Bright Moments: Gary Bartz

One of jazz culture’s many graces is that a musician’s value—his or her relevance, to use a deeply flawed term—has little to do with age. A brilliant example of this is Gary Bartz, who seems to have hit upon yet another apex. At 78, the Baltimore-born, Oakland-based saxophonist, composer, and educator is in a rare position to be all things to all jazz people.

To start, he’s one of the most reliable living narrators of the music’s history, an intermediary between the bop and fusion generations with oodles of memoir-worthy firsthand accounts. A nice haul of those tales appears below (and is expanded further on JazzTimes.com), but this interview yielded much more: a recollection of the time Bartz’s hero Jackie McLean taught him to never leave his horn with a tough-love prank; the memory of meeting Bud Powell, after a Brooklyn club owner thought the genius pianist was a vagabond, and playing with him; anecdotes from Ornette Coleman’s historic Five Spot stand; and reflections on Sun Ra’s sprawling two-night Omniversal Symphonic on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in 1984. To name but a few.

Lately, as artists like Kamasi Washington and an ascendant London scene have made jazz’s longstanding relationships to R&B, social justice, Afrocentric spirituality, cosmology, and DJ culture seem new, Bartz’s status as a crucial forebear has become clearer. His performances at this year’s NYC Winter Jazzfest—especially a 50th-anniversary celebration of his LP Another Earth at Le Poisson Rouge, featuring Pharoah Sanders—felt like showcase gigs by a breakout star. And for good reason. Bartz’s playing continues to deliver a distinctive meld of the many lodestars he’s spent a lifetime studying, among them Bird, Trane, Ornette, Wayne Shorter, and Jackie Mac.

At New York’s Blue Note in March, Bartz joined Charles Tolliver, Vijay Iyer, Buster Williams, and Lenny White to mark the half-century anniversary of Tolliver’s . Again and again, regally dressed and gripping his alto in a power stance near the edge of the stage, he offered perfectly charted lines that surged in fervor until the applause and smartphone cameras rose to meet them. A couple