For 82-Year-Old Jazz Saxophonist Gary Bartz, ‘Music Is My Religion’

This story is part of the series 8 Over 80, celebrating artists and cultural figures over the age of 80 who continue to shape the greater Bay Area.

G

ary Bartz wants to go to the playground. Walking along 17th Street in San Francisco, he spies a swing set in Franklin Square and clambers up the park stairs, carrying his saxophone.

In his 82 years, Bartz has released dozens of albums under his own name, and hundreds more as a sideman. He’s performed thousands of concerts with jazz luminaries like Miles Davis, Pharoah Sanders and Art Blakey, all over the globe. In August, three weeks before we meet, the NEA named him a 2024 Jazz Master, a prestigious national honor.

But today, he’s just returned from a marathon three-week recording session in Los Angeles, and he’s ready to unwind. At the playground, he hops on a swing, throws his head back with a wide smile and starts singing: “Fairy tales can come true / It can happen to you / If you’re young at heart…”

The passage of time, this inevitable thing that might nag at other octogenarians, comes to a halt. For a moment, singing of love and life and dreams, Bartz is a kid again, transported back to his childhood in Baltimore. When he reaches the end of the song, he stands up, brushes the dirt from the swing’s chains off his hands, and asks out loud to no one in particular:

“Who’s 82 now?!”

There may be a reason for Bartz’s carefree mood these days. In addition to the NEA honor, which comes with a $25,000 grant, his music is undergoing a renaissance among younger listeners. Part of it is his recent collaboration with Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad (from A Tribe Called Quest) in their Jazz Is Dead series, which introduced Bartz to a new audience amidst a growing crossover of jazz and hip-hop.

But mainly, it’s that Bartz has always made music that reflects the emotional, spiritual and political realms of the world. Everyone else is just catching up, is all.

‘Spontaneous composition’ in the Bay Area

For a college professor — he’s taught at Oberlin for over two decades — Bartz is quicker to admit what he doesn’t know than what he does. He says he can’t define love, exactly. He doesn’t know what happens to us in the afterlife, only that man-made religions exist to console those who refuse to see reality. As for music, this thing he’s spent his life studying, “we don’t know where it comes from, and we don’t know where it goes.”

He does know about the things he can control, though. On his days at home, Bartz sometimes runs or bikes around Lake Merritt or Lafayette Reservoir. He tries to stay on his diet, and listens to Frank Sinatra “about every day.” Most of the time, he practices his horn: running through his compositions, or spontaneously creating new ones. Other people, he says, foolishly call it “improvising.”

“But we’re not improvising. We’re composing, all the time,” he says about soloing. “Improvising means you’re making stuff up. You don’t study something for 50 years just to go make stuff up.”

In those 50 years, Bartz kept being drawn to the Bay Area. He closed out the final show at the old Yoshi’s in North Oakland, appeared regularly at the Keystone Korner in San Francisco, and recorded prolifically at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley. He even tells a story of crossing paths with Bob Marley at a live radio broadcast session in Sausalito. “There’s so much great music that has come out of here,” he says. “It’s always been a very fertile place for me.”

Six years ago, Bartz moved to a house on the border of Oakland and Emeryville to be closer to family. He admits to a touch of nomadism, suggesting he may not stay forever. But in his time living in the Bay Area, he’s become part of the scene on major stages like the Kuumbwa Jazz Center and the San Jose Jazz Festival.

At the SFJAZZ Center in January, Bartz appeared at a tribute to the late pianist McCoy Tyner, in whose band he performed for many years. (“He was composing music at the highest level,” Bartz says.) On tunes like “Contemplation,” Bartz soloed on stage — or rather, spontaneously composed — with more imagination, technique and spirit than many musicians half his age.

In June of this year, Bartz again paid tribute to a recently departed friend, who he calls “my brother”: the saxophone giant Pharoah Sanders. At the Healdsburg Jazz Festival, Bartz performed Sanders landmarks like “The Creator Has a Master Plan,” and stepped to the microphone to sing the pensive “Colors,” with its poetic lyrics about pushing aside the misery of life, and inviting happiness and joy.

Hearing the future

Bartz was just six when he heard Charlie Parker for the first time, and “it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever heard,” he says. He remembers thinking to himself: that’s what I want to do with my life.

Five years later, during which he listened studiously to the jazz greats of the day, his parents bought him an alto saxophone. (His life goal was aided by the fact that his father, Floyd, ran a jazz club in Baltimore.) After attending Juilliard, he packed off to New York, where he hooked up with jazz drum giant Max Roach and, at age 24, joined Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. While stringing gigs together, he sometimes slept on the subway.

By the time Miles Davis asked Bartz to join his band, in 1970, he’d already played with the likes of Charles Mingus, Roy Ayers, Eric Dolphy and Woody Shaw. But his time with Miles, captured on records like Live-Evil and The Cellar Door Sessions, was an experience like no other.

“Miles could hear the future,” Bartz says. “That’s the job of any artist, to be able to see or hear the future. Something that’s never been heard before. That’s what we’re all looking for.”

Listening to Bartz’s own albums from the early 1970s, one gets a glimpse of his version of the future. On 1971’s Harlem Bush Music—Uhuru, made with his group NTU Troop, blues and ramshackle proto-funk mix with avant-garde jazz and the music of Central and West Africa. Lyrics sung plainly by either Bartz or vocalist Andy Bey cover topics like Vietnam (“Vietcong”), life in the cosmos (“Celestial Blues”), conscientious objection to war (“Uhuru Sasa”), and the emotional abrasion of being Black in America (“Blue (A Folk Tale)”).

At the same time, Bartz also conveyed a playful side, as heard on the later tracks “Whasaname” and “Dozens (The Sounding Song),” which refers to the one-upping game of insults which strongly influenced early hip-hop. (Rap is often a dividing line among generations, but Bartz understood it immediately: “When they asked Rakim where he got his flow, he said ‘I got my flow from listening to John Coltrane.’ So that should tell you something right there.”)

Bartz has also drawn on the words of poets, like Paul Laurence Dunbar for “Parted,” and Langston Hughes for the rhythmic, reflective “I’ve Known Rivers.” The latter is a highlight in Bartz’s catalog, and an ode to a community of people that spans the Congo to the Mississippi. Its final line is a meditation on age and experience: “My soul has grown deep like the rivers.”

The world is still catching up to Gary Bartz, but to write so soulfully, so young, I gather Bartz was also catching up to himself. He first recorded “I’ve Known Rivers” in France when he was 33 years old. Almost 50 years later, after living in New York, Italy, Spain, and Los Angeles, I ask how he views modern-day America.

“Well, our laws are based on a false premise, which is that color of your skin makes a race. That’s a dumb premise,” he says. “There’s only one human race. I mean, I’ve never seen a different one. Little kids know it. They have to be taught different, either on purpose, or just by society. I found out by growing up in a segregated city.”

With so much lived experience, I wonder: Does he feel 82?

“Physically, I do, sometimes,” Bartz says. “Mentally, I see myself the same as I’ve always seen myself. But when I look in the mirror, I say, ‘Who is he?’”

Staying devout

A British reporter once asked Charlie Parker for his religious affiliation. “I am a devout musician,” Parker replied. Bartz likes that concept, and calls himself a born-again musician, “because there were times that I forsook music, and didn’t realize how important it really was.”

Bartz tells me if he could go back in time and give advice to himself at age 20, he’d say: “Be careful.”

Drugs were rampant in New York jazz circles at the time. Heroin, especially. If you did it, you were immediately connected to other musicians who did it too; people like Art Blakey, Kenny Dorham and Philly Joe Jones. Bartz did it, and naturally got hooked. It lasted on and off for years. “I endangered myself,” Bartz says.

Once, a friend asked Bartz, “Who do you play music for?” “It was like a koan,” he says. “It took me a while to understand even the question: Who do I play music for?”

He says he spent much of the 1970s trying to answer the question. He got close to an answer in 1977, when he switched gears stylistically and recorded the song “Music is My Sanctuary.” Released on Capitol Records, it became one of his better known commercial singles. But originally, it had a different title.

“For me,” Bartz says, “music is my religion.”