Gary Bartz (2008)

Om’Mas Keith

Today, we would like to bring to you all someone, who in my opinion, is one of the most talented human beings on earth, one of the most insightful and giving teachers I have ever known, and a real good dresser too. Ladies and gentlemen, the world-renowned bluesman, Gary Bartz [applause].

So, we will just give you a brief introduction really quickly. Gary is a saxophonist bluesman, he has played with Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers, McCoy Tyner, Chaka Khan, who else have you played with?

Gary Bartz

Well, see, I moved to New York in 1958, which is, I’m sure, before most of you guys’ time. So, living in New York you end up working with almost everybody that come through so I can’t even remember everybody.

Emma Warren

We are definitely going to be asking you about some of the specific people you worked with, but I would like to ask you something first, and this is about the fact that Om’Mas referred to you as a bluesman. Now, a couple of people have told me that you are very uncomfortable with the term jazz. Why don’t you want to be known as a jazz musician?

Gary Bartz

The word “jazz” has no meaning, it is a made-up word. It is not even a real word, and the origins of the word is from the whorehouses in New Orleans where you go to find women. The only place this music was being performed was in whorehouses, and the term – we can talk, right? – the term for “pussy” and “f---” was “jazz.” They would say, “I am going down to the jazz house to get me some jazz,” and that is where the music was, so they said, “What kind of music were they playing?” “Jazz music.” Certainly, it is a negative word and most of the musicians I have been fortunate to be around, such as Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Max Roach, Mingus, Art Blakey, I could go on, they hate that word. So, I come from that and I hate that word too.

Emma Warren

Is it just because of the origins of the word or because of the fact that it is like a way of compartmentalizing what you do?

Gary Bartz

I think it is a negative word and, to me, negative words bring negative energy. And I think it affects the music. To me, and to most musicians, I heard Front 242 here yesterday saying the same thing, labels… musicians don’t label music because it’s music. I don’t see the labels, that is more for the corporations and the business people.

Emma Warren

And what about the term “blues,” why is that any better a term?

Gary Bartz

I think blues is the essence of the folk music that comes from the United States, and all of the different forms, whatever you want to call them, stem from the blues. That is how I started playing the blues, listening to the blues, working with R&B bands and playing for dances. I’m more comfortable with that term.

Emma Warren

Blues it is.

Om’Mas Keith

I just heard you say something to the effect of, basically implying that musicians often don’t label their sound, they don’t get the chance to, right?

Gary Bartz

Somebody else does it for them. For all these years I have read quotes from Duke Ellington [where] he says, “That music that they want to call jazz, they keep insisting,” but he never called it that. I just saw an interview with Miles, and he said, “I hate that word.” And I have been around them and know they hate the word just like I do.

Emma Warren

I had an interesting conversation with one of the participants here yesterday and she was talking about the fact that she – already, at this point in her career – felt labeled and constrained by that. Do you have any suggestions for artists who feel that constraint? What is the best way of responding to that fear of being labelled or feeling as though you’re being labelled?

Gary Bartz

It’s a hard thing, because I don’t even know whether you can fight it. It goes in the magazine, it is all over and everybody sees it. We say, “That’s not who I am,” but who hears that? That’s an individual thing, I don’t know. But Duke Ellington did say that once you name something, you date it. It becomes dated. I call it music. What an innovation!

Emma Warren

And when you and I were chatting last night and talking about what we were going to cover, you told me a really nice story about how you first were exposed to music.

Om’Mas Keith

Maybe tell them about the theater, because you were mentioning to me… how the whole thing started coming about, and [how] the whole experience was about heading to the theater to go and see some movies and music?

Gary Bartz

I am surprised, maybe you guys don’t know it… well, I guess they called it vaudeville, but when I was growing up there was stage shows and so the musicians would travel from one city to another. They would play for the whole week, they would do maybe five or six shows a day, and in between the shows they would have movies. The movies of the day, cowboys, and you would see cartoons and stuff like that. Then the show would come on and they would do the show. I was telling Om’Mas that the first time I saw music live or heard music live, that I remember, was at these theaters. And the anticipation – I would rush out of school and get to the stage shows. I would see anyone from Fats Domino, Little Richard, Jackie Wilson, Duke Ellington, Louis Jordan – I would see many people. And if you got there early, I would get there after school, by the third show I was on the front row, because you could stay all day. You could come and stay all day and see all the shows. But [Om’Mas] was surprised they had the movies, but the theatres came first and then they put the screens in.

Om’Mas Keith

How much was it?

Gary Bartz

I don’t remember… it must not have been much.

Om’Mas Keith

You said Little Richard so, I guess you were a fan of rock & roll, also?

Gary Bartz

I am a fan of music.

Om’Mas Keith

The same importance, just not labeling – it is very important to be able to have something you feel comfortable about, talking about an art form that you can represent and have a name for it that you feel really confident in expressing… [and, for you, that’s] “music”.

Gary Bartz

Music!

Emma Warren

You were talking about when you were at school and when you were a child. The town you grew up in, what kind of place was it?

Gary Bartz

Oh, my goodness. I grew up in Baltimore, Maryland. I guess you could find out how old I am anyway but I was born in 1940. I just had a birthday last Friday [applause]. So, that makes me 68, if you don’t want to do the math. Baltimore, when I was born, was a segregated city. African-Americans could not go… we had certain places like the black movies, the white movies. At a public park, there was a black swimming pool and there was a white swimming pool, there were the black tennis courts, white tennis courts. When my mother would go shopping, and my mother was very fair-skinned, she was fair-skinned enough that her and her best friend, who was even more fair-skinned, they used to go to the white movies. If she would take me shopping, she couldn’t try on clothes in the department stores, and as a kid nobody sat me down and said, “Look, this is why this is.” I just noticed it and thought it is very curious and wondered why, and later I found out. So that’s my background as far as growing up.

Emma Warren

I suppose, if I thought about it, that would have been obvious. But it feels incredibly shocking to hear you talking about that.

Gary Bartz

A lot of cities weren’t like that. But Baltimore is on the Mason-Dixon Line and so it was on the South’s side of the Civil War. Maryland was actually set up as a free portion of the United States, so when dignitaries from overseas would come, they wouldn’t see slavery. They had slaves in eastern Maryland, but around Baltimore, they didn’t necessarily have slaves. Although Frederick Douglass was from Maryland and he escaped through the Underground Railroad. Actually, I had some ancestors that escaped and went to Canada, and then went back to Africa.

Emma Warren

Was that kind of experience something experienced by some of the musicians you went on to work with later?

Gary Bartz

Yes, some of the musicians were from further south than I was, like Mississippi and places like that, which was really bad. But I couldn’t wait to move out of Baltimore. It wasn’t a very happy place. But, in some respects, it wasn’t totally bad. There were the black high schools, there were two high schools, one on the east side and one on the west side. But the community was greater. We were talking about traveling, once I started traveling as a musician, because of the society in the United States, the black musicians could not stay in the hotels downtown. There were usually one or two black hotels that the musicians stayed in, and a lot of them stayed at people’s houses. You know, boarding houses, church ladies – church ladies loved musicians.

Om’Mas Keith

And unable to enter through the main entrance at times, too. Always entering through the back.

Gary Bartz

There was one club in Baltimore called the Surf Club, and a lot of people, a lot of musicians didn’t work there. You could perform there but you couldn’t mingle with the customers. There was a bar at the back that was the bar for you. Partly due to that, one of the good things about that, traveling from city to city and having to stay in certain places, was that there was a real community, because the musicians, the dancers, the writers, or whatever, we all had to stay in the same hotels. So, we all knew each other, and I think the sense of community was a little better then. There were good things and bad things.

Emma Warren

Your father ran a nightclub, didn’t he?

Gary Bartz

He did. In 1960, he and a couple of his friends bought a nightclub, and that was very fortunate. I had a permanent job. I was actually living in New York City at the time, so I was commuting from New York to Baltimore because I was going to school.

Emma Warren

It is interesting how the internet sometimes replicates things that aren’t totally accurate because I was under the impression that your father had this nightclub when you were much younger?

Gary Bartz

Everybody for some reason thinks that, but no, he bought the club when I was 19 or 20.

Om’Mas Keith

You said something just now that really just made me say, “OK, sense of community, comparison then to now,” and the fact to me that you feel now there is a sense of community lacking is very important from someone who has clearly seen communities manifest all over the planet and how they do and how people exist. And now you’re saying something is going on here, something a little different. What is that? What’s different in the sense of community now then from when everyone was forced to be with people because of segregation and the negative energy is going on around you? But it seems there is a positive outcome of that. What’s going on now?

Gary Bartz

I guess, I am not sure, I’m not sure. It is like a regrouping and now it’s more of an effort. We have to make more of an effort to maintain a community. And I think it happens. I call them gangs. I think everything is a gang. Even church. You got the Catholic gang, you have the police gang, everybody is a gang. You’ve got the Red Bull gang here. I think, really, the effort should be made and more thought should go into how to be a community. I watch the hip-hop community and I think they are more together.

Om’Mas Keith

There seems to be some sort of an appreciation for the essence of hip-hop right now. More so, of course, with things being cyclical in nature, it all comes back to one and we’re all recycling music, and look what is going on. The 16-year-old kids today are epitomizing the beginnings of hip-hop now. That is what their standard is, 1981, Basquiat, a whole other level of understanding that it was a very arty time, a very transitional time. Things all come around. How was it to you? Or rather, did the ‘40s ever come back for you stylistically in music?

Gary Bartz

I’m not sure I know what you mean.

Om’Mas Keith

Basically, to say that every 20 years is a cyclical regurgitation of going back to what was here before and bringing it back to the popular mainstream culture. That never really happened to music from before, like swing going into bebop and going into forward-thinking jazz. It was a forward movement as opposed to going back.

Gary Bartz

You have to move forward, that’s the future and you have to move forward. Artists, period, do go back, but you can’t just go back. You have to maintain what’s going on at this time and bring maybe some of the older aesthetics [into what you’re doing now]. I was just reading this book about Miles’s music, and I worked with Miles for two years and I had no idea how he recorded.

I knew he did some things, because we worked, we would record every night, every concert we would record, so somebody was always listening to the tapes and Miles would ask, “What are you listening to?” You know how Miles talks, right? He would ask, “What are you listening to?” And you say, “This is last night’s concert,” and he’d suddenly hear it and he would take it and listen to it and we learned never to give him the tape because we never got it back. But the reason why we wouldn’t get it back is because it would find its way on to a record. He would hear maybe four bars here and he would love those four bars, and he knew we weren’t going to create like that again because it should only happen once, so he would end up splicing it.

I think on Live-Evil, he did some of that. But most of his records are put together, and I had no idea. You know the record In a Silent Way, when he recorded that, he would just go in the studio and start running the tapes, and they would record everything. Everything – the talking, the music, he wouldn’t stop. And then he would take the tapes and take portions, and they would make songs. Sometimes they wouldn’t even play a song, they were just playing, and they would make songs out of what they played. “That sounds like a good melody,” and it would become a melody. That is how he would do things. I forgot how we got there… His thing was always to go back, but he would always say, “Play what you know and then more than that, play what you don’t know.” He wanted you to play what you don’t know.

Emma Warren

That idea of playing what you don’t know, it’s really interesting particularly because there is a book, I don’t know if you’ve seen it, called Black Swan, which is one of those ideas books around at the moment. It’s about the study of uncertainty and how we as human beings focus on what we know. But actually, we should be focusing on what we don’t know because that is what propels the future. So, there are these crazy random things that happen, but when crazy random things happen, as humans we respond by trying to make sure that the crazy random thing never happens, rather than having an awareness that we actually don’t know very much. So, that idea, that as a musician you play what you don’t know and focus on what you don’t know rather than what you do know and what is perhaps comfortable, is really interesting.

Gary Bartz

There was one story about Miles where John McLaughlin, his first recordings, actually it was Bitches Brew. Miles had given him this melody, so he was playing this melody, and Miles comes over and says, “I want you to play this melody as if you don’t know how to play the guitar.” So, he says, “How can I do that?” He’s messing around, trying to figure out how to play the guitar as if he didn’t know it. And that is what ended up on the record, he had no idea he was being recorded. That is what Miles wanted. He had a certain way of getting things out of musicians.

Emma Warren

Was there anyone else maybe a bit earlier in your career who gave you a similarly interesting experience, or someone who showed you a different way of working with musicians and getting music from musicians?

Gary Bartz

I would think almost every bandleader that I worked for, I learned something. And not even the ones I worked for, just watching the musicians and studying them. Max Roach’s was the first band I was ever in and I learned so much. I learned the seriousness of music – music can be a party, it can be social, it can be many things, and I started to learn those things from Max. Art Blakey, I learned many things, what not to do.

Om’Mas Keith

Please elaborate on what you learned from Art Blakey…

Gary Bartz

Art was a free spirit. I would just look at him and say, “Well, when I have my band I am not going to do that,” because he reminded me… like you have what I like to call old-style bandleaders. There are different philosophies that bandleaders have, like the Max Roach style, the Art Blakey philosophy was to pit the band members against each other, so as long as they are squabbling amongst themselves, you are not going to mess with the bandleader.

Emma Warren

It’s like the divide and rule idea. This idea of bandleaders itself is something that seems very specific to the time that you were making music in. How did it work? What made you a band leader and is the band leader just a guy who says, “It is my band”? Was there more to it than that?

Gary Bartz

Nowadays it is, the guy says, “That’s my band.” Every bandleader is not really a bandleader. Because a bandleader… and I say that because there are some – and I won’t name names – younger bandleaders, who have never worked in a band and their first time with the band it’s their band, so they don’t have the knowledge. This is my opinion, but, by the time I became a bandleader, I had seen and worked in many different bands, so I saw a way each guy ran a band, the way it responded, and so I began to develop a philosophy of how I wanted to be a bandleader.

Emma Warren

So, is the bandleader more like the captain of the football team?

Gary Bartz

We used to call Miles “Coach.” That’s what he was. Max the same way. If I ever had any problems, even when I wasn’t working with them, I could call them and say, “Look, I’m having this problem with this promoter over here, what should I do?” Things like that, whereas some bandleaders would never take these things.

Om’Mas Keith

Wasn’t Max notorious for being a little roughhousey?

Gary Bartz

He was a drummer [laughs] – he can’t help it. Art, I loved working with art. I loved working with and learned musical things from everybody, but he taught me some specific music devices. Each one. Mingus – there’s another – [they were all] very individual people, so each one you could learn things from, each one of them.

Emma Warren

One thing that kind of takes us back slightly, but Om’Mas and I were talking again last night about how musicians end up with the instrument they end up with. What was it about the saxophone that made it feel like the right thing for you, or were there other contenders? Was there a time when you could have been a drummer or could have been something else?

Gary Bartz

I thought I wanted to be a drummer, and then I heard Charlie Parker… I actually heard him when I was about six years old… I used to go by my grandmother’s house, where my uncle lived, and he had all the Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker records, and that was the highlight. I couldn’t wait to play these records, but I heard this one record and it just got me. I just said, “Whatever that is,” I didn’t know whether it was a trumpet or a trombone or what it was, but I said, “I want to do that.” So, I begged my parents for five years. It took me five years to get a saxophone. They said, “Hey, he’s only six, he’s only seven, he’s only eight.” Finally, when I was 11 they got me a horn.

Emma Warren

And how easy or difficult would it have been to get you a saxophone?

Gary Bartz

They rented me a saxophone, because you know how kids are. They are into something this week, and then never touch it again. They rented it and I really got into it. And what I realized is that from the age of six until the age of 11, I was begging for this saxophone, but meanwhile I am studying music. Because, in my mind, I am listening to things that I like and so I couldn’t wait to get the horn, because then I can try these things and see if I can do them. You can study music and not have your instrument. I studied all the time. Another thought that just came to me is, I think a lot of you guys – I guess you are mostly musicians here – I think that you have people who are musicians who never played an instrument. Never picked up an instrument in their life and don’t know a note of music, but they’re musicians. And sometimes their musical knowledge is greater than somebody who is a musician. You’ve got musicians who play instruments and good musicians who don’t play instruments.

Emma Warren

That thought has never occurred to me, but it is a really interesting one, and it makes me want to ask you about how you listen to music or how musicians listen to music. I guess, the way you listen is as individual as the way that you see. We all have different ears, we all literally hear different things. But as a technique, how do you listen?

Gary Bartz

[Laughs] With my ears! I teach school at a music conservatory, and I have noticed that the young kids coming in nowadays, they don’t have any ears. They don’t know how to listen. And they know that they don’t know, so they want to learn. They started learning music off the page. I didn’t start learning music off the page, I started learning music with my ears. I hear it and try to mimic it, and even if I didn’t want to mimic it, I would say, “Well, how would I play this? How can I put my character into this same phrase?”

Emma Warren

So, you would listen out for portions of the song that really hit you, and focus on small parts of it?

Gary Bartz

Yes, I do that and I would learn the whole thing. But there would be some portions that really hit me. When I was young we had [78 RPM records]. I guess you have heard of them, right? We’re talking pre-history. You could look at my 78s and see, “He must have liked this section,” because it was worn out. I just kept on putting the needle back there until I learned it.

Emma Warren

I don’t want to go back on this too much, but I find it really interesting – does one listen to music on an emotional level, listening to rhythmic patterns and listening to melodies? When you’re listening to a piece of music, do you listen to it in the same way or in lots of different ways?

Gary Bartz

I listen to it in different ways. Sometimes I’m listening to it for one thing; sometimes I’m listening to it for something else. Sometimes I’m listening to the whole. It can happen all kinds of ways.

Emma Warren

I guess that is a good way to get into to a piece of music…

Gary Bartz

When I moved to New York I didn’t know any harmony or any theory, but I could hear and I realized that the ear comes before anything. All the books and everything that is written about music, somebody heard it first before it was ever put down a page. You can go back to Beethoven, Mozart, they could hear things. Beethoven was hearing things that nobody else was hearing, flat fives and dominant sevenths and dominant ninths. Nobody had heard these things before, so everyone thought his going deaf was a result of his lack of hearing. You can be deaf and hear music, because he wrote music after he went deaf. My students always ask me, “What can I do? How can I hear?” Because it is like their ears are locked, and I can hear it is locked and I know they can hear. Because if you’re playing something, and there is a wrong note, you know it, you hear it. So, how do you use that ear. How do you unlock it? It’s a funny thing because for most musicians, at least the early musicians, they learned by ear first, which is the natural way because that is the way it happens. Then they write that book after Beethoven’s use of the dominant sevenths and flat fifths. They wrote the book but he heard it first before anybody wrote it. So, you have to use your ears after you have learned this music. I’ll say we are going to learn a song today and they start to get their books out and I’ll say, “No, no.” They’re kinda lost if they can’t read it, but I want them to hear it – that is what they have to get back. Everything is backwards nowadays.

Emma Warren

What you’re explaining now suddenly makes the whole idea of improvisation and maybe the way some of the music was constructed, it makes more sense now that I understand something new about it, just by having this explained to me, how you and your fellow musicians learned music in the first place.

Om’Mas Keith

It almost sounds as if you are alluding to the fact that... do you feel DJs are musicians?

Gary Bartz

Don’t you think they are? I think they are, for sure.

Om’Mas Keith

I think they are too. If you begin your musical career by listening, what better way? That is the natural way.

Gary Bartz

If you don’t have an ear, you can’t even hear the record, you can’t hear the music coming out – you’ve got to hear it.

Emma Warren

One more thing on this tip, I think, – before we start hearing some of the music we are talking about – is that we are obviously in an environment where we are exposed to a lot of very loud music and some people take precautions and protect their ears and will use earplugs and some people have an awareness of it. Do you have any strong feelings about the amplified culture that we all live in?

Gary Bartz

Well, the first two bands I was in were led by drummers, so my hearing has been gone for many years. I have tinnitus, there is always ringing in my ears and I don’t even pay any mind to it. It’s an occupational hazard. If I was a yakuza, I might get a finger cut off.

Om’Mas Keith

That’s the gangster in you. You know a little bit about gangster life, huh?

Gary Bartz

In the United States, nightclubs, which is where this music was mostly popularized, came from Prohibition and most of the clubs were mafia owned or run. Louis Armstrong talks about working in the clubs that Al Capone owned. Al Capone would come in, so you knew these people.

Om’Mas Keith

Who did you know?

Gary Bartz

I’m not mentioning any names.

Om’Mas Keith

So, I think this is a good time to play some music. You have anything in particular you’d like to share – any time frame?

Gary Bartz

Where do you think we should start?

Om’Mas Keith

Where do you think we should start? We can both give you ideas on where we think you should start. If you can start with your earliest recording, I think that would be cool. I think we can get an idea of sonically where music was at, and we can go anywhere from there.

Gary Bartz

I’ll play this one, this was from the first album I ever recorded as a leader. That’s another thing, too, is going into the studio, a lot of times now I see younger musicians – and I’m not jealous, that’s just the way it is – but a lot of younger musicians, the first time they are ever in a studio it’s their record date… So, that’s the same thing. They have bands when they are not band leaders, they have record dates when they have never recorded before. It takes a while to know how to deal with the studio. I would watch Ron Carter – he is a stickler for his bass sound, and he would come in really early to the session to work with the engineer and make sure his sound was like he wanted it. A lot of guys go in and whatever they get from the engineer is their sound, but you have to know what you want to sound like.

Om’Mas Keith

How important is sound? We were going to talk about that, but you brought it up – the studio aspect of your life. You have been living in studios for years. Really quickly, do you like the way records sound now, or do you like the way records sounded before? Is there any difference to you, or any preference?

Gary Bartz

I don’t know. Sometimes I like some of the records. I like the sounds now, and in some I like the older sounds. I think the technology today is so much greater, and you can do so much more. I did this record – I won’t mention for who because I may get in trouble – but they are supposed to be the cutting-edge audiophiles. You have a lot of record labels that are audiophiles, and so I don’t have a problem with that. But we went in the studio, and you have these great musicians and they did a direct to disc recording, and I’m saying, “You got the studio.” You couldn’t do any overdubs, you know. So, to me it defeated the purpose. I like to take advantage of the studio. The studio is different to live – it is two different things to me. Going in the studio to make a record and doing a live concert, two totally different things.

Om’Mas Keith

Why?

Gary Bartz

The studio is like a laboratory, and you go in to create music. You take your time. You can take years. Really. Which is what I have done on some records. You can take years and make sure it is just like you want it. But live, you just go and play. It’s a different energy. Then you have the feedback from the audience, and it is a totally different thing from being in the studio. You play something, and then you go back and listen to it and say “No,” it’s just different. It’s a laboratory, so you should do your experiments.

Emma Warren

Talking about laboratories and experiments, you were talking about people going in and wanting to spend a long time on getting the right bass sound. How did you find your sound in the studio? What is a good way for musicians to find their sound?

Gary Bartz

The first thing you need to ask yourself is, “What do I want to sound like?” Because I notice a lot of musicians, they don’t find their sound – their sound finds them. They just play and they end up with a sound. Whereas some musicians say, “I want to sound like this,” and then they have something to go forward. Like, in my instance, I play alto, I mostly played alto. I played soprano, too. But I love the tenor saxophone sound, so I tried to play the alto with the tenor temperament. The tenor has a whole different temperament, they can honk and do things like that and you don’t see that so much with the alto, but that is what I was going for.

Emma Warren

What is the alto’s temperament?

Gary Bartz

The temperament of the alto – it’s like the leader of the big band. The alto is usually the boss of the band; it is to the band as the violin in the orchestra, it has the same role. The first violins lead the orchestra. Traditionally, the alto was like a sweet, melodic thing, but I didn’t necessarily like the syrup.

Emma Warren

So, what is the temperament of your alto-turned-tenor?

Gary Bartz

I go towards a tenor sound, and after I had been looking for this sound, I realized that the guys I listened to, like the tenor players I really loved, they were tenor players with an alto temperament. Like Lester Young played tenor but he was like an alto a lot of the time. John Coltrane, he played high like an alto… he started out on an alto. Then you had the tenor players like Sonny Rollins and people like that. Even in the blues field, like Junior Walker, King Curtis, they are tenor players.

Emma Warren

It is interesting to hear you say that because it is almost like this idea of doing something wrong with an instrument can make it sound really right. And sometimes it seems like people who are trained in an instrument are somehow constrained, because they don’t want to do the wrong thing… And I know, with early drum machines and samplers, the people that made the best sounds are the people who didn’t know what to do with them and made the sounds so good because they did things that someone who knew what they were doing wouldn’t have done… All of which is a very long way of saying that, all the way through the history of music, interesting things happen when people do things a bit wrong, even if it is consciously wrong.

Gary Bartz

That was something Miles would say a lot. I heard him say this to more than one person; he would say, “I love your mistakes.” Because when you make a mistake you have really got to get it together. That’s why he would always say, “Play what you don’t know, play beyond.” He could hear like that… Talking about hearing, he had a way of hearing things different from other people. I guess everybody hears in their own way, but it is fascinating the way he heard, because he would change the whole paradigm and he did that more than one time with music. You would listen to the same thing, but he would hear totally different things from it and get something else out of it. So, it is many different ways to listen, like the question you were asking me earlier.

Om’Mas Keith

Was your time with Miles the beginning of electronic [jazz]?

Gary Bartz

I didn’t realize it when I joined the band, because I was acoustic, I’d never played in an electric band. I’ve never been in a band that had a sound man and a soundsystem, so I was frustrated because everybody else, Keith Jarrett had it, everybody could turn up their amps. Miles had a wah-wah pedal, and I’m out there with nothing but a little alto and the microphone. I couldn’t hear myself. I literally couldn’t hear. I told Miles, “I can’t hear.” He said, “Well, tell the sound man – why are you bothering me?” He said, “I play the trumpet, I don’t do the sound.”

Om’Mas Keith

This is the beginning of modern sound, the change of everything, the sound man.

Gary Bartz

It was very important. We didn’t have soundchecks. Our soundcheck was with the same equipment and same people every night. One thing happened, we did the Johnny Carson Show one time ,and Jimi Hendrix had done it – many of you might not know, but it is a big late-night television show [in the US]. Jimi Hendrix had done the show a couple weeks prior, and he didn’t do a sound check. When they came on and played, they blew everything so now they had network TV with no sound, which was a big problem. So, they passed this new law, I guess you could call it, where if the band did no sound check, they didn’t perform. So, we go to do the show, Bill Cosby was the host that night. Miles didn’t do a soundcheck, because he didn’t like doing soundchecks. We almost didn’t do the show because of that, but we did the show and the sound was good.

Emma Warren

Talking of sound, I feel like we missed our opportunity to listen to some music because there are so many things to talk to you about and we want to hear what you’re saying. But I feel like we owe it to everybody here to listen to some music as well. So, at this point in proceedings should we play something else? We can always play what you were going to play us?

Gary Bartz

This is my first album, entitled [Libra]. I am a Libra, and so the song is 4/4, but it’s got an implied 3/4 against it so the balance isn’t quite right.

(music: Gary Bartz – “Libra” / applause)

Om’Mas Keith

The personnel on that one?

Gary Bartz

My best friend Albert Dailey was on piano, one of the best pianists I ever worked with. Jimmy Owens was on trumpet, Richard Davis was on bass and Billy Higgins was on drums [applause).

Freddie Hubbard was supposed to be on that, but that is a whole other story. Let’s see, this one, this was the second album. This was for me very ambitious.

(music: Gary Bartz – “Another Earth” / applause)

Gary Bartz

That is called “Another Earth.” I had read somewhere about Beethoven, how, when he wrote his symphonies, he would write a light symphony, like the Pastoral, and then a heavy one, like the Eroica. So, he would go back and forth, so I started with that concept. I liked that concept, so I would do my first album, Libra, a light collection, a bunch of songs. Recordings to me are like books, they are “ear books.” So, a slow, light work, to me, like that is like a bunch of stories and this one, Another Earth, was like a novel. It was a concept, it was about life. I saw my first UFO – I’m serious – back in 1963. I had been looking at the skies and thinking about other life forms and waiting for them.

Emma Warren

What did you see in 1963?

Gary Bartz

I saw a UFO. It just looked like a star but it was moving in such a way as it actually made a figure eight, and that is what did it.

Emma Warren

Are they like… if you see one, do you see more?

Gary Bartz

I did see another. I have telescopes now, and that particular song was inspired by all of that. I had got my first telescope and I was looking up in the skies every night.

Emma Warren

So, what are your thoughts on that subject of aliens, extraterrestrials?

Gary Bartz

We all live in the same universe, so we can’t be aliens. It depends on how limited you want to think. People say, “I am living in New York,” and I’ll ask, “Where are you from?” They will say, “From Brooklyn.” Some people will say, “New York.” Some people will say, “The United States.” I say I’m from Earth.

Emma Warren

That’s you and Aristotle, then… when he was strolling around the streets of Greece, he would say, “I am from the world.”

Gary Bartz

It is how small you want to think. Some people never leave their neighborhood ,so that is where they think they are from.

Emma Warren

And also, this thing about an album as an ear book, what an interesting concept… I have never thought of it in that specific away, but definitely I’m going to listen to some ear books in a slightly different way when I get home. One of the things about the record, before you played it, you said that it was ambitions for you. What did you mean by that?

Gary Bartz

This piece that I wrote took up the whole side of the record – 22 minutes; actually, 23, 24. So, that, in itself, was ambitious. And the writing – I wrote all of the themes, all of the different themes, and I tried to connect them. To me, it was like a symphony for six horns, six pieces… one day I was studying symphonic forms, and I thought, “Why does a symphony have to always be an orchestra?” A symphony can be whatever you make it, so to me, that was a symphony. That’s why I said it was a little bit ambitious.

Om’Mas Keith

I think it attests to your ability to always think forward and see what is going on next or what should be next… transitionally… where should people be going instead of stagnant, static. You have got to move around. So, moving forward and being conceptual, it is very important to me to think of a clear divide between artists who are just cutting sides and artists deciding to do something, to paint a picture with the music. I find it interesting that you are using classical forms or classical structures as your way to go into the future. Looking back to move forward?

Gary Bartz

I was just reading this thing, and it was saying that part of the problem with a lot of the experimental musicians is that they started doing music that had no past. It just started right there, and so it had no foundation, so it didn’t really last. It has to bring the past, everything has to have a foundation. I think that is very important.

Om’Mas Keith

You can’t build a career without a foundation. You can’t build anything… So, are you kind of going to go chronologically?

Gary Bartz

So, that was the second one. I think maybe I will play something, Harlem Bush Music. I was living in Harlem – that’s my neighborhood in New York, and I started this band called NTU Troop… “NTU” is a Bantu word, a roots suffix, and it encompasses the philosophies of the arts. I wanted a band – this was an all-acoustic band. We had no electronics in this band, because I wanted us to be able to go out in the jungle and play, if we wanted to. To go out in the bush. You probably know this one.

(music: Gary Bartz – “Celestial Blues”)

Gary Bartz

That has been sampled a lot of times.

Om’Mas Keith

Getting funky! It starts getting funky in the ‘70s.

Gary Bartz

This was when I was with Miles I recorded that.

Om’Mas Keith

What do you think about that word “funk”? Is it cool to say “funk”? Is it cool to use that and do you like funk?

Gary Bartz

I love funk. Funk is my life, I love George Clinton and people like that, but what it really is is the blues. You can call it all these names, but it all stems from the blues, that is the essence. It is a folk music that is still alive. Jazz is dead, the word and everything. I think jazz music is dead, because it has lost its essence. I hear musicians playing so-called jazz and I can’t hear blues anywhere – they will play all night and I don’t hear blues. I remember I did one gig with a trumpeter Bill Hardman, and we were working with some younger guys and he got so frustrated that at the end of the night he said, “Goddamn it, we haven’t played the blues all night.” So, I said, “Let’s play one.” But they don’t even think of it, they don’t even think that that is where the music stems from – it is a folk music; it is music from the streets. That is why hip-hop right now is where we were in the ’40s… hip-hop is on the cutting edge. Whereas, in the so-called jazz field, they just recreating what has gone on before; there is nothing new happening.

Emma Warren

When you were recording that did you have the sense that you are trying to take it in a new direction or were you responding to a changing environment? Was that a sound that was happening or did you go for that sound in a particular way?

Gary Bartz

It was just something I was hearing and, like I say, because I love all forms of music. Music is music to me, so I have this and I want to incorporate that, and that is what I do. I don’t want to be in a box. That is what happens – you have all these musicians in their jazz box and they can’t get out, and I don’t want to be in a box. I used to practice with Eric Dolphy. He would go out in the woods and listen to the birds, take his flute and try to mimic the birds and things. Pharoah Sanders – actually that was Pharoah on the last record – Charles Tolliver, Reggie Workman, Stanley Cowell, Freddie Waits, that is who was on that one… But, Pharoah… we used to go out into the park and play our horns. We would go out and practice in the park and see how loud we could play. Just the Westside Highway in New York City, where the cars go… we would try and play so loud the drivers would turn and say, “What is that?” Which they never did. We couldn’t play that that loud.

Emma Warren

Obviously, that is a charming image that I now have of the two of you playing by a freeway. But is there something useful generally in taking your music or your instrument out of its normal environment and testing it, or playing it in a way that you wouldn’t normally?

Gary Bartz

When I’m practicing, a lot of times, if there is like a wall or a nice brick wall, I sit on my chair in the corner because the sound comes right back at me and I can hear it so clear. Sometimes you play in the bathroom and you hear the echo, you hear the reverb. So, it’s nice to play in different places and see what it sounds like. What made me recognize that it is, I would go and see Sonny Rollins and he was always walking, he would walk across the stage, he would walk around. I’d ask why he was walking, but he was listening to the way the horn sounded in different parts of the stage and different parts of the room, so I became cognizant of that.

Om’Mas Keith

He was doing his own little experiment, using the stage as a laboratory?

Gary Bartz

He is using the stage as a sound projector, I guess. Because, in those days, you didn’t have the microphones.

Om’Mas Keith

You find a place on stage where the resonant frequencies are such that you can project from a better stance. You think he is walking around crazy, but he is not, there is really something very special going on.

Gary Bartz

There is method to the madness.

Om’Mas Keith

What are some of the methods to your madness?

Gary Bartz

Hard work. I look at it like most people go to work eight hours a day and do their job. I should practice eight hours a day – that is a full work day. I don’t do it all the time, and it is really hard but it’s like getting in shape. I love boxing, and I think boxers probably are the most well-trained athletes. They have to do everything, so musically I think like that. If I’ve got a concert date or something, I really want to be up on, then I will go into training and start doing at least eight hours a day.

Emma Warren

I have a good friend, and she is an opera singer, and sometimes when she is preparing for something she will talk about getting a piece into her voice. I never understood what she meant and I asked her about it quite a lot, because it was just an idea that never occurred to me. Is that the actually the same thing with a piece of music, you have to get it into your head, into the instrument? What happens over and above learning a song?

Gary Bartz

I think each song has a key. Not a tonality key, but if you can find the secret to that song, then you understand that song and you completely know it. I have found that from a friend of mine, Grachan Moncur III, he got a hold of all of Thelonious Monk’s music and we used to go to these lofts in New York, where they had a loft scene. We would go to the lofts and stay there two, three, four days, and pitch in and buy food and sleep. There were always musicians coming in and you could play 24 hours a day, and we went through every song. So, I started studying Monk’s songs, and through studying his songs I realized that there is something about every great song – that if you learn that song, then you have added something. You’ve learned something, you’ve gained some knowledge, something you can use the rest of your career. So, that started me looking for the keys of how to unlock the song, because his songs were hard, even though a lot of them were simple. They were simple and hard at the same time. Like George Gershwin or any great composer – their songs have something that nobody ever heard before, which is what makes it a hit. People want to hear it over and over again.

Om’Mas Keith

We’re talking about repertoire, then… you’ve got to have that foundation and do your homework.

Emma Warren

Is that like repertoire over and above stuff that you would actually play?

Gary Bartz

Even talking about recording, some songs I have recorded and never played live, because some songs are just done for a record. Which is, like I said, about Miles – he couldn’t play those songs because they were just put together from lots of different things. So, he would never play them, but if he did play them, it would be a different way – that is what I like about live performances. I love doing both. I could just be happy doing one, but I’m happier doing both.

Emma Warren

So, some songs are for the studio and some songs are for performing live. Are there any songs that are just for you?

Gary Bartz

Just for me? Yeah. That nobody will ever hear.

Emma Warren

Are there lots of songs that are just yours, or maybe for like you and your closest?

Gary Bartz

What happens is that I fall in love with songs. Women and songs, but that’s another thing – I will go to any lengths to find a song. I was telling somebody the other day about a song I heard on a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie. I was up late at night, going through the channels, and they were dancing and I heard this melody [sings melody], and it was way low and he kept going back and forth. I said, “I have to find that melody. What is it?” And they didn’t have it at the end of the movie, because it’s an old movie. It took me about two years to find the song, but I eventually found it. I was asking everybody, humming it to people and they were saying, “It sounds familiar to me, but I’m not sure.” Finally, I’m watching The Three Stooges one night and Curly is sitting on a milk crate, humming the song [sings the same melody]. He sings, “Dreaming of you,” and Moe comes in and bam! “It’s ‘Thinking of You’!” I said, “Thank you!”

Om’Mas Keith

I think Emma was even alluding to a deeper sense of personal attachment to a song. Aretha Franklin has said that there are songs that she says she wouldn’t even perform.

Gary Bartz

I saw an interview and they were interviewing Aretha, and she was saying one of her most favorite songs was “The Makings of You” by Curtis Mayfield, which is one of mine, too. That’s a song that, right now, is very personal. What happens is, until I can find a way to do it with my personality, like you are saying, it has to get in me. It has had two or three different arrangements so far, and I played it a few times. We actually recorded it, but I’m not happy with it, and I’ve not found that way yet. But [Franklin] said, because they asked her, “How come you never recorded that song?” She said, “I love it too much.” So, some songs are that personal you would never do it for the public.

Emma Warren

I think that is a really special thing, and a useful thing for musicians to remember that not everything you do has to be for public consumption. There are some things that maybe you can keep. Maybe all musicians have a secret stash of songs just for them?

Gary Bartz

Let me play this for you, because this is different. This is also from this same album. This one’s a poem.

(music: Gary Bartz – “When Malindy Sings”)

Speaker: Gary Bartz

OK, that was a poem written by Paul Laurence Dunbar, who actually didn’t speak in dialect; he wrote his poems in dialect. Which is why I read it like that. It is about a slave who is being sold away from his family with his wife, and he is saying, “Don’t worry, I will come back one day.” He knew he never would never get back. They probably never saw each other [again]. But you didn’t hear piano. You could do these songs anywhere, and that’s what this particular band was about, NTU Troop. We could go in the middle of the desert and perform music. Because you had to have a piano player, you had to have guitar. We could have acoustic guitar, we could have the balafon, which were the early pianos, but that was the purpose of the group.

Om’Mas Keith

The voice is there, though. You are a vocalist, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy, Fats Waller, you like to sing. What is it about horn players and singers? What is it about singing to you as a horn player, what makes it so special to want to sing, to share your voice?

Gary Bartz

I think the horn is the same thing. I’ve been singing on the horn, and most of the horn players I know they will say, “Have you heard this song?” And they will sing it. You’re always singing. That is the next step, to really sing. I know Trane would love to sing. I actually heard Charlie Parker sing one time, and he had a voice like Billy Eckstine. He had one of those kind of voices. If I’m playing a song on the saxophone, I learned from the older musicians, I had to know the melody, I had to know the words. Even though I wasn’t really singing it, I needed to know the words, because I wouldn’t be able to read the song properly on the horn. Art Blakey was a drummer, but he knew all the words to all the songs, or to a lot of songs. Lester Young, the same way. So, I started learning the words early on, and so I guess that was the next step, to sing them with my voice.

Emma Warren

When did you make that transition in terms of what you’re recording? When did you first start singing in your recordings?

Gary Bartz

I guess, I was trying to get some message across, and it is harder when you’re not using words, and so I started using words. And that is when Andy started singing with the band, and I would help him. He didn’t really need help, but I would sing along with him.

Emma Warren

When you say “send messages” what do you mean?

Gary Bartz

The Harlem Bush Music record was a result of that. I came of age in the ’60s, and the political climate in the ’60s in the United States was very volatile. We lost leaders who were assassinated, leaders of the country were assassinated. I think there was a coup – not a bloodless one. And working with Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln… Max had done an album called We Insist! – Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite, which was banned in South Africa and other places, because of the message it was giving: Freedom. But there were some black students on the cover sitting at a lunch counter, which they were trying to integrate. My philosophy about that started from talking to Max. I would go by Max’s at night and you might see anybody – you might see Malcolm X, you might see Paul Robeson, you might see Adam Clayton Powell, you might see any politician. I got into the social scene, and that was some of the messages I was trying to portray on the Harlem Bush Music records. And it wasn’t all heavy, we did music about dancing and party songs. We did one song called “The Drinking Song.” You can find liquor stores on almost every corner in Harlem, which I didn’t think was a good thing. So that song addressed, you know, “You never will have a revolution while you’re drinking wine.”

Om’Mas Keith

That was the plan, to plant those in the community, essentially. That was part of the plan, a liquor store and a funeral parlor, and a church on every corner. Seeing that whole procedure, how America did people and seeing it go from ’50s, ’60s, ’70s. Now did the ’70s into the ’80s see you, in Los Angeles, in an even more transitional time – major label time, Capitol Records, Hollywood. You’ve done the whole gamut. [Could you] maybe play something from that time and elaborate on what that was all about, Hollywood? Because I lived there for some time and, there, it seems to be the order of the day that nothing has really changed… it is just different people. How was it for you out there?

Gary Bartz

It was exciting. I like Los Angeles. That’s one city I like to live in. I like 24-hour cities… I’m up all hours of the night, day and night, so if I need to go and get something... but no, it was a good music scene there.

Om’Mas Keith

Who did you interact with out there?

Gary Bartz

Like I said, Chaka Khan lived near me. The Mizells were producing and I was doing a lot of records with Donald Byrd, which they were producing. I asked them if they’d produce one of my things and they did. Let me play this one. This is my favorite, probably.

Gary Bartz

That was Syreeta Wright on there and, of course, I know everybody has mentioned this to me. I guess this is my most well-known song, and I like it too. I think you know what it’s going to be.

(music: Gary Bartz – “Music Is My Sanctuary”)

Om’Mas Keith

People have sampled you… people are using what you have created to make new energy, new life. A Tribe Called Quest, the Jungle Brothers, Cypress Hill… You get the requests in the mail?

Gary Bartz

I get the checks [laughs].

Om’Mas Keith

What is it like? Is it flattering for you?

Gary Bartz

It is. It has made me see, when you’re tying up contracts, because nowadays – I am so glad record labels are a thing of the past. But if you do happen to sign with them, record labels do have their part, they can get you a name, they can get you known. And if they want to, they can distribute your records. But that is about it. Prince found that out, and a lot of people find that out – once you have a name, you should sell records anyway, so then you can have your own label. I think that if you are a recording artist writing songs, you should have a publishing company. If you make records, you should have a record label. That is the way I feel, because the other people drop the ball.

Om’Mas Keith

Big companies drop the ball?

Gary Bartz

They were greedy. They tried to take all the money, and I have seen contracts… especially now because they didn’t see this technology coming. If the record labels had seen that technology of sampling, it would be a whole different thing. They would still own everything. But they didn’t see it, so now what they do in their contracts, they say, “We want all the rights…” I had one contract not too long ago, it was funny, they said, “We want all of your rights, in perpetuity, throughout the universe.” Throughout the universe! When they go to the moon, if they go to Mars, we have got this publishing. Please, man, you have got to be kidding. So, you have to be careful. They’re trying to cover their asses now, because they dropped the ball with CDs and sampling, they didn’t see that coming. If everybody has their own record label, you don’t have to worry about that. And it is so easy nowadays to have your own record label. It’s too easy. It’s too easy not to do it.

(music: Gary Bartz – unknown)

[Applause]