NEA Jazz Master and Grammy Award-winning saxophonist Gary Bartz is part of the NYC Winter JazzFest concert "A Night at The East" on January 14. Gartz spoke with WBGO's Doug Doyle about his career as well the past, present and future of the music.
Gary Bartz, named a 2024 Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts, is a prolific recording artist with more than 45 solo albums to his credit; he's appeared on more than 200 as a guest artist. What does the honor of Jazz Master mean to the humble performer?
"I guess it means I have been recognized as being a pretty good musician."
The two-time Grammy winner was first exposed to jazz as the son of the owners of a jazz nightclub in his hometown of Baltimore.
He ventured to New York City to attend the Juilliard School in 1958. After graduating, 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.
With the Max Roach Centennial upon us, Doyle asked Bartz about the legendary drummer and composer.
"Max was a mentor and a griot of the highest order. I met Max when I was 14 years old. I sat in with him. Being the nice man that most of the musicians were during that time and they played "Cherokee" as fast as they could (laugh), fortunately I was so into Charlie Parker that was right up my alley. I guess he was impressed and gave me his number. I told him I was coming to New York as soon as I can. After I graduated from high school, I connected with him in New York. He was like a father figure to me."
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.
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.” In 2020, Gary Bartz collaborated with the London-based spiritual jazz ensemble, Maisha, on Night Dreamer's Direct-to-Disc Sessions on a vinyl format LP.
Bartz has been on the Oberlin Conservatory of Music faculty since 2001 as Professor of Saxophone. The educator has some concerns about how young musicians and their instructors are working on their craft in 2024.
"What the challenge is now is that I see a lot of young musicians are not following the path that the music was on, which was the path that started this whole way of creating music. It's an old process that's been used for centuries called theme and variations. So you play the melody and then you create themes based on the melody. You have to hear the music in order to know you want to do this, but what's been happening, especially in academia, is that the hearing part has kind of been left out and the more technical side of it, that is memorizing chords. We didn't even know what a chord was, but we knew the melodies. We could hear the chords. Chords are sounds and sounds are to be heard not memorized. Now students memorize all these chords and a lot of times they don't even remember the melody and that's where the chords came from. They'll play a solo and you don't hear a melody."
You can SEE the entire interview with Gary Bartz here.
