jazz. It seems to me that’s had a big impact on the way
you’ve approached music through your career as a musician.
I don’t know if you mean during the early years, when things were
more segregated. And Baltimore was a segregated city right straight
down the line. We had Black high schools, we had White high schools.
In the public park we had a Black swimming pool, we had a White swimming
pool. Everything was totally divided. My mother couldn’t try on
clothes in the department store. I didn’t realize what this was a kid;
that’s just the way things are, you know. But I know I used to wonder,
“I wonder why she’s not trying that on.” Later I found that out.
But when I started coming out into the club scene, it seemed like it
was the end of an era where… The theater brought people together. You
would have on the same bill a jazz group, an R&B group, a comedian, a
dancer, a singer –you would have a complete thing.
And at a pretty high level.
For sure. Consequently, they had to travel together going from town
to town. They’d spend six months out of the year together traveling
sometimes. So there was a community, is what I’m trying to say. There
was a definite community. Because it was segregated, we couldn’t stay
in certain hotels. You had to always stay in the Black hotels. When
you went to Chicago you stayed in the Hotel Evans, at the Dunbar when
you went to Washington, uptown at the Theresa in New York, in Philly.
So there was a good sense of community. That has eroded. We don’t even
know each other now. The actors don’t know the dancers; they don’t
know the musicians. The rappers don’t know the singers.
It’s very segmented.
Very segmented. And I think that’s to our detriment, to everyone’s detriment.
In asking the question (and I think your answer was very
thought-provoking) I was also thinking more in terms of the pure
aesthetics of the music. The jukeboxes would mix let’s say Nat Cole and
Louis Jordan and Charlie Parker and Wayne Shorter’s “Wrinkles” or
something like this. Styles were more mixed. Can you address it from
that end?
Well, I think that still goes on, the deeper you get into the Black
community. That still happens. There are certain clubs in different
cities that I go into, and you’ll have Billy Eckstine with maybe
Babyface. You’ll have a Charlie Parker, you’ll have a Dinah Washington,
you’ll have Aretha Franklin, you’ll have Michael Jackson. See, we
don’t think like that, as segmented…to segment things out. I’m sure a
lot of people are like that. But if you look through my record
collection, you’ll see everything. I don’t know whether I’m a good
example. But if you look through a lot of people’s record collection or
CD collection, I think it’s varied. They might not tell you that they
listen to some of that stuff! [LAUGHS]
Your record album, The Blues Chronicles on Atlantic,
brings to mind a lot of the work you did in the 1970’s with the NTU
Troop and the various recordings that many of your fans are quite
familiar with, and which they’re probably waiting to hear us play. Part
of what I was leading to with that question was your interest in
narratives and using music to present a broader picture than just a
purely musical experience in a very conscious way.
Early on also, in studying musicians and composers, I ran across
something about Beethoven, who happened to be one of my heroes. Talking
about his symphonies, he said he would write a light symphony and then
he would write a heavy symphony. He would mix it up. He wouldn’t do
everything heavy-heavy-heavy or everything light-light-light. He would
write the Eroica and follow that with the Pastorale. I thought that was a good way to go. So I’ve tried to do that with my recording career. I started out with Libra, which was to introduce me to the record-buying public. Then my second album was very heavy (for me anyway), called Another Earth,
about Life — Life everywhere to Infinity. If it’s about Life, it’s
about Death, so it’s about everything. Then I followed that with a
lighter album, then a heavy album, then back and forth, back and forth.
What has happened, though, even the light albums now are more or less
concept albums. Because when I think of an album, I no longer think of
just putting some songs together. There has to be a reason to do
that. So the songs have to connect in some kind of a way. So I guess
every album that I do lately has been a concept album.
[Bartz, “The Five Dollar Theory” (1996); “Rise” (1969); “Parted”; “Celestial Blues”]
There are so many questions raised listening to the music in a
set like that. I’d like to get more into biography, talk to you about
your coming to New York, the connections you made here, and your
emergence as a professional musician in the jazz community. I gather
you came to New York to go to school.
Yes. I came to New York in 1958, and went to Juilliard for about two
years, and met a lot of musicians — Lee Morgan, Freddie Hubbard.
You didn’t meet them at Juilliard, I take it. Or did you?
No, I didn’t meet Freddie. I met Lee at Juilliard, though. Addison
Farmer, Andrew Cyrille, Grachan Moncur, Bobby Thomas, Roland Hanna — all
were going to Juilliard at the time.
What was the curriculum like at that time?
I was actually an extension student, so I wasn’t going full time.
But full-time, they were taking English classes, History, all that. All
I wanted to work on was music, so that’s what I opted for. But it was a
full curriculum. They also had the dance wing. It was extensive.
What was climate like, say, in 1958 in an institution like Juilliard for someone who was interested in playing Jazz?
[LAUGHS] Jazz was like… We talked about in the corners. You didn’t
talk about it in class. But that’s really where I learned chords,
harmony and theory, was from the musicians. Grachan Moncur in
particular kind of guided me as far as that’s concerned. Then we’d go
out and night and play. There were a lot of jam sessions going on.
Count Basie’s. You could go up to Branker’s up where the 155th Street
Bridge is. Babs Gonzales had a room over top of Branker’s in Harlem
called Babs’ Insane Asylum, which lasted for a few years, and we worked
up there and had jam sessions. The Bronx. You could go to Brooklyn,
the Blue Coronet, the Baby Grand. There were so many places to go. So
whatever neighborhood you lived in, there was someplace to go. You had
the Continental in Brooklyn, and the Turbo Village.
Speaking of sitting in, things that come to mind: One night at Turbo
Village, I noticed this man… We were sitting, waiting for the next set
to go up and play, to jam, and I noticed this man was staring at me,
this very intense stare. I got up and moved, and I realized he was
still staring at the same spot; he wasn’t really staring at me. But
when we went up to perform, I realized that was Bud Powell. So I
actually played two songs with Bud Powell in my life [LAUGHS], which was
something — I’m telling you. I still remember it. I know we played
“Bud’s Bubble” and I can’t remember what the other song was, probably a
blues. But that was a unique experience.
It sounds like an incredibly exciting time to be a young musician in New York City.
Yeah, I think it was. It was the end of an era, the tail end of the
Bebop Era. Bird had passed three years previous, and things were just
beginning to change. Rock-and-Roll was beginning to take over a lot of
venues. But still there were many more clubs open and many more places
to play. Being the end of the era, it was still happening. So I feel
fortunate that I did come at that time.
Some of the things that happened around then were the
emergence of Ornette Coleman during his Five Spot gig, John Coltrane
recorded “Giant Steps” and those discoveries, Max Roach was doing things
like the Freedom Now Suite and Percussion Bitter Sweet, Mingus was
really extending his music. Were you apprised of all these developments
and the new things that were happening in Jazz at that time?
Oh, yes. Actually, I met Eric Dolphy and Rahsaan Roland Kirk
performing with Charlie Mingus down at the Village Gate. He had this
big band jazz workshop, an improvised big band, so we’d go down. The
sax section was being led by Eric, but Rahsaan… I don’t remember who
else was in the band, but I remember that. This was ’58 or ’59.
Charles would just come over to each section leader and hum what he
wanted you to play, and then cue you, and then we’d play it. It was a
totally improvised big band setting, and that was exciting.
I remember when Ornette came to town. That was the talk of the
town. I mean, everybody… I think I was in there almost every night,
whether I was in there or outside. Miles came in one night, Dizzy came
and sat in with him, Philly Joe sat in one night. Just everybody was
coming down and wanted to see, “What is this new music?” So that was
just a very exciting period.
Then you could go up to Count Basie’s and jam up there. Anybody
might come up there. I remember many a night coming home on the subway
with Freddie Hubbard and Andrew. They lived in Brooklyn. I lived
uptown, in Washington Heights, but I would spend a lot of time in
Brooklyn. So I eventually moved to Brooklyn. [LAUGHS] All my friends
were in Brooklyn. Just everywhere you went.
How about as far as beginning to work with other people’s
bands or starting to formulate your own sound and aesthetic? You’ve
mentioned some of your earlier associations. How does that start
coalescing into a career?
I remember my first gigs in New York were out at Far Rockaway with
just an R&B band. That’s a long ride on the subway. I’d go out to
Far Rockaway, and we’d do these gigs every weekend. So that was really
my first gigs. Then a few gigs here and there, and things happened.
Turbo Village, I did that one week, with Andrew Cyrille and Grachan
Moncur. Then Max called me in 1964, and that was my first really being
in a professional band.
So you’re 23 years old, and joining Max Roach. Since your
experience at 15 or 16 playing at presumably some supersonic tempo by
Max Roach, you had kept in touch with him, you mentioned before.
Right. We never lost touch from that time period.
On the next segment, we’ll hear earlier recordings, beginning
with Gary Bartz with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers — an uncredited
composition, nor is Gary credited on the back of the jacket.
That was actually my first recording.
How did you come to join the Messengers?
Oh, that’s a good story. Actually, they were working at my father’s
club in Baltimore. My mother and father had a nightclub for about five
years, from 1960 to 1965, called the North End Lounge, primarily so that
I’d have a place to play. I mean, that was a big sacrifice, even
though my father liked doing that.
So were you commuting back and forth from New York to Baltimore?
Yes, I’d do the reverse commute from New York to Baltimore on the
weekends, and come back to New York during the week. John Hicks was in
the band, and Charles Tolliver, who was not in the band…Lee Morgan was
actually in the band, but Lee wouldn’t show up a lot of nights. So
Charles would follow the band around sometimes, and in case Lee wouldn’t
show up then Charles would make the gig. They knew John Gilmore was
about to leave, so we all being friends, Charles and John and I (and we
had groups together around that period), they encouraged Art, “Call this
guy, Gary Bartz.” My father said, “Yeah, you’ve got to…” There he
goes again! My agent. He would have been a good agent. So my father
called me and said, “Well, look, Art is going to need a saxophone
player, so why don’t you come down here and sit in with the band, let
him hear you” — which I did. As John says, Lee cosigned it, because Art
would have never hired someone without Lee’s okay. But they liked what
they heard, and I joined the band right there in my father’s club.
The track we’ll hear is “Freedom Monday” which is credited to Art Blakey, but it’s Gary’s composition! This is from Soulfinger on Limelight…
It has Freddie and Lee. Like I say, Lee might not show up, so Art,
to cover all bases, asked Freddie to come down just in case Lee didn’t
show up. Lee showed up, so we have Lee and Freddie both on this record.
…Jack de Johnette, who was on drums, that wasn’t electric. Miles was
electric, Keith was electric. Dave Holland was playing bass when I
joined the band, and he was playing acoustic and electric both, at
different points. It was so loud sometimes that I’d get so frustrated.
I would feel like “nobody can hear me, what am I doing here?” I had
never really been in a group with that much electricity associated with
it. The speakers would sometimes be 12 feet tall! They’d put two
6-foot speakers on each side of the stage. It was loud.
You were playing arenas and even stadiums occasionally.
Sure. Most of the time we were playing big, big venues. So like I
said, I didn’t think I would last too long. But I guess he liked what
he heard. So finally I said, “Miles, I can’t hear. It’s too loud.” He
said, “Well, tell the sound man!” [LAUGHS] So I told the sound man, and
I never had a problem. He made sure I could hear myself. So I began
to learn how to deal with sound and being loud or being heard, or how to
play, or how to deal with different contexts. If I’m playing in a loud
group, you can’t play the same way as you would play in a more acoustic
group. So you begin to learn how to play in different settings. That
was very helpful to me.
What had been your interaction with Miles Davis before joining the band?
Well, I used to see him all the time. I used to see him at
Birdland. We would speak, say hello, just from seeing each other so
much. And I guess he knew who I was, because he would go out a lot to
listen to music. In the early days he would never hire a musician
unless he had heard him in different circumstances, and unless that
musician had served apprenticeships in other groups. You were
well-seasoned by the time you got to Miles. But one memorable occasion was the Count Basie engagement, which was
the famous… I was working with Max. We did ten days at Count Basie’s in
Harlem. The bill was Max Roach and Miles Davis. You couldn’t get near
the place. I mean, literally, you could not get near that place.
Cars, people crowded right on that corner. So that was the first time
that I really knew that Miles knew who I was. One night he came in to
see me with McCoy, and that next week he called me to join the band. I
don’t think he came in to see me with McCoy, but he came to see somebody
with McCoy. I won’t mention who it was, but he was thinking about
using them in the band. He came in and heard me in the band, and he
ended up calling me. When he called me, I didn’t think it was really
him. Because friends tease each other, so we would call each other up
and, [MILES WHISPER] “how you doin’? This is Miles.” “No, this isn’t
Miles; I know who this is.” So when it really happened, I thought it
was a friend just teasing me. And it took a couple of minutes to
realize, “Unh-oh, this is the real thing.”
Joining the band did you just come in cold? Did you go in
and hit and had to find your way as you went along? Was there any
orientation?
Well, there was a little orientation. We rehearsed. Miles rehearsed the band.
What was the band when you came in?
Keith Jarrett and Chick Corea both. Chick hadn’t left the band when I
first joined. So when I joined it was Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett,
Airto Moreira, and Dave Holland.
Now, you were a very well-seasoned player by this time and
had covered a lot of different types of music, but as far as I know you
hadn’t played in any situation quite like this before.
No.
What did you have to do to function in that ensemble?
Actually, just solo was the main thing. If I remember, the first few
concerts we hadn’t really rehearsed. We just went in and Miles would
tell me when to play, and I would play. Later we rehearsed, especially
when he was hiring Michael Henderson, because Michael needed to learn
the music — he knew nothing about that music. So we had a lot of
rehearsing around that time. But other than that, all I had to do was
just play solos, play the Blues. [LAUGHS]
We’ll move now to more NTU Troop material from the early ’70.
These bands had quite a contemporaneous, but haven’t been in print for
many years. Talk a bit about how you conceptualized NTU Troop after
leaving Miles Davis.
As you probably heard on the “Black Maybe” cut, I was using a wah-wah
pedal on the saxophone, which was a direct result of having worked with
Miles Davis and watched him use that wah-wah pedal. But it’s funny,
because the whole time I was with Miles I never used any electronic
equipment, other than the microphones. But after I left the band, I
started experimenting on my own time and everything, and I used the
wah-wah pedal for about five years in various settings. Originally, the
idea of NTU Troop was to synthesize all of the musics from Africa,
whether it be R&B, Rock-and-Roll, whether it be Jazz, whether it be
Blues, Latin, Afro-Cuban…
The continuum of Transafrican music, as it were.
Yes. Most people seemed to either…it was a Bebop band, it was a
swing band, it was this kind of band. I loved all of the musics, and
still do love all types of music, and don’t want to be pigeonholed into
playing one certain thing. Because this is what I hear. And when you
listen to a jazz musician, you should be hearing the music from that
man’s or that woman’s mind. I don’t really consider a true Jazz
musician who only performs or records what a producer hears for him.
That’s not Jazz. That’s Pop. That’s what the record industry wants.
But Jazz has never… You would never go to Duke Ellington and say, “I
don’t want to record the Sacred Concert, but why don’t you just do some
Gospel tunes?” I mean, you can’t do that to a Jazz musician! But I’ve
been seeing it more and more in these days, which is unfortunate. But a
true jazz musician has to go his or her own way, and whether it be bad
or whether it be good, you have to follow that path and see where it
leads.
One of the things that distinguished NTU Troop was your use
of spoken word and poetry, blending black narratives with black music.
I’ve always loved poetry. Poetry and songs are the same for me.
Poetry might not have the music setting, even though you can hear it.
So I started adapting a lot of poems of some of my favorite poets.
“I’ve Known Rivers” is an adaption of “A Negro Speaks of Rivers,” which
Langston Hughes wrote. I did a Countee Cullen poem called “Incident.”
Paul Lawrence Dunbar. I still read a lot of poetry, and have ideas to
adapt different writers. So that was one thing, the poetry.
Then also, I realized that music without words is the purest form of
language. But it can be misunderstood by a lot of people who are maybe
not following it or don’t understand music so well. So I felt a need to
use more words to explain some things and directions that we were going
in.
This is a time when jazz clubs were disappearing in Black
communities around the country, much fewer than a decade before. I’d
imagine the idea of wanting to reach people with this music was very
much on your mind at this point.
Yes, that played a part, for sure.
[MUSIC: GB, “I’ve Known Rivers” (1973); GB/JMac, “Ode To Super” (1974)]
We’ll stay in the ’70s with music by the Norman Connors group with whom you recorded numerous times.
Eight or nine albums we did. That was a very good relationship. One
of Norman’s good qualities is that he knows how to put a band together
and knows how to put musicians together. He’s a good producer. Herbie
Hancock, Stanley Clarke, all good people. I don’t think he ever had a
bad record. So it was always a good occasion. We didn’t have a copy of
that You Are My Starship album, which
actually was a gold album, but that’s when I met Phyllis Hyman. That
was Phyllis’ debut on records, and she went on to be big in the
industry, and of course we all miss her. Norman brought out a lot of
people.
The date with Jackie McLean brings me back into personal
anecdote and recollection. I gather he was one of the musicians who you
admired for many years going back to teenage years.
Oh, sure. I had met Jackie early on, when I first moved to New
York. At least by 1960 I know I had met Jackie, and had loved him
always before I even moved from Baltimore, before I came to New York,
had all of his records, listened to him, followed him. While I was
going to Juilliard, Grachan Moncur started working with Jackie and
started doing recordings, so I used to go hang out with him and sat in
with Jackie a few times. We became friends and have maintained that
friendship.
He’s a musician who shares your interest in narratives and
adding to the purely instrumental context words and dramatic
situations. Some words about other saxophonists who were influential on
you. You’ve made no bones about your allegiance to Sonny Rollins, the
great tenor player.
Yes, indeed. That’s one of my favorite musicians of all time, and
one of my favorite people. A lot of people say, “Oh, you look like
Sonny,” and I started wearing a goatee and trying to look like Sonny for
a while. This was when I was a teenager, of course. But I go back
with Sonny from the beginning.
You mentioned once in an interview that you used to go hear
him, and one thing you liked was that from night to night you never knew
what sound you were going to hear. You never knew which Sonny. I know when he was at the Vanguard I was
down there every night, and he was there for like two weeks. One night
you might hear him play all Lester Young songs all night, “Three Little
Words,” “Tickletoe,” “There Will Never Be Another You,” all songs
associated with Prez, and he would actually a lot of times play
note-for-note Prez’ solos, which was very impressive to me, because I
realized that he knew all of these solos. I didn’t know a lot of those
solos, but after hearing him play them it made me really want to go
listen to Prez even more. Another night he would play all songs
associated with Coleman Hawkins — “Stuffy,” “Cottontail,” “Body and
Soul.” He would again play Coleman’s solos note-for-note before he
would play his solo. I mean, he would play maybe a chorus or two of the
recorded solos that they made famous. Then another night he’d be
Sonny. Another night he’d be in a Calypso bag. So I’m paying attention
to everything. He wasn’t limited. You don’t come in and play the same
thing every night, or even play in the same way every night. So that impressed me, and when I formed a group… Actually, the first
band… This is even going back further. But the first band I ever led
was in 1958. I’ve been a bandleader since 1958! Grachan Moncur and I
took a band on the road. We took a band to Pittsburgh, to Crawford’s
Grill. So that was my initiation. Jeff Jefferson was on bass. Arthur
Stanley Trotman, a young drum whiz who would have been one of the great
drummers had he lived, he died at a very early age, very tragic. He
OD’ed in a doorway in Brooklyn. They found him. He was no more than 17
or 18 at the time. We had become real good friends, and he’d stayed at
my house in Baltimore. But we went on the road, and he was in that
band. Grachan, Arthur, Jeff Jefferson, the bass player from Baltimore,
and the pianist was a friend of Grachan’s from Newark, New Jersey, and I
can’t remember his full name, but his nickname was Hip (we called him
Hip) — so Hip played piano. Hip was like a Monkish-Randy Weston-Herbie
Nichols kind of player. He was really hip. The stuff he did for
musicians was hip. The layman might not have thought he was too hip
because they might not have understood what he was doing. I don’t know
whatever happened to him.
You mentioned meeting John Coltrane around 1954, but I gather
you knew him and stayed in touch with him throughout your time in New
York City.
Sure. If he was somewhere close by, I was there. I never really got
too close to John because I was in such awe of him. It was like
whenever I was around him, I felt stupid. [LAUGHS] Some people affect
you like that. Two people in my life have affected me like that,
Malcolm X and John Coltrane. There was nothing I could say that could
make me sound like I was really saying something to them. So I didn’t
say anything much.
When would you be in proximity to Malcolm X?
I used to see Malcolm every day because I used to eat in the Shabazz
Restaurant off of 116th and Lenox, and he would come in every day about
that time from the Muhammad Speaks office where he would work doing the
newspaper. He would come in and have dinner and shoot the breeze.
Sometimes I’d follow him. He would walk through the neighborhoods and
talk to the brothers and sisters. He would see the prostitutes and see
the drug addicts, and he wouldn’t reprimand them; he would just give a
warm greeting and say, “Brother, you know that’s not the way; you could
do better,” or tell the sisters, “You can do better than that; don’t let
this happen to you.” And they loved him. So that was good. I would
also see him in Louis Michaux’s bookstore across from the Theresa Hotel
near that diamond store there (I forget what that store was). He would
be in the back sometimes, debating or discussing things with Mr.
Michaux, Black history or politics or something. And where we weren’t
privy to go back in the back unless we were invited, we could still hear
the conversation, so we would stand around and listen. Sometimes we
were even invited back there and he’d say, “What do you think about
this?” He wanted to know the young person’s opinion. Also in Michaux’s
bookstore, whenever you went in there, you didn’t have to buy anything,
which is my idea of a real bookstore. He would have certain books open
each day or each week, and things highlighted and things for you to
read and just see. It was a very interesting bookstore. If I ever had a
bookstore, that’s the way I’d run it.
Those are all part of the dynamics of what made the music of that time what it was in many ways as well.
I think so.
The quality of hearing Sonny Rollins over a week in a club
playing in a different way all the time, is that… How do you approach a
week in a club? How do you set yourself up to play something dynamic
and fresh and different every night, when you might be playing the same
material for the four thousandth time or whatever?
Well, there’s lots of ways. For instance, when I worked with Miles,
for two years we played the same show every night, without too much
variation — changing a song here, maybe “Sanctuary” a little earlier.
But basically it was that same order every night. And most bands end up
doing that, because you go with what is working. If it worked the
first few nights, it’s going to work most nights. It would get to the
point I’d say, “Oh, man, I hope we do something different tonight,” and
we never would. But what would happen every so often, Miles would play
the songs differently, and take them into an altogether different area
or different direction which opened it up for everybody else, which
made me realize, “Okay, we’re playing the same thing every night, but I
don’t have to play the same thing. I’m a soloist. I can take it in any
direction I want to.” So that freed me as far as playing the same
music.
Also in acting and comedy, which are two of my pet loves. I like to
do comedy, and I like people like Redd Foxx and Henny Youngman and Bob
Hope and people like that, who come out and tell jokes, and they tell
them the same way every night. That is not me. I’m an improviser.
Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, people like that, Eddie Murphy even (who
comes from Bruce and Richard) showed me how to deal with that. And in
acting, where you have to say the same lines every night is parallel to
playing the same songs every night. But I’ve done a few plays. I even
played a lead in one play. I found out that if you read the lines
different, you get different reactions. So there are different ways of
reading the same lines which will give a whole new meaning.
So there is no end to… You should never get bored doing the same
thing, because it’s not the same thing. First of all, it’s a different
audience. Secondly, you’re different each night. I might be in a
different kind of mood, so I’m not going to play the same way I did the
night before. And listening to Sonny and listening to the different
musicians, listening to Trane… Now, Trane approached it in another way.
Trane worked hard. Every night… He had practiced all day long during
the day, so when he came to work each night he had something new and
fresh to play. Even if it was the same song, he could take in a whole
new direction on something that he had worked on earlier that day. So I try to use all of these things.
To me, when I hear Gary Bartz play in 1997, or the last
decade, you seem to have arrived at a style (I’m going to speak in gross
layman terms) that kind of blends the language of Charlie Parker and
John Coltrane in a very distinctive way. I wonder if you have any
comments about the way of improvising you’ve arrived at. It’s been many
years now, and you’re playing in different situations than you did
20-25 years ago.
To me, it’s just a synthesis of everything that has led up to this
particular time. I’ve been influenced by many people outside of music,
which if you know those people you could hear me play the influence that
they had given me, even though they never thought about being a
musician or whatever. It might be a little phrase that someone says
that catches me, and I incorporate it into the music. Just like a
writer or just like any artist, you’re influenced by life, not just
music and not just by musicians. Life is the big influence. [MUSIC: GB w/N. Connors, “Butterfly Dreams”; GB, “Music Is My Sanctuary”; GB, “Singerella”]
We’ll hear music from The Blues Chronicles, which
dovetails quite well… I think the last three hours of programming is a
good introduction to anyone who wants to hear what life and career
experiences of Gary Bartz buttress The Blues Chronicles.
Actually it just grew. It was not originally going to be such a big
project. It was going to be an album — you know? As I started
formulating it I thought, “I’m going to do a blues album,” and as I
started putting the songs together for the Blues album I thought, “Do I
really want to do an album like a Blues player? If you want to hear
that, you can go listen to B.B. King or Albert King or Bobby Blue Bland
or any of the great Blues singers.” I said, “I think I want to give my
interpretation of what I think the Blues are.” And I do hear the Blues
in many places that a lot of people might not hear them. For instance,
some people thought it was a stretch for me to include “Miss Otis
Regrets,” which is a Cole Porter tune and not a 12-bar blues by any
stretch of the imagination. But the sentiments involved are Blues,
where the woman, who happens to be a rich lady, so this can go to all
social strata…
That’s what the Blues is supposed to do.
That’s what it’s supposed to do. And she finds out that her
boyfriend, her lover is messing around, and she goes down and shoots
him. They put her in jail. The line keeps going when her friend comes
to see her…she has a tea appointment, a lunch appointment; the butler
opens the door and says, “Sorry, Miss Otis regrets she’s unable to lunch
today; see, she shot her husband.” To me, you can’t get any more
bluesy than that. Blues is not, as most people think, just a 12-bar
form. There’s a 5-bar blues on the album, “Makes Me Want To Moan,”
there’s a 20-bar Blues; they’re in all different contexts. A lot of
people don’t realize also that the original blues singers and players,
you probably never really heard them, because they never felt a need to
conform to a 12-bar form. They might do a 12½-bar form one chorus, the
next chorus maybe 14 bars. And because that began to be a problem… If
you were going to have a band, you have to have some kind of criteria.
So if you’re doing a 12-bar blues form, each time it’s going to be 12
bars, so everybody will know where they are. But the early guys, they
might do an 8-bar chorus one time, in the same song the next chorus
might be 11 bars or 14½. In researching a lot of Blues players and
listening to them, I realized that a 12-bar blues form is just the most
popular form. So I was trying to show the different areas. And also
the Bob Marley; that to me is Blues. Flamenco music in Spain is very
Blues oriented. Ceseria Evora from St. Verde Islands, that’s Blues to
me. I hear it everywhere. I hear the Blues in Ravi Shankar. I heard
it in a recording of some Pygmies from deep in the bush. They had never
been out of the bush, out of their forest. They sang a line which I
have heard B.B. King, I have heard Blind Lemon Jefferson, I have heard
many musicians over the years do the same phrase that I heard these
pygmies do. Therefore, you know where it comes from. But I’m sure B.B.
never heard those pygmies. Well, I don’t know; he may have heard
them. But a lot of people who have never heard those recordings of the
pygmies or Africans singing in the bush still do it because it’s part of
you. So that’s basically what the album is about. [MUSIC: GB: “Hustler’s Holler 1-3”; “Passage: Song of The Street””]
Those were the segues that hold the album together. “Hustler’s
Holler” was basically from my childhood in Baltimore. We had a
tradition called Arabbing, where people, young men usually (or older
men, too; I’ve seen them in all ages), rent or buy or own a wagon, and
they rent or buy or own a horse, and they attach the horse to the wagon,
and they’d go around the streets of Baltimore selling products —
vegetables, fish, whatever they can get and sell. They each had a cry,
and you could hear them from blocks away coming down the street so you’d
know which person it was. If it was the one that you’d bought from,
then you’d go out and buy the goods. So that’s kind of where that came
from.
In thinking about it, everybody’s got a hustle. Everybody is
hustling something, whether it be church, you’re hustling souls, you’re
trying to get people to go to church, or whether you’re selling records!
[LAUGHS]
[MUSIC: GB, “Song Of Loving Kindness”]
My band has been together for about two years, so it’s a real
band. Greg Bandy and I go back to the ’70s when he first came to New
York, and he worked with Roy Ayres, with Pharaoh Sanders, with Betty
Carter, Arthur Prysock and many other people. We’ve always been friends
and band-mates through the years.
George Colligan is a young pianist who is going to make a big name
for himself, I think. Every time I’d go to Baltimore and I’d need a
rhythm section and would hire George, every time I’d hear him I’d see so
much growth… That’s one thing that really impresses musicians, when you
can actually hear and see the growth from one gig to the next. So I
when I had a chance to form a band, I definitely had him in mind. So
he’s been with me for a couple of years. The same thing applies to
James King, who is originally from Houston, Texas, but resides now in
Maryland. Like I say, we’ve been together for quite a while. We’ve
traveled all over the world, and hope to continue to be a band. [MUSIC: GB w/R. Drummond, “Poor Butterfly”]
* * * *
Gary Bartz (WKCR, 10-24-90/1-18-95):
[MUSIC: “Uncle Bubba”] [With George Cables and Ira Coleman at Bradley’s.]
You’ve been thoroughly grounded in Jazz from the beginning.
My mother played piano, and my parents had a lot of records, but my
uncle, my father’s youngest brother, the youngest one of all, actually
had the records that really got my ear. They called my uncle Sharp
Bartz, because he liked to dress. He would come up to New York and buy
the slickest clothes, and come back, so he’d really be slick in
Baltimore — because Baltimore was kind of country, you know. But he was
into the music. My uncle had the Louis Jordan records; he had the
Charlie Parker records. The first time I heard Louis Jordan, Charlie
Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and you name it, was at my uncle’s. My uncle
was friends with Dizzy Gillespie, and he was very good friends with
Dinah Washington and a lot of the musicians. So I would hear him
telling stories, and I would always ask. So it was in my background, I
guess. I used to go by my grandmother’s house, and that was the one
thing I looked forward to. Not even the food or the company. I wanted
to hear the records! And that’s what got me started.
Were you listening to a lot of radio, too, as a child?
Oh, yes. I’m a product of radio, really, because TV’s were not in
households when I was small. I can remember our first TV was… I mean,
it stood on the floor, and the speaker part was, like, probably up to
your waist, and then there was the cabinet with the screen, but the
screen was like 12 inches or 10 inches! It was this big box and this
little TV screen. Now it’s the other way around. You have big TV
screens… Well, big boxes, too, but it’s all the screen. But yeah, I
listened to a lot of radio.
Now, you came up in Baltimore?
Baltimore, Maryland, yes.
Now, your parents actually were in the Jazz business, as club owners?
Well, they got into it. They weren’t into it until the Sixties. My
father more or less bought the club for me to have some way to work,
which is unbelievable! It lasted for about five years, and it was called
the North End Lounge. A lot of people worked there. Max Roach. I
worked there with Max. I joined Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers from
there. They were working at my father’s club.
Were there musicians in your family?
No. Not that I know of.
So listening to this music inspired you to pick up the horn, or were you doing it…
No. When I was 6 years old I heard Charlie Parker, and I didn’t know
what this was. I didn’t know what instrument, I didn’t know anything.
At six years old you can’t know that much. It could have been an organ
for all I knew. But I liked the sound of it, and I knew that I wanted
to do that. Whatever this was, I said “I have got to do that,” which is
weird, because at six… That just shows you how open a mind is at that
age, and if the mind is subjected to something as positive as that,
there’s no telling what might happen.
Well, did they put you on the alto saxophone right away?
No. It took me five years to really convince them that I really
wanted to do this. [LAUGHS] So I didn’t really get a horn until I was
11.
Was it an alto?
It was an alto, yes.
So you’ve been playing the alto sax for a very long time.
Quite a while. Are you trying to get my age?
No, that’s a matter of public record.
It sure is!
Anyway, we’re about to start off the music segment of the
show with Lester Young’s “Tickletoe.” I’d like to know when you first
became aware of Prez.
Actually, I had always been aware of Prez. But when I was younger,
because I was into Bird so much, you know, Prez was kind of old-time to
me. As I studied Bird more and more, I heard Bird loved Prez and that’s
where Bird came through, so I said, “Well, as much as I love Bird, I’ve
got to go back and see where he came from.” And that’s when I really
got into Prez. It really wasn’t until after he had died, too, which was
a shame — because I never saw Prez play live.
Early on I heard a story that Prez, whenever he played a song, before
he’d count it off, or rather than count it off, he’d hum the whole
first chorus, or sing the whole first chorus, you know — and then you
went into the song. Art Blakey knew the lyrics to all the songs.
Miles, Dizzy, they all knew the lyrics. Sonny, Coleman Hawkins. So I
realized that’s important. I started learning the lyrics to the songs,
and by learning the lyrics, then I could sing the song. Because that’s
actually what we are. We are singers in the purest sense of the word,
because we don’t even use a language. We use the language of music —
pitch. So it’s very important.
[MUSIC: Lester Young, “Tickletoe” (1939); “Let’s Fall In Love” (1951); “All Of Me” (1956); “Sometimes I’m Happy” (1943)]
Next up are some songs by Louis Jordan.
Every Sunday, like I said, when I went by my grandmother’s, I had to
hear “Saturday Night Fish Fry.” I know it by heart. And I’m not
alone. A lot of my contemporaries know that, and also “Beware.” I used
to go to the Royal Theater in Baltimore, which was part of the circuit
(you know, with the Apollo and the Howard in Washington), and hear him
sing these songs.
Was the Royal Theater the place where all of the big bands would go through?
Yes. I heard everybody from Louis Jordan to Art Blakey and the Jazz
Messengers — because I saw them…they were there, too. Because I was so
young, my father would take me, and that’s the first place I ever saw
live music, was in a theater. To this day I think it’s best presented
in a theater.
You probably don’t have quite as much opportunity as you’d like…
No. But more so in Europe. There are nice theaters over there.
[MUSIC: Louis Jordan, “Saturday Night Fish Fry”, “Beware”]
“Saturday Night Fish Fry” contains philosophical lessons that I’m sure you’ve put to good use.
Oh yes. I mean, what did he say? He said, “You don’t have to pay
the usual admission if you is a cook, a waiter, or a good musician.” I
liked Louis Jordan because he was funny. As a kid, like, 5-6 years, I’d
hear “Saturday Night Fish Fry,” and I liked because it was such a funny
thing. It was almost Rap, what he was doing. I’m highly influenced by
Louis Jordan, too, because I love comedy.
We’ve been listening to Lester Young and Louis Jordan. Now it’s time for Bird.
I had the 78’s of “In The Still of The Night” and “Old Folks.” Every
time Bird came out with a record, I was the first one at the store, or
among the first anyway. This particular record was a 78 of “In The
Still Of The Night” backed with “Old Folks” — and I wore several of them
out. Then, “Repetition” and “Just Friends” with the strings. I love
to hear Bird play with strings in the big band situations. I mean, I
loved all the situations, but these were more off of the norm, so they
kind of stuck out.
[MUSIC: Bird, “In The Still Of The Night”, “Old Folks”, “Just Friends,” “Repetition,”]
This material, and indeed just about everything we’ve heard
in this first hour of tonight’s program is material that was on the
jukeboxes throughout black communities at the time it was released. It
was the popular music of the time.
Of the day, yes. It sure was. It got to a point at my folks’ club,
that they were beginning to phase those records out when Pop Music was
beginning to come in, and it got harder and harder to find the Jazz
records to put on the jukebox. So that’s a part of Americana that’s
disappeared.
While were playing “In The Still of The Night,” you mentioned
you had the 78 of it, and you could see a spot on it, where you
practicing the phrase, that you had worn it out.I take it that as a young saxophonist, you were avidly studying Charlie Parker and trying to play all his… Is that how it went?
Yes. I tried to play him note for note…if possible.
Did you have any teachers in this regard, who were giving you tips, instruction…?
No, not at that time. It was mostly the records. I learned from the
records, until I got into senior high school, in ninth, tenth through
the twelfth grade. Then I had teachers. I started taking private
lessons, which did help. My first teacher was a man by the name of Mr.
Albert Holloway. I credit him with starting me in the right direction
as far as technique is concerned. He concentrated on solely technique
and reading. From him I learned that you don’t learn everything from
any one person. You have to have many teachers along the way. And each
one, if they can give you something, then they’ve done their job.
What kinds of things did he start you off with? Was it always an alto?
It was always alto, yes. Well, he taught me how to read, first of
all, which was important. Then he would jot down songs. I would say,
“Well, write this out for me,” when I would hear a song that I wanted to
learn, and he would write it out, and I would learn it and phrase it,
and we would go over it. Nothing involving chords, because I don’t even
know whether he was into that. But as far as learning how to read and
playing, getting over the entire board of the horn, he taught me that.
When did actual playing come into your world, playing with little combos, playing jazz or whatever with other musicians?
Probably when I was about 13 or 14. I would say about ’52 or ’53.
See, I had been listening to the music since I was 5 or 6, so it was in
my head. I knew the chords, I knew what I wanted to do from listening
for so long, so that when I got the horn, as soon as I could make
sounds, I would start to… Like, I would play along with Charlie Parker.
I would play along with Earl Bostic. I would play along with Tiny
Bradshaw, because Red Prysock was in the Tiny Bradshaw band. They had a
lot of hits. One I remember is “Heavy Juice.” It was an instrumental,
but it was hot, man. So I learned the whole thing, Red Prysock’s solo,
and tried to sound like him. So I was initially trying to sound like a
tenor. I always heard tenor, even though I loved Bird.
Does the tenor concept lay naturally on the alto sound?
For me, because the alto is a very funny instrument. I think it’s the hardest of all the saxophones.
Why is that?
Because of the sound. It’s such an individual sound; the alto is
more of an individual sound. Most people can pick up a tenor and
immediately have a decent sound. But you can’t do that with the alto.
You can do it with a soprano, if you can get a sound — it’s a decent
sound. But on the alto, it just takes many years to get a sound, and
it’s more of an individual type thing, you know. So that’s why I think
it’s the hardest. I’m sure that’s debatable, but that’s how…
I’ve heard other alto players say that as well!
Well, I’ve heard tenor players say it, too. And there are a lot of
tenor players who started out on alto, and I guess were not satisfied
with their sound, and the sound they got playing tenor was more pleasing
to them. But it just takes so long to get a sound on the alto, many
years. And it’s always developing.
When you were 12, 13, 14, were you seeing musicians who came through Baltimore from out of town?
GB: Oh yeah. Because I was into the music, me and my partner in
high school… There were two of us who were into Jazz in elementary
school, he was an artist (he’s a painter)…and myself. So we would go
downtown, buy the records and buy the albums, and buy the concerts. And
my father would take me to the major concerts and to the clubs, you
know, whenever they came to New York — which they came to New York a
lot. I used to go down to Birdland…
Oh, by this time you’d moved to New York?
No, I hadn’t moved… I didn’t move to New York until 1958. But they
would come up periodically, especially in the summertime, and take me
to Birdland, because that’s the one thing I wanted to do more than
anything else, is come to Birdland.
And they had a balcony where kids…
The Peanut Gallery, they called it, where they had no drinking. They
should have that in every club. If they can have a non-smoking
section… They need to have that, too, but that’s another story.
But I was just around the music. I saw Art Tatum in Baltimore. I
saw Sonny Rollins, who was one of my idols, and went up there and got
his autograph, petrified… Just a little kid! I stood outside of a club
around the corner from where I grew up, waiting for Charlie Parker every
night, because he was in there. I heard him, you know, but I was too
young to go in. Most of the musicians would come outside the club for a
smoke, or to get some fresh air — and he never came out. But I peeped
in there every night. That was a few months before he passed.
You also mentioned that in your teens, musicians sometimes would invite you to come on the bandstand.
Oh yeah.
You mentioned one such experience with Sonny Stitt.
[LAUGHS] Well, again, my father was always taking me around, because I
couldn’t get in the clubs by myself, being so young. When I was 14, I
went to see Sonny Stitt at a club in Baltimore called the Comedy Club. I
happened to have my saxophone with me. I must have been somewhere
else, you know, because I used to go to the jam sessions, too, and
sometimes they’d let me play! But this particular time, my father goes
up to Sonny Stitt and says, “Yes, my son plays,” and so on. And if you
know Stitt, that’s like, “We’ve got to get him up here.” He got me up,
dragged me up on the stage, and had the nerve, at 14, to take me through
the keys on the Blues! At that age, I knew nothing about chords, but I
could hear. It didn’t make no difference. C-Sharp was the same as C
to me, because I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t know it was supposed
to be hard. So I did it. And I’ve known him ever since; we were
friends ever since then.
By the way, a man named Mickey Fields, who lived in Baltimore, was
one of my heroes. He was just a natural musician. He could play
whatever he heard. And that influenced me, because I started out, as
most musicians do, or as most musicians did, as an ear musician. I
don’t know whether they still do, because they have schools nowadays.
But we had to start out by ear, as ear musicians. I think that is a
thing that a lot of musicians have lost, or lose as they get older. The
more that you know, the less you begin to rely on your ear. You stop
trusting your ear because you trust the notes. You know, if the chords
are written and you’ve memorized them, then you know they are right. If
you’re going by your ear, maybe you might hear something that might not
be there — but that’s okay. So I stress that: Don’t lose your ears.
Is that something you have to constantly remind yourself of?
No, I always work on that. But there was a time when I had gotten
away from it a little bit, and yeah, then I had to remind myself.
In a conversation we had off-mike you said to me that you’re
writing a lot of music now so that you can work on things that give you
difficulty, that you don’t know so well.
Yes. Well, actually that’s what Trane was doing when he wrote a lot
of his songs. If he was having trouble with something, he’d write a
song, and that enabled him to work on it. So that gave me the idea,
and I’ve been doing that on a lot of things that I have done. I mean,
why play things that you know? I mean, that’s for me. Some people,
that’s okay, you know, if that’s what you want to do. But for me, I
need to push myself. I like to work on things. I’m always working on
something. So that’s the way my compositions are going nowadays.
How so? Which way is that?
Towards there should be a reason, you know, for it. Even if I write a
Blues, I’m looking for a key that I don’t play it in often, so then I
can work on that key. But I mean, I’ve played in B-Flat so many times
that… It’s so comfortable, you know, sometimes you could get lazy. I’m
not saying that you do, but it’s a possibility. But if you play a Blues
in B, you don’t have time to be lazy.
Back to your teenage days in Baltimore, I take it that the
Jazz scene was strong enough that everybody would come through at one
time or another.
Yes.
So you must have had a taste of everything that was going on in the 1950’s.
Yeah, I saw everybody. Oscar Pettiford. I saw Art Tatum. I saw
Miles with Trane, Philly Joe, Red Garland and Paul Chambers, saw that
band. Max Roach. I didn’t see Clifford [Brown], but I understand he
was around Baltimore a lot. But you know, I wasn’t out on the scene so
much. You know, I could only go out like once every so often. Bird
spent time in Baltimore. A lot of people. It was really a fertile
music town..
We’ve been talking about how Jazz could be heard readily on
jukeboxes when you were coming up, and the next track is a particular
favorite of yours.
GB: This track was Part 1 and Part 2. I hope it’s the full
version. I think it was Wayne Shorter’s second record date, but I think
it was the first one that came out. The album is called Kelly Great;
it’s Wynton Kelly’s album. This was a big hit in the Black
neighborhoods. It’s called “Wrinkles,” and if you know what wrinkles
are… They’re chitlins. That’s the slang word for chitlins, “wrinkles.”
[MUSIC: W. Kelly/L. Morgan/Shorter, “Wrinkles” (1960)]
The great Lee Morgan on trumpet. Lee Morgan was only 21 when he did this record! And did you hear that?
It seems like you could make a great four-hour show on the things Lee Morgan did before the age of 22.
Right?! You know? I mean, it’s unbelievable. This is around the
time that I met Lee. He was working with Dizzy Gillespie when I met
him. Of course, he was a hero, because he was about my age; I think Lee
was about two years older than I was. I was like 18, 19, you know, and
here he was, like, the same age and doing, you know, what I wanted to
do. So I followed him around. That’s how I met Wayne, too, because he
took me to New Jersey one night and said, “I want you to hear a
saxophone player.” And I’ve been a Wayne Shorter fan ever since, too.
That track also was with, of course, Wynton Kelly (it’s Wynton
Kelly’s album), Philly Joe Jones, who is another one of my heroes, and
Paul Chambers, who is the same thing, another hero.
[MUSIC: Miles Davis, “Tadd’s Delight” (1958); Messengers with Bartz, “Soulfinger” (1964)]
That was Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers doing a composition
called “Soulfinger.” That happened to be my recording debut. It
featured, of course, Art Blakey, Lee Morgan and Freddie Hubbard, Victor
Sproles, John Hicks and myself. This was a collaboration of everybody,
because we needed one more song to finish out the record — so we came
up with this. And Lee was a big James Bond fan…
Somehow that doesn’t surprise me.
No? [LAUGHS] So he was a big James Bond fan. So Goldfinger the
movie was out, so we called this “Soulfinger.” I remember around this
time we were in San Francisco, and he took me to a… He said, “Come on,
Bartz, I want to show you something.” We walked downtown somewhere, and
we go in this store, and he’s looking around, and he says, “There it
is, there it is!” It’s a case of guns. I said, “What?” He said,
“That’s the P.K. Walter. That’s the gun that James Bond uses.” That’s
how I got into James Bond.
You also mentioned that you have a fascination with soundtrack music.
Yeah, I do. I love soundtracks. That’s why I moved to Los Angeles.
I was going to break into the movie industry! But little did I know!
Anyway, this Jazz Messengers session was your first recording
date. How did you come to join the Jazz Messengers? What was the
process?
Well, as I said earlier, Art was working in my father’s club, the
Jazz Messengers, and John Gilmore was in the band, but John Gilmore was
leaving. John Hicks and I had been friends for, you know, years, and
Charles Tolliver was also on the gig, because he was taking Lee’s place
whenever Lee didn’t show up. So they called me. They said, “Gary, come
on down.” I was living in New York at the time, because I’d moved to
New York in ’58 — but this was in ’65. So they said, “Come on down,
because Art’s going to need a horn player, a saxophone player.” So I
came down and played, and I joined the band from there.
Actually, the next gig was with John Gilmore and myself. We came up
and did the Half-Note. And Lee Morgan. Lee rejoined the band.
John Hicks was then the piano player?
Yes.
Was he the music director? Or was there one at that time?
It was between Lee and John. Lee wasn’t on all the gigs, because he
wasn’t showing up a lot…you know, sometimes… So whoever was there. But
it was between those two.
Just briefly, your comments on your experience with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers.
Oh, that’s a university there. That’s really a university. Go get
your Masters. When you leave Art, you really know how to build a solo.
I mean, Art builds the solo for you. He shows you how to contour a
solo. That’s how I learned dynamics. Art teaches you dynamics. He
teaches you so many things. I learned how to speak on a microphone
working with Art. One night he just gave me the mike, and said, “Now
make the announcements.” I couldn’t even think of anybody’s name! I
couldn’t think of Art Blakey. It’s endless, the things I learned with
Art.
How long was your tenure with the Messengers?
GB: Well, the first time was a year, and then I went back and was in other bands of his, of the Messengers.
You mentioned in another conversation, “Once a Messenger, always a Messenger.”
Always a Messenger. That’s right. I think I was talking to one of
the younger Messengers about this, telling them how Hicks and I found
out we’d lost the gig one time. We heard them advertising on the radio,
“Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers on the Jazzmobile today.” So we
called each other and I said, “Have you heard from Art?” He said,
“No.” He said, “We’re working tonight, right?” He said, “Yeah.” I
said, “Well, let’s go together.” So we went uptown to the gig, and
there was a whole new group on the stage! That’s how we lost the gig.
But later on he called us back, and we came back and did other stints
with the band. So it just dawned on me, you know? I was always a
Messenger.
[MUSIC: Messengers, “A La Mode”, Mobley/Blakey, “Remember”]
Soul Station is my favorite Hank Mobley
album. He once gave me an ultimate compliment, because he wrote a song
for me — which I never heard.
We’ll move now to another of your favorites, who you met
after moving to New York in 1958. That must have been a big step for
you musically and I guess in many other ways.
Well, I think that’s why musicians and other artists come to New
York. I think in the last century, Vienna was where you had to go, if
you were a musician, to learn and to prove yourself. In this century,
you come to New York. So I couldn’t wait to come out of high school so I
could come to New York and learn.
And in ’58, September, to be exact, of ’58, I moved to New York. I
met a lot of people. Freddie Hubbard had moved to New York in August of
’58. So there was a lot of people around. I met Andrew Cyrille, I met
Grachan Moncur at Juilliard. Lee Morgan was in and out of there.
Addison Farmer, Art Farmer’s twin brother. Roland Hanna was going
there. Bobby Thomas. A lot of people were going there. A lot of great
dancers who went on to Broadway fame and to win Tony’s and stuff, they
were going to Juilliard. Juilliard was up on 120th and Claremont then,
where Manhattan School of Music is now. They were just in the talking
stages of moving down to Lincoln Center then. So that’s where I was.
So you were combining the academic experience, I assume, with the fairly vigorous nightlife available in New York…
I think you’ve got it backwards. The academic part was the nightlife.
Actually, I went there with the intention… I said, “Well, I’m going
to learn my chords.” Because I was playing totally by ear. They didn’t
know what I was talking about when I asked them to explain chords to
me. So I ended up learning chords from the musicians that I met there,
and from hanging out at night. That was my real learning experience. Later on, I was better able to use the things that I learned at
school. But at the time, I was not into Mozart and Beethoven and people
like that. I was into Bird and Diz and Miles! And Juilliard was a
strictly Classical-oriented school. So I had a bit of a problem
adjusting to it.
Well, talk about the academics of the nightlife, then, and
some of your professors, as it were. What were some of the spots you
would go to?
Count Basie’s. I know we used to jam at Count Basie’s with Freddie
Hubbard and Andrew Cyrille. I used to go to a place called the
Speakeasy down on Bleecker Street. That’s where I met Pharaoh Sanders,
and we started hanging out. They had a lot of people down there. Trane
used to come in there all the time.
We used to go to George Braith’s place, his loft, which was over on
Spring Street down in the basement. He had the most beautiful loft.
You’d go down there, and instead of… There was no alcohol, you know; it
was whatever you’d bring. And he had chairs hanging from the ceiling,
beautiful hard-wood floors, sofas… I mean, the most comfortable
chairs! And what would happen, people would come down there, listen to
the music and fall asleep, heh-heh; they’d wake up at 6 o’clock in the
morning. And it was cool. We’d still be playing.
We used to go to Kiane Zawadi’s loft and play, you know, for days on
end. We’d go up there and buy food, chip in and buy food, sleep there,
and play whenever we got up, and just have marathon sessions… It was
always a learning experience. I remember one time Grachan Moncur found
all of these lead sheets of Monk’s music, all of his music. So we went
down to Kiane’s loft down on Allen Street, and we stayed there for about
three or four days until we’d played every song he found — every Monk
song. Different rhythm sections would come in, and spell each other.
That was fun.
Self-generated education. Talk about the vibration in New
York 30-35 years ago vis-a-vis today. Can a young musician replicate
that kind of experience now?
Oh, I think so. Yeah. I mean, I think that the need to learn and
the urge to learn does that. I mean, we wanted to learn this music so
bad, we would do anything to learn it. Actors are the same way.
Artists are like that, painters, and writers — if you want to learn
something, you will find a way. And we found it however we could, and
we just worked hard, and then we took what we learned from each other
home, and worked on that.
I’d also like to talk about the spiritual dimension of music
at this time. This was a period when just cataclysmic upheavals were
happening in society, and they were certainly reflected in the way the
music presented itself.
Yes.
You came to New York as, I’m assuming, a young guy really
into Bird, within ten years you were involved with the Ntu Troop
projects, extended structures and so forth… Talk a little bit about how
your attitudes towards music changed in that time, if they did change.
I don’t think they have changed. What happened was, you know, you
start meeting other people, and exchanging philosophies, exchanging
outlooks on life, and talking… For instance, I used to go up to
Micheaux’s Bookstore on Seventh Avenue and 125th Street, and I used to
see this tall guy, red-headed guy in there; he would be in the back
sometimes talking to Mr. Micheaux, and they would be debating about
Black history. It turned out that was Malcolm X. So I was around him a
lot, and listening to what he said, and listening to Micheaux talk
about African-American history, and buying the books. Because when you
went in his store, he would have books open to certain pages every day
and things underlined that were important, and you’d come in and you’d
read them, you know. So I took that back to Baltimore with me when I
would go back, and exchange ideas… It was just a growing thing. I would
talk about things with people that I would meet from everywhere here in
New York. Then I started working with Max Roach, who was very socially
conscious and was a friend of Malcolm’s. And I met Adam Clayton
Powell, and a lot of people like that.
So that had a lot to do with me starting the Ntu Troop, because the
Ntu Troop was a social commentary group. I mean, we could have fun, we
could party, too; like, “People Dance,” that was a party song. But also
we did things like “Uhuru Sasa,” you know. So it was just like
everything… It’s the whole gamut, and it goes the whole way.
The next set of music features another one of my buddies. This is
Jackie McLean. When I met Jackie, Grachan Moncur was working with him,
Grachan introduced me to Jackie, and we have been friends ever since.
Now, I’d loved Jackie’s playing for years, ever since “Dig.” So that’s
back to the beginning. Thjis one is called “Bluesnik.”
[MUSIC: JayMac, “Bluesnik” (1961); Sonny Rollins, “Blues For Philly Joe:” (1958), with Max, “Gertrude’s Bounce” (1956)]
Sonny Rollins I know has been a major person for you throughout your musical career.
Yes, he has. I had a chance to meet him… Like I said, my father had a
club, and he also used to promote concerts. He promoted a concert with
Sonny at the Lyric Theater in Baltimore, and I was the opening act, so
that’s when I met Sonny. So I have known Sonny since the early Sixties.
Did he use a local band for that?
No, he brought his own band, but I don’t remember who was in the band.
Did you?
Did I use a local band? Yeah, I did. It might have been John Hicks,
Mickey Bass, Joe Chambers. That’s who was working at the club with me
down there. Joe Chambers….
Are there any existing documents of what you were doing at that time? Tapes?
Probably some tapes somewhere. I don’t know where they are, though.
At any rate, you were familiar with Sonny’s records, as you said before, going back to “Dig.”
Oh yeah. I can’t remember the first time I heard Sonny. I think it was… It probably was the Dig
album. And I fell in love with him, and I used to see him all the time
here in New York. What impressed me and helped me was, if he was
working at the Vanguard, say, I would see him one night, and that night
would be like Prez night; Sonny would play like Prez all night, and
would play Prez’s songs, “Three Little Words” and things that were
associated with Prez, and play Prez’s solos sometimes note-for-note
before he would go off into his solo. The next night, maybe Coleman
Hawkins, and he would do the same thing. Then the next night would be
Sonny. So I used to go every night, as you see!
We have cued up music by John Coltrane.
I met John and Benny Golson together when I was about 14 years old,
at a session in Baltimore. They were actually working with an R&B
band with Bull Moose Jackson. Some of you might be familiar them. “Who
Threw The Whiskey In The Well?” which was his big hit. I met them, and
so I had been following both of them, Benny and John, through the
years.
But you know, the first time I heard Trane on record, I didn’t care
too much for him. The first record I heard was the one on the
Transition label, out of Detroit, wasn’t it…? And he was a little
different. I mean, I’ve since, of course, made up for that, because I
have everything he ever did, and would be up under him as much as I
could.
John Coltrane was known to be very encouraging and supportive to young musicians…
Oh, he was.
…and would have people come up sometimes to play.
Yes. I could have, but I wouldn’t dare. I was learning enough just
listening. After he finished, what was I going to do? I wasn’t a
masochist. John was so intense. I mean, his need to learn and his will
to get the music out impressed me. And for me, that’s the way I wanted
to be, was to be such a hard worker like that. Because really, this
music is a lonely thing. You see us out in the clubs, you know, and
that’s like party time when we’re playing, when we’re performing — or
you know, at concerts. But our work is really done at home, and no one
sees that. You know the legends of how hard John worked. He would
practice sometimes 23 hours a day, you know. So that impressed me.
In researching things, you find out that Bird did the same thing…
There’s no other way. You just don’t play this music or do anything at
that level without putting the time in. And it might have looked like
Bird didn’t work that hard, but believe me, he worked just as hard. He
might had other things that made it easier for him, like photographic
memory. I mean, that’s a big help! Perfect pitch. Those things are
big helps if you’re a musician, or if you’re an actor or something.
So you just have to put in the time, and that’s what John showed me.
[MUSIC: Coltrane/Pharaoh, “The Father, The Son and the Holy Ghost (1966),” “Nancy With The Laughing Face” (1963)]
By the time Meditations came out, Gary, you had already begun recording. You had worked with Max Roach, and about a year after Meditations
you did your first record for Milestone. You recorded several records
for Milestone up to around 1970. Then you began working with Miles
Davis, and the music started to change. The choices many musicians were
making began to differ around that time, and there were many reasons
for it.
Yes. I remember when I joined Miles, I was really not into
electronic music at that time, and I was the only one in the band who
was not electrified. And I had many problems, you know, those first
gigs, because everything was so loud! — and here I am with just a
saxophone. They had amps and speakers and pedals and fuzz-boxes and
everything, and I’m just trying to deal with it. But I did grow to
understand electronics. I mean, a microphone is really the beginning of
electronics! I mean, if you’re using the mike, you’re already
electrified. So I guess there wasn’t a big step.
I think Jimi Hendrix probably was a transitional figure for a lot of
musicians. I guess Jimi was really a Jazz musician playing Rock. I
know Miles loved Jimi, and that made me listen to him — because I was
not listening to him before that. I always loved, as you heard earlier,
the R&B with Louis Jordan, and I loved James Brown, I love…
When you asked me who did I see at the Royal, I was thinking more of
Jazz, but who I really saw more were people like James Brown, Little
Richard many times, I saw Clyde McPhatter, Sam Cooke, Fats Domino — you
can name them in that idiom. I saw everybody. And I always loved that
music, because it’s the same music! I mean, it’s the same experience.
Had they been the same age and in the same city at the same time, John
Coltrane could have gone to school and graduated with James Brown, but
yet they both would have played the same thing, knowing each other,
being friends, but yet one playing one kind of music, or what we think
is one kind of music… It’s really all the same music to me. Like Duke
Ellington said, “There’s only two kinds of music, good and bad,” and
that’s the way I… That’s my philosophy.
So making the jump…it wasn’t really making a jump. It was making a
jump to people in the business or maybe critics or people like that, but
it wasn’t making a jump to me. Now I just love this song. I think this is a funky song. And it
is. And it i-yiz. This is Bootsy, and this is a song they called
“Hollywood Squares.”
[MUSIC: Bootsy, “Hollywood Squares,” Parliament, “P-Funk Wants To Get Funked Up”] Well, all right! Ha-ha, make my… Okay. That was George Clinton
doing “P-Funk Wants To Get Funked Up.” I just saw, that was Tiki
Fulwood on drums, who has passed away. He worked with Miles for about a
month; we worked together. That’s how I ended up meeting all of the
Merry Funksters. Before that you heard “Hollywood Squares” by Bootsy
Collins, and that was also produced by George Clinton. What an innovator
he is I mean, he started a lot of things. Actually these were all the
same bands, but they were different record labels and different names
and different monies. But it was the same band. You know, he started
that. Prince is a big fan of George Clinton.
George, if you go to see his concerts, you’re going to really hear
some music. And you won’t hear tapes… When I say you’ll really hear
some music, you’ll really hear musicians playing. Which is kind of
rare nowadays, because most of the Pop artists bring tapes, because they
can’t emulate what they do on the records.
They’re so produced also, those records.
Yeah, it’s so produced, but even the ones that are not produced, they
can’t… I mean, it takes them a long time. They do, like, take after
take until they get it right. That’s one thing about Jazz which makes
the initial investment kind of low, because we can go in and give it to
them in one or two takes. These guys go in, and they’ll work on a song
for like a month. One song! But George can go do it in one take, too. I
mean, they sound better… A lot of times in person it sounds better than
the records.
Well, turning to your recordings, Gary, you always seem to
approach sessions as kind of an extended drama or narrative within the
music.
Yes. The music sort of bears codes within it that tell a larger story.
To me, albums are a musician’s version of books. They are books for
musicians. So just like you have mystery novels, you have fiction, you
have biographical novels, autobiographical, comedy… It runs the gamut.
From probably my first album, I have been into concept albums. Why am I
doing the album? What’s the purpose of the album? Is it just to do
some originals? Is it to show what your arrangements are on standards.
Or it goes deeper than that, like Another Earth, which was an album
dedicated to Life, you know, and the Universe. So it goes everywhere.
I read something where Beethoven, when he would write his symphonies
or when he would write music, each one… He went from a light symphony,
like Pastorale, to a heavy symphony like Eroica. So he would go back
and forth, from light to heavy, light to heavy. So I’ve kind of kept
that in mind, and tried to do that sometimes. This sort of raises a question of extra-musical influence, as
it were, the other phenomena of life that impact upon your concept of
music-making. Your albums are full of references. Have movies, books,
inspired your ideas about music from your beginnings as a musician? Oh, sure. Artists, I think, are inspired by everything and everyone
they come in contact with. Just like you may have a certain inflection
on a little thing that you do that I may interpret into the music. So
that means you influenced me. So I can be influenced by… I walk down
the street and see somebody, and I say, “I like that,” and I may end up
interpreting…you know, putting that in the music.
Gary Bartz ANOTHER EARTH 50-Year Anniversary feat. Ravi Coltrane & Special Guest Charles Tolliver Produced by Revive Music
STRAIGHT AHEAD JAZZ -
HARDBOP - SPIRITUAL JAZZ
FRIDAY 12 JULY 2019
HUDSON
Lineup:
Gary Bartz (alto saxophone); Ravi Coltrane (clarinet, soprano saxophone, tenor saxophone); Charles Tolliver (trumpet); Paul Bollenbeck (guitar); James King (bass); Nasheet Waits (drums).
About:
Alto saxophonist Gary Bartz (1940) is a jazz veteran who made his name in the 1960s alongside Eric Dolphy and McCoy Tyner as part of the Jazz Workshop concerts of bassist Charles Mingus. Later, Bartz played with Max Roach and Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. In the mid-1970s, he came to Europe with trumpeter Miles Davis’s band and, among other things, was present at the legendary concert on the Isle of Wight. Bartz also appeared with Davis in concerts at the Cellar Door Club in Washington, where the controversial album Live-Evil was recorded. In 1969, the alto saxophonist released a second album under his own name: Another Earth(Milestones), bursting with adventurous music. On that album, Bartz played with trumpeter Charles Tolliver (1942). At the festival, John Coltrane’s son Ravi Coltrane will be replacing tenor saxophonistPharoah Sanders. And an interesting detail: drummer Nasheet Waits is the son of Freddie Waits, who played on the 1969 album. And so the circle is complete!
THE MUSIC OF GARY BARTZ: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH GARY BARTZ:
"I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it's for or against."
W.E.B. DuBois (1868-1963)
"There is but one coward on earth, and that is the coward that dare not know."
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)
"Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can't ride you unless your back is bent. "
James Baldwin (1924-1987)
"Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society."
"A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization. A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilization. A civilization that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilization."
Nina Simone (1933-2003)
"There's no other purpose, so far as I'm concerned, for us except to reflect the times, the situations around us and the things we're able to say through our art, the things that millions of people can't say. I think that's the function of an artist and, of course, those of us who are lucky leave a legacy so that when we're dead, we also live on. That's people like Billie Holiday and I hope that I will be that lucky, but meanwhile, the function, so far as I'm concerned, is to reflect the times, whatever that might be."
Amilcar Cabral (1924-1973)
"Always bear in mind that the people are not fighting for ideas, for the things in anyone's head. They are fighting to live better and in peace, to see their lives go forward, to guarantee the future of their children ....Hide nothing from the masses of our people. Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories..." .
Angela Davis (b. 1944)
"The idea of freedom is inspiring. But what does it mean? If you are free in a political sense but have no food, what's that? The freedom to starve?”
Duke Ellington (1899-1974)
“Jazz is the freest musical expression we have yet seen. To me, then, jazz means simply freedom of musical speech! And it is precisely because of this freedom that so many varied forms of jazz exist. The important thing to remember, however, is that not one of these forms represents jazz by itself. Jazz simply means the freedom to have many forms.”
Amiri Baraka (1934-2014)
"Thought is more important than art. To revere art and have no understanding of the process that forces it into existence, is finally not even to understand what art is."
Frederick Douglass (1817-1895)
"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” --August 3, 1857
Cecil Taylor (1929-2018)
“Musical categories don’t mean anything unless we talk about the actual specific acts that people go through to make music, how one speaks, dances, dresses, moves, thinks, makes love...all these things. We begin with a sound and then say, what is the function of that sound, what is determining the procedures of that sound? Then we can talk about how it motivates or regenerates itself, and that’s where we have tradition.”
Ella Baker (1903-1986)
"Strong people don't need strong leaders"
Paul Robeson (1898-1976)
"The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or for slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative."
John Coltrane (1926-1967)
"I want to be a force for real good. In other words, I know there are bad forces. I know that there are forces out here that bring suffering to others and misery to the world, but I want to be the opposite force. I want to be the force which is truly for good."
Miles Davis (1926-1991)
"Jazz is the big brother of Revolution. Revolution follows it around."
C.L.R. James (1901-1989)
"All development takes place by means of self-movement, not organization by external forces. It is within the organism itself (i.e. within the society) that there must be realized new motives, new possibilities."
Frantz Fanon (1925-1961)
"Now, political education means opening minds, awakening them, and allowing the birth of their intelligence as [Aime] Cesaire said, it is 'to invent souls.' To educate the masses politically does not mean, cannot mean, making a political speech. What it means is to try, relentlessly and passionately, to teach the masses that everything depends on them."
Edward Said (1935-2003)
“I take criticism so seriously as to believe that, even in the midst of a battle in which one is unmistakably on one side against another, there should be criticism, because there must be critical consciousness if there are to be issues, problems, values, even lives to be fought for."
Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937)
“The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned. There must be pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will.”
Susan Sontag (1933-2004)
"Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager."
Kofi Natambu, editor of The Panopticon Review, is a writer, poet, cultural critic, and political journalist whose poetry, essays, criticism, reviews, and journalism have appeared in many literary magazines, journals, newspapers, and anthologies. He is the author of a biography MALCOLM X: His Life & Work (Alpha Books) and two books of poetry: THE MELODY NEVER STOPS (Past Tents Press) and INTERVALS (Post Aesthetic Press). He was the founder and editor of SOLID GROUND: A NEW WORLD JOURNAL, a national quarterly magazine of the arts, culture, and politics and the editor of a literary anthology NOSTALGIA FOR THE PRESENT (Post Aesthetic Press). Natambu has read his work throughout the country and given many lectures and workshops at academic and arts institutions. He has taught American literature, literary theory and criticism, cultural history and criticism, film studies, political science, creative writing, philosophy, critical theory, and music history and criticism (Jazz, Blues, R&B, Hip Hop) at many universities and colleges. He was also a curator in the Education Department of Detroit’s Museum of African American History. Born in Detroit, Michigan, Natambu currently lives in Berkeley, California with his wife Chuleenan.
With the Rance Allen Group
Gary Bartz 
