#gary bartz

During the pagan hours of an otherwise uneventful Harlem pre-dawn in 1963, Gary Bartz glimpsed a galactic mystery that conventional aeronautics could not explain. Only a few weeks prior, the nascent alto saxophone virtuoso had acquired his first telescope to pursue a newfound passion for astronomy. The purchase was already yielding dividends.

“I saw a UFO,” the composer and Miles Davis collaborator (among many others), recalled in a 2008 interview with the Red Bull Music Academy. “It looked like a star, but it was moving in such a way as it actually made a figure eight.”

The recent Juilliard graduate’s fascination with the heavens began with astrology, but the then 22-year-old quickly realized that those celestial sketches were just photographs of the sky as captured during a specific orbit. Why bother with the rough blueprint when you could witness the entire electromagnetic spectrum in its full glory?

By day, Bartz honed his craft and collaborated with future legends at Charles Mingus’ Jazz Workshop. By night, solitary stargazing explorations from his uptown apartment offered pathways into distant realms of the universe. Once and for all, it confirmed to the Baltimore native that human mortals were merely support columns in a much grander divine architecture. When he spied this unidentified aerial phenomenon, Bartz finally understood reality — unbound by the gravitational rules that arbitrarily govern planet earth.

The truth was out there. It was Bartz’s responsibility to discover it, and convert those epiphanies into sound. The interregnum between the UFO sighting and the June 1968 recording of his first masterpiece, Another Earth, ranks among the most turbulent in American history. Just listing the ruptures and tragedies of those first six months of ’68 induces Forrest Gump soundtrack flashbacks.

In January, the North Vietnamese launched the Tet Offensive. The next month, Walter Cronkite turned against the war on national TV. March brought a new dawn of Black power activism on campus, marked by Howard University students shutting down the school during anti-war protests targeting its ROTC program and lack of an adequately Afrocentric curriculum. In April, Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination set off race riots in Pittsburgh, Detroit, Boston, D.C. and Bartz’s hometown of Baltimore. The same week that LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act, the Black Panthers and the Oakland police fought a violent gunbattle. It bled into June, when Robert Kennedy was murdered during a victory rally and Bartz committed some of the most searching saxophone testimonials to ever ascend.

During a 30-day stretch at the start of an infamously hot summer, Bartz played on minor and major masterpieces from Roy Ayers (Stoned Soul Picnic), Max Roach (Members, Don’t Git Weary) and Charles Tolliver (Paper Man). But his creative apogee was Another Earth, a psychic teleportation accompanied by Tolliver (trumpet), Stanley Cowell (piano), Reggie Workman (bass), Freddie Waits (drums) and the tenor bodhisattva liturgies of Pharoah Sanders. In a welter of mass upheaval, Bartz responded with four cosmically-slanted originals and “Lost in the Stars,” a Kurt Weill cover.

These miniature symphonies bridge the gap between earthly duress and the eternal desire to discover a better world: one unburdened by bigotry, greed and gravity. As Bartz himself says on the back cover: “This music is dedicated to life whenever, wherever, and however it may occur.”

While overlooked at the moment of its release in 1969, Bartz’s first opus has become a foundational part of the late ’60s avant-jazz canon. It’s both a continuation of the interstellar divinations of John Coltrane’s last years and a prelude to the Afro-Futurist mothership connections that defined ’70s funk (and Bartz’s own celestial blues experiments with his NTU Troop). Released on Milestone Records, Another Earth fuses virtuosic hard bop with astral free jazz, building on the synapse-shattering traditions of Sonny Rollins and Ornette Coleman and presaging the spiritual jazz seances soon pioneered by Alice Coltrane and Sanders. There is even a song called “U.F.O.,” a half-decade before Sun Ra decreed that space is the place.

Before Bartz transcended the Milky Way, apprenticeships in Baltimore and Harlem beckoned. Born in 1940, he was raised in a still heavily segregated, mid-Atlantic city renowned for producing Billie Holiday and Cab Calloway. His sharp political sensibilities and desire for liberation were incubated in the inequities of Black and white swimming pools, tennis courts, water fountains and movie theaters. At a young age, he realized his mother, who was particularly fair-skinned, couldn’t try on clothes in the department stores whenever her son was around.

“As a kid nobody sat me down and said, ‘Look, this is why this is,’” Bartz said in his RBMA interview. “I just noticed it and thought it is very curious and wondered why, and later I found out.”

At age six, Bartz heard his first Charlie Parker solo and became an acolyte. His father’s youngest brother was nicknamed “Sharp Bartz” for his sartorial flair and penchant for bringing back the hottest jazz records from New York. Whenever he visited his grandmother’s house, where his uncle lived, the boy was awed by bebop classics from Parker, Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie.

“I heard this one [Parker] record and it just got me,” Bartz told RBMA. “I just said — I didn’t know whether it was a trumpet or a trombone or what it was, but I said — ‘I want to do that.’”

For the next five years, Bartz begged his parents to buy him a saxophone. At 11, they finally acquiesced. Each Sunday, the family attended a church where his mother played piano and Bartz unleashed his first solos. During the week, the budding talent practiced and caught shows at Baltimore’s famed Royal Theatre, including performances by Fats Domino, Little Richard, Jackie Wilson and Louis Jordan. But the one most seared into his memory was a performance he couldn’t actually witness in full.

In 1955, Parker came to Baltimore to play Club Tijuana, which happened to be around the corner from where Bartz grew up. Too young to get in, he snuck out every night and waited outside the venue to meet his idol. He spoke to Johnny Hodges, whom John Coltrane once called “the world’s greatest living saxophone player,” but Parker never materialized. Shrewdly lingering in an adjacent french fry joint with a swinging door opening up to the bandstand, the teenager could hear but not see one of Parker’s final performances.

When he wasn’t gigging in a high school dance band, Bartz’s father took him out to the clubs to participate in local jam sessions. That was where he first met Coltrane and Roach. But his real education came after 1957, when he moved to New York to attend Juilliard. Even then, musicians claimed that the post-war peak was over — the time when 52nd Street was fully alive with brass instruments booming from smoky rooms into the sour early morning light.

Bartz was there that infamous night in 1959 when the police assaulted Miles Davis at Birdland. He absorbed the dazzling strains emanating from fabled Harlem nightclubs like Small’s Paradise, Barron’s Club and Count Basie’s Lounge. Most Mondays, Bartz partook in Mingus’ improvised big band workshops at the Village Gate, sitting in the saxophone section alongside Eric Dolphy and Rahsaan Roland Kirk. But his first break actually occurred in Baltimore, where his father and his friends had purchased a jazz club. One weekend, Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers were booked; when Bartz’s father discovered Blakey needed a new saxophonist, he told his son to take the train down and sit in. He immediately got the job.

In the years that followed his ’63 extraterrestrial encounter, Bartz made a name for himself as a rising star in Blakey and Roach’s bands. He attended civil rights marches and followed Malcolm X around Harlem. The schedule was always the same. He’d leave the newspaper Muhammad Speaks around 4 p.m. every day and come into the Shabazz restaurant off 116th and Lennox.

“He was such a spiritual person,” Bartz told RBMA. “I was never around Martin Luther King, but the two people that I happen to have the pleasure to be around, to me, that had a Christ-like aura: Malcolm was one, John Coltrane was the other.”

When Coltrane died in 1967, Bartz was one of his first apostles to expand upon his meditations. In his late 20s (and now), Bartz abhorred commercial expectations and the constricting boundaries of genre. He hated the phrase “jazz,” preferring to call his expeditions the blues, or ideally, just music. The music was rooted in Black power politics, but he maligned the constructs of race, reminding anyone who would listen that we’re all human. So when it came time to follow up his 1968 debut, Libra, he riffed on a concept from one of his heroes, Beethoven.

“[Beethoven] would write a light symphony like the Pastoral and then a heavy one, like the Eroica. He would go back and forth; I started with that concept,” Bartz told RBMA. “Libra [was] a light collection… a bunch of stories, and Another Earth was like a novel. It was a concept, it was about life. I saw my first UFO back in 1963. I had been looking at the skies and thinking about other life forms and waiting for them.”

This tribute to both existential and interplanetary mysteries was met with a redoubled dedication to technique. In addition to his daily saxophone devotionals, Bartz acquired a piano, which gave him regular access to the instrument for the first time since his Juilliard days. The idea was to aid his ability as a composer, but the bonus result was that his practice on the keys aided his speed and dexterity on the alto.

The evidence is exquisitely clear on the title track, a 23-minute vessel that occupies the entirety of Side A. The theme of each suite was written by Bartz, with the aim to interweave the grand sweep of life with the perpetual motion of the heavenly firmament.

“It was symphony for six horns, six pieces,” Bartz told RBMA. “One day I was studying symphonic forms and 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.”

The symphony marked a first culmination after decades of study and rigor. You can hear the hours that Bartz spent woodshedding with Dolphy, who was famed for taking a flute into the woods to mimic the birds. Bartz’s bright and airy alto blasts perfectly complement the dark elysian starbursts of Sanders. It was Sanders who taught Bartz to master the circular breathing technique during regular practice sessions at Riverside Park, where they’d try to play so loudly that the drivers on the West Side Highway would turn around to say, “What is that?” No one ever did.

In its epic ambition and execution, “Another Earth” captures a grandeur worthy of Hubble. In the original liner notes, he calls it “a sextet in three uninterrupted movements.”

Beginnings: conditions being right, life is formed. Endings: undetermined factors can eliminate it in a flicker of a star. Beginnings: there will always be life somewhere.

You hear brass fanfare — a new solar system unveiled that gently lilts into a springtime ballad. The exuberance and joy of childhood come to mind. Or maybe you feel a welcoming sun offering life to those planets lucky enough to enjoy it. Bartz’s sax sings with dulcet grace, a flexible middle register dropping and soaring with precision and command. It is the instrumental equivalent of the figure eights from the flying saucer figure spotted a half-decade earlier.

During the 20-plus minutes of “Another Earth,” you catch the stardust of Coltrane, as well as waltz, gospel and rocket journeys into infinite dimensions. Sanders sounds like he’s discovered previously uncharted constellations; Bartz charts sacred hymns from those same masses of rock, fire and air. The rest of the band anchors the composition with judicious restraint and sunglasses-at-night swing. Even the improvisations move with esoteric intention.

Side B opens with “Dark Nebula,” a slowly rising, post-bebop volitation named after an opaque area in the sky that scientists once assumed to be an abyss. In the years leading up to Another Earth, they realized that nebulae were actually patches of space gas blocking the stars blinking behind them. In his solos, Bartz conjured the familiar notion of how solving a mystery sometimes leads to a deeper awareness of how little we actually know. “U.F.O.” is a jaunty up-tempo blues bounce in conversation with Thelonious Monk. While “Lost in the Stars” was selected because of its lyrical accordance to the album’s themes, Bartz was specifically struck by this stanza from the musical’s lyricist, Maxwell Anderson:

Before Lord God made the sea and the land, He held all the stars in the palm of his hand, And they ran through his fingers like grains of sand, And one little star fell alone.

The finale, “Perihelion and Aphelion,” was inspired by the points in a planet’s orbit when it’s nearest and farthest from the sun. By shifting tempos from a medium waltz to a rollicking 4/4, Bartz channeled the increased speed of orbit as a planet approaches the star.

Perhaps there was some irony that Bartz’s gift for bridging worlds might have initially led Another Earth to slip into the void. It wasn’t as self-consciously avant-garde as Dolphy or Albert Ayler; its melodies weren’t slick enough to be comfort food for the masses. It was accessible but still abstruse, an underground record for serious heads overshadowed by the proliferation of genius that defined the Aquarian age.

Miles Davis noticed, though. A year after Another Earth’s release, he tapped Bartz to play in his band. You can hear his towering alto solos on the monumental Live-Evil (captured in full on the Cellar Door sessions). And Bartz similarly glowed on McCoy Tyner’s 1970 classic, Expansions. With the introduction of his own politically radical blues ensemble, the NTU Troop, Bartz again evolved, thundering with black-gloved poetics that could stand tall next to The Watts Prophets and The Last Poets.

In the course of Bartz’s career, he has experienced several renaissances. In the early ’90s, A Tribe Called Quest sampled his “Gentle Smiles (Saxy)” for The Low End Theory’s “Butter.” Later on, Black Sheep, Jurassic 5 and Casual repurposed NTU Troop’s spiritual jazz jam, “Celestial Blues.” Two full decades hence, the Jazz is Dead collective, helmed by Adrian Younge and Tribe’s Ali Shaheed Muhammad, recruited Bartz to be part of its Jazz is Dead series, an ongoing project to cut records with nearly every still-living 20th century jazz great.

In its timeless ability to reflect and transcend terrestrial limitations, Another Earth offers a singularly mystic panorama. While a civilization burned, Bartz found a temporary escape, discovering unspoken truths and supernal possibilities, rarely achieved then or now.

In the original liner notes, Bartz’s wife Maxine wrote: “This music is a testimonial. It is akin to the Black Baptist tradition of standin’ up and testifyin’ to the glory of the Lord — an act of humility and an emotional expression of appreciation for some miracle, great or small; or simply a plea for mercy. The tradition is as old as Africa, where oblations to the gods are manifold and frequent, serving as reminders of man’s comparatively small role in the cosmic scheme.”