Midway through an eclectic and exuberant set of music on June 28 at An die Musik in Baltimore’s Mount Vernon neighborhood, Charm City native and jazz luminary Gary Bartz paused to tell a story. “People play this song and sing it with the original lyrics. We’re going to play it and change the lyrics to tell you of some memories.” The quartet began to play the standard “Is That All There Is?” with all of the playfulness, daring and humming chemistry they had displayed in the previous numbers of the set. Australian native Barney MacCall’s piano traveled seamlessly from bittersweet Elington-inspired melodies to speedy and soaring bop runs. Bassist James King anchored the quartet, articulating solid and expertly chosen three and four note phrases that served as a sort of root system for the group, connecting the drums, saxophone and piano into a living organism. Greg Bandy’s drums propelled the group by manifesting the dictum “less is more.” His distilling of a drum fill to its simplified essence or leaving out of a tom-tom hit where one expected to hear it granted the compositions space, breath and uplift. And finally there was Gary Bartz’s alto saxophone, which, in keeping with our metaphor, was like the blossoming flowers upon the branches – melodic phrases bursting forth like the congruence of petals that form a flower.
Gary
Bartz sang “Is That All There Is,” his voice possessing the weathered presence
that one would expect to hear in a 73-year-old musician who has played with
Charles Mingus and Miles Davis. As the chorus approached, the music reduced and
the bandleader told the story of his earliest memory. He was two years old and playing in the
living room of his family’s house in Baltimore, as his great-grandmother stood
in the kitchen cooking a pot of beans. “I heard her fall down and saw her
laying on the floor of the kitchen. My parents returned home and asked me where
great-grandma was. I said that she was in the kitchen, sleeping. My parents
entered the kitchen and saw her. And I said (and here Bartz began to sing and
the music returned full on), ‘Is that all there is?’ “
It is odd that this
story of viewing death for the first time served as the preamble to the chorus
refrain, “Is That All There Is?” Death is so immense and incomprehensible to the
small child that the response, “Is that all there is?” seems weirdly apt. And
this - the union of seemingly incompatible parts - gets to the essence of great
jazz, like that performed by the Gary Bartz Quartet in the high ceilinged room
with the tall, arched windows that warm Saturday night in Baltimore in late
June.
Chicago reed player
Douglas Ewart has stated of jazz, “This is music of collective thought.”
Throughout the evening, we heard this collective thought in full force. Several
of the night’s pieces came from Gary Bartz’s most recent release, “Coltrane
Rules - Tao of a Music Warrior.” These pieces (some of which are Coltrane
compositions) feature the spiritual seeking characterized by a stark saxophone
ascending in dizzying spirals over the moving ship formed by the piano, bass
and drums – a form forged by the John Coltrane Quartet and carried on since by
many disciples. It was within this structure that we heard the simultaneous and
collective improvisation alluded to above. While the bass maintained a blues-based
ostinato and peppered variations upon it, the piano endlessly unspooled chord
voicings – tinged now with the Impressionist colors of Debussy, now with the
sly impasto of Fats Waller. Bandy’s drumming, meanwhile, was in constant
conversation with these moving parts: a cymbal splash to acknowledge a piano
accent, a quick snare roll as a tip of the hat to a saxophone flourish.
Gary Bartz -
looking stately in a gunmetal blue suit with a light green shirt, his curly
gray locks combed straight back and cascading onto his shoulders – led the band
on alto sax, soprano sax or vocals and mesmerized the audience. Writing of the
late Chicago tenorman Fred Anderson, the poet Sterling Plumpp has said, “He
believes art is the process of knowing one’s axe (instrument), as exemplified
by one’s ability to invent a personal language that articulates its infinite
layers of prophecy.” This, exactly, has been the pursuit of Gary Bartz for more
than 60 years. A “personal language (articulating) infinite layers of prophecy”
describes precisely what the enthralled audience heard that night at An die
Musik. In his liner notes to Coltrane Rules,
Gary Bartz defines himself as a warrior involved in a lifelong struggle to
bring people healing through music. At the show, Gary Bartz healed and provoked
with the power of his tone imbued with many decades of artistic and spiritual seeking,
dating all the way back to his earliest memory involving his great-grandmother
in the kitchen in Baltimore.
Baltimore, Maryland. June, 2014
