Hearing the Future: A Conversation with Gary Bartz on ‘The Eternal Tenure of Sound: Damage Control’

As a vehicle to facilitate group improvisation – or collaborative creation in the moment, as some artists refer to it- musicians have long relied on the concept of a “head” piece. A precomposed melody, the head provides a set baseline for free creation. Often, these pieces have been standards, frequently reused songs penned by others.  This tradition of using standards as a starting point goes as far back as Turner Layton and Henry Creamer’s “After You’ve Gone” in 1918. Chances are, most readers have not heard of this song outside of the subsequent covers by people like Ella Fitzgerald or Louis Armstrong. And herein lies one of the problems of these pieces – often their origins become forgotten as more compelling subsequent versions eclipse the originals. As another example, “Softly as in a Morning Sunrise” is a fairly well-known tune, but its source – The New Moon, an arcane 1928 operetta about pirates and romance in New Orleans –  is hardly memorable. Many of these songs of overlooked origin make up what we sometimes call the Great American Songbook and come from the 1920s to the 1950s. Even today, most standards come from this period so long ago. But why? Songwriters have certainly continued to write memorable tunes in the ensuing decades. Gary Bartz’s The Eternal Tenure of Sound: Damage Control is a cogent statement that perhaps we should broaden the Great American Songbook beyond people like George Gershwin and Cole Porter. Why can’t it include Maurice and Verdine White? Curtis Mayfield? Michael Henderson? They’re certainly equally American and their works arguably more necessary. 

In challenging the status quo on the Great American Songbook, Bartz engages in a subtle act of protest. Damage Control, the first in a planned trilogy, is credited to the saxophonist’s NTU Troop. This ensemble name is not one the NEA Jazz Master has recorded under since the 1970s. The older recordings were inherently political in nature, with songs like “I’ve Known Rivers” celebrating Black identity and “Vietcong” protesting war. By contrast, Damage Control seems a bit tamer at first blush, focusing on slow jams and smooth grooves. However, appearances can be deceiving. In presenting these songs, ones overwhelmingly by Black composers, Bartz further expresses the need to celebrate Black excellence in the arts when it is far too often understated.

But Damage Control is also more than a collection of covers of great songs by Black composers. Bartz’s criteria for selecting the pieces were wholly personal in nature. They are the songs he finds himself relaxing to or singing in the shower. Bartz’s love for the songs is evident in the story of the album’s creation – he stepped away from teaching and cashed in his 401(K) to make the recording a reality – and one can also hear his deep passion for them. The fire that burnt through the leader’s alto saxophone when playing Miles Davis to McCoy Tyner to Art Blakey remains at the forefront of Damage Control, as vibrant and lively as always. However, the album also displays a quiet and subdued maturity that can come only from an artist in the later years of his life. This element is particularly evident when he chooses to sing. While Bartz is not an acclaimed vocalist, the warmth, rawness, and sheer humanity of his voice shine through. This is especially true on Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Fantasy,” where his repetition of “Music can’t let me down” evokes shadows of his Mizzell Brothers-produced Music is My Sanctuary (Capitol, 1977), along with almost a half-century of further reflection and thought on the true significance of music.

Damage Control also underscores the futility of classifying music to preset stylistic norms. As Bartz states in our conversation, he has no need for genre, and the album shows this well. Most would probably identify the pieces as R&B jams, but the album’s versions also take cues from the works of Charlie Parker and John Coltrane. The newest incarnation of the NTU Troop – Bartz with producer Om’mas Keith, drummer Kassa Overall, pianist Barney McAll – similarly straddles music to which purists may assign those two aforementioned labels, as well as the one of hip hop. So too for the several impressive guest artists on the recording, including Terrace Martin, Kamasi Washington, Brandee Younger, Keyon Harrold, Theo Croker, and Nile Rodgers.

Perhaps most of all, Damage Control provides a sonic refuge in a world of chaos. We sat down with Bartz to discuss the album and his thoughts on the importance of music more generally. 

PostGenre: You cashed out your 401 (k) and stepped away from teaching to fund the creation of Eternal Tenure of Sound: Damage Control. What gave you the confidence to take those risks to make the recording?

Gary Bartz: Well, if I don’t have confidence in myself, how can I expect other people to have that confidence in me if they release my music? But the main thing is that I had stepped away from the record industry because it’s not kind to musicians. I had determined that I had nothing if I couldn’t own myself. I was not going to give myself to somebody else. 

PG: So, you stepped away from recording for a while, starting in the 1980s, before you ultimately came out with your own label, OYO, which stands for “Own Your Own.” 

GB: I realized when I was signed to a label that they put you in the mindset of only releasing, at most, two albums a year. So, I was only making two albums a year.  I could have easily done ten a year and only given the label two of them. That would have let me keep the other eight. But the labels create a mindset that you need to go with the label, even though there are only two things a label can do for a musician. One is that they can get your name out there because they have the machine. The other is that they sell your records. They definitely don’t do well with that one because they found that this particular music has a long shelf life and doesn’t need to be sold right away. 

This music actually appreciates in value rather than depreciates. So, the labels focus on the product that’s hot right now. The recording industry is the only industry that doesn’t have money set aside for the future because the major players are not interested in the future other than owning masters. 

As far as selling product, they’re going to sell whatever’s hot. They don’t care beyond that. Whatever is hot is what they’re all going to jump on.

PG: With the rise of the internet and things like Bandcamp, do you feel the music industry has gotten better or worse as time has progressed?

GB: Oh, it’s gotten worse. It’s gotten worse. It’s gotten better in the sense that we have more ways to go around the major record labels. They can still stop a lot of things because they are the industry, so to speak. When you’re on your own, you’re like a mom-and-pop store. The competition is rough. But at least I own my music and have something to pass on to my kids instead of the major labels owning it and the executives and owners of those companies passing my stuff on to their kids.

PG: Damage Control is the first in a three-volume series. What can you share about the rest of the series?

GB: Well, the second one is going to be a real NTU Troop album. It will be a little more political than Damage Control. I’ve also been working with Hiatus Kaiyote to recreate some of the NTU Troop songs, which may be on the next album. The third one will be a mix of both albums.

PG: As far as Damage Control specifically, it is your first record with a band named NTU Troop in over four decades. What was behind the decision to tie this album to the group’s older works instead of adopting a new band name?

GB: Well, I didn’t insist on using the name NTU Troop for this album, but it was always in my head that this band is the NTU Troop. To me, the NTU Troop is not just the musicians but also the people who come to see us. The audience is part of NTU Troop, too. That concept started at the club, The East, in Brooklyn. New York. 

But going back even earlier, growing up, I used to see a stick at home. It was made of metal, long, maybe a foot long, with a ball on the end. It looked like a drumstick. My parents brought it back from their vacation in Atlantic City. I asked them what it was, and they told me it was a souvenir from, I think, the Cotton Club in Atlantic City. I asked them what it was for, and they said you can use it to tap along with the music. That gave me the idea of having the audience play along with the band. So, at The East, I would encourage the audience to bring tambourines or whatever other percussion instruments they had. And that kind of started the process. And that’s really what NTU Troop was and still is. 

PG: So, because of that aspect of audience involvement, do you feel you approach the group differently live than in the studio, as on this album? 

GB: Yeah, studio recordings are totally different from live. Totally.

PG: The songs on Damage Control are ones that you find yourself singing or listening to relax. Do you feel that connection to the songs changes how you approach them compared to something like a common “jazz” standard?

GB: No, no. These are songs that I love. They’re songs that relax me and put me in a good frame of mind. I just enjoyed putting this music together. [Pianist] Barney McCall and I worked with Om’mas [Keith,] who produced the record. Barney has been playing with me for about twenty years or so. I had a concept of how I wanted the songs to go before we started working on them. We didn’t want to do them the same way they were done initially. I wanted to bring my style and way of thinking and looking at music. And so that’s why you hear a lot of so-called John Coltrane changes. You’ll hear many things that you wouldn’t necessarily hear on an Anita Baker or Debarge record.

PG: One thing that is great about the album’s song selection is that a lot of the songs are from the 1970s or very early 1980s, a period when some critics said that the music died. It may not have been referred to as “jazz” and instead things like “R&B” or “funk,” but great Black music, that continued the lineage before it, was still being made. 

GB: Yeah, well, it’s hard for me to even explain or for other people to understand. But  I don’t see genres, if you want to call it that. I don’t see the concept in reality. I never have. I started in music by listening to records. I grew up going to see Fats Domino, Little Richard, and James Brown. I saw Marvin Gaye with Harvey and the Moonglows before anybody knew who Marvin Gaye was. I saw all these bands, and I also saw Count Basie and Duke Ellington. To me, there was nothing really dividing these groups, at least in genre terms. 

PG: It’s all the same music. 

GB: It’s all the same. Yep. That’s right. You said it. It’s all the same. 

A major inspiration behind Damage Control was albums like Trane’s Ballads (Impulse!, 1962), Clifford Brown with Strings (EmArcy, 1955), and Charlie Parker with Strings (Mercury, 1950), and how they beautifully approached ballads. But I wanted to use the beautiful songs that come from my community. The music on those albums came from Broadway or movies, written by different, mostly white, composers. Max [Roach] once made me aware that when you play a song by, say, George Gershwin, Gershwin’s family gets that money. But if you play a song by Bud Powell, hopefully,  if they did the paperwork, his family gets that money. So, a lot of that was also behind my thinking in selecting songs.

PG: One of those songs was “You are my Starship.” It feels like many people overlook the song a lot. You were the soloist on the original version, right?

GB: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I was also with Michael [Henderson] when he wrote that song.

PG: Do you feel you approached that song differently than the others on Damage Control since you have a more direct connection to the original?

GB: No, because when I decided I was gonna do “Starship” for the album, my next thought was how to do it differently than the original. I was talking about this with someone last night – as a musician, you need to be able to hear the future. As I’m playing it now, I’m trying to hear the future. Barney and I have been together for so long that he knows what I’m doing. So, he follows me and comes up with his own ideas as he does. We just work things out like that. 

PG: In addition to Barney, you have also worked with Om’mas for a long time, and Kassa [Overall] was your student. You said in another interview that to get a band to really gel and start looking forward takes about two years. Were those long-standing relationships an important part of getting Damage Control off the ground?

GB: Yeah, it was very important. It does take two years for a band to gel, and at that point, they can innovate and create something that’s never been heard before. I’ve seen that from Bird working with Diz. Same with all of Miles’ bands. And Art Blakey’s bands. Cannonball’s bands, too. And that’s the one thing that I feel bad about for the young musicians of today. They generally have nowhere they can go to learn how to hear the future and move forward with a band. You’re not going to learn it in school. Definitely not. The only way you’re going to learn it is by going out there and playing night after night. 

Often, you do end up playing the same songs over and over to really get into them. I used to tell Miles, when I was in his band, that I would get tired of certain pieces because we would play the same set every night. But one night he played something completely different than anything we had done before with those songs. That changed everything for me. And at that point, I realized it was me who had the problem. It wasn’t the fact that we were playing the same songs every night. It was that I needed to figure out what to do with those songs from that point onward. And a lot of the inspiration on how to do that came from John Coltrane, because I would see him every night. Every night, he had something new. Something I’d never heard or even thought of. And that happened because he would work on stuff all day, every day. He knew the music he was going to do that night and worked on different ways to do it. It was very enlightening for me once I found out that he does that.

PG: Since you mentioned Miles, what do you feel you learned the most from when you worked with him? 

GB: How to hear. How to listen. How to hear the future. I learned from him how to hear the future. He was able to keep changing music because he could hear more. He could hear the future. My theory is that hearing is like a fingerprint. Everybody hears differently. Everybody hears differently. If you can tap into the way you hear, you can hear the future.

PG: You have even said that listening is more important than actually playing.

GB: It is. Yeah. Yeah, it is.

PG: But going back to how you have worked for a long time with the other musicians on the album, you also have several guest artists on Damage Control. What was your process for determining who you wanted to be guests for it?

GB: They just popped in, basically. Om’mas called Kamasi [Washington],  Terrace [Martin], and a bunch of other people. I think he called Shelly [FKA DRAM] to be on “Slow Jam.” Before he came into the studio, I had never met Shelly, but he killed on that song. Oh my goodness. It was overall more like a hip hop session with a lot of people coming by. It was like a party scene. Good energy. It was like a party.

PG: But to ask you about a more serious message on Damage Control, on the album’s version of Earth, Wind and Fire’s “Fantasy,” you recite the statement that “music won’t let me down.” That statement seems to recall the message you had on “Music is my Sanctuary (Capitol, 1977). Do you feel like your overall perspective on music more generally has changed a lot between that album and now?

GB: Very subtly. What I said then has, through the years, been strengthened to the point where I realized that music is really nature’s religion. It is the gift that nature gave to us as a religion. We keep messing around with these man-made religions when nature has already given us this beautiful religion, this beautiful thing called music. Music can bring everybody together.

I did a festival in Uruguay some years ago on a cattle farm that made milk products. They had a lot of cattle. And the stage was right at the fence line of the pasture. As soon as music started, all of the cows would come down right to the fence and stay there. They probably would have come further, through the fence, if they could. But they lay there and peacefully listened to the music. That experience and many others along my journey have led me to realize that music really is our religion.

PG: Even to those who do not view music as a religion, it does still hold a special power that transcends cultural and social divides. Even people who cannot hear are drawn to the music. People who cannot communicate – babies, for instance – can understand through hearing music. You avoid terms like “jazz” to describe your music. Do you feel such labels are imposed by society or individuals to try to separate people from the underlying power of music?

GB: Yeah, well, it’s a monetary thing more than anything else. It is all about control. The word “jazz” came out of the whore houses of New Orleans. The word was initially a curse word. A negative word. And I feel negative words bring negative energies. That word itself has stifled a lot of things that we could have advanced. The imposition of that term is really about control. It is again all about the record labels controlling things, which goes back to why I stopped recording until I could do it myself. I need to own myself.  That’s the same thing Prince said. It’s the same thing Michael Jackson said and worked towards. It’s the same thing Barry White worked towards. And you’ll notice that all these people died before their time, and I could name many more like them. Ultimately, it’s dangerous to be an independent musician. It’s dangerous to be an artist because artists don’t conform. Artists are dangerous because we don’t conform to society’s rules. If we did, we wouldn’t be artists. We might be richer, but we wouldn’t be artists. 

PG: Is that trying to escape control tied to why you, like many artists, avoid the term “improvisation”?

GB: It is. It is. Because if you looked up the word “improvise,” some of the definitions are “unprepared” and “unstudied.” Come on, I have been studying music for sixty or seventy years. Do you really think I’m going to go up on stage and make up whatever I play? No, I’m composing in those moments. Bach did the same thing. Beethoven and Mozart, too. They all did what we’re doing. If you think Bach sat down and wrote his music out note by note, then you’ve got another thing coming. They often didn’t even have written notation in those days. So, a lot of what they played came by memory, which invites different approaches and changes. They didn’t need written music because there was none. They could do it all by ear.

When I see young musicians, too often they are using music stands and sheet music. I see that all the time now, and it is a reflection on how much this music has degraded. Back when, I never saw a music stand on stage with any of the bands I would go to see or that I worked with. Never. The music stand is a work tool you use at home. You don’t bring it on stage. The minute I see one, it is clear I am seeing a rehearsal, not a performance. I don’t want to go to the theater and see actors reading from the script. And that’s what I’m seeing when I see musicians reading sheet music. They can’t take the time to learn the music? Are you kidding me? What kind of a musician are you then? It’s not hard to learn. 

And maybe that’s part of the problem because I was in bands that would go out on three-month [long] tours. Of course, you’re going to learn the music after three months, as you’re playing the same music every day. But I guess many younger musicians today don’t play the same music as we used to. It might be only once that they’ll ever play that particular music. So, I can understand, to some degree, the increased reliance on sheet music. But, even so, I don’t approve of it. 

PG: When did your opposition to using written music on stage begin?

GB: I got that view of written music from Max Roach. When I played with Max, it was a sin to have music on the bandstand. We would rehearse songs in the mornings or afternoons of a performance, maybe five or six times. He’d expect us to know them by that night. He would always say, “No music on the bandstand.” We didn’t always remember the music and would try to sneak the music on stage where he couldn’t see it. But he would always see it. 

The reliance on sheet music comes from a desire not to make mistakes. But you also make mistakes when you’re reading music. It’s much more powerful when you make mistakes and are not reading music, because then you really learn from your mistake. You should learn from the mistakes you make. But if you make mistakes when you’re reading, you simply say, “Well, I’ll read it better next time.” This is also what schools are teaching musicians. And, to me, that’s a sin because music is for listening. People pay money to come listen. We listen. We don’t read. You can’t read a sound. You can’t read a clap. You can’t read a car crash. You can’t read that. Sounds are sounds. Composers have devised a way to read sounds, but doing so is very cold. Nothing warm about reading music.

PG: The criticism that academia forces a reliance on written music is not something unique to Oberlin College, but did your perspective on this – that more of a focus should be placed on sound itself instead of written notes –  make it more difficult for you as an educator to step away from that status quo?

GB: Well, no. No. My job as an educator was to show students that they didn’t need to rely on written music. That they needed to open up their ears. When you learn how to play music by reading it first, your ears are locked. They’re not open. They don’t have to be open because you can count on the page. 

It is easier to teach singers how to open their ears because they need to be able to hear the notes. They don’t have a button to push. On a piano, you just press a key and get a C. A singer doesn’t have anything to push. They have to be able to hear the C in order to hit that note. They have to know where that C is and know where the D is. They have to hear it. So, to some extent, instruments can make you lazy, especially if you start by reading music. And when I show that to students, once they see the difference, they are generally very happy that they don’t have to rely on written music anymore, as their ears begin to open and they begin to really hear things.

As long as you’re reading music, your ears won’t open. I don’t know of any innovators in this music who innovated by reading music. They innovate by hearing the future. You can’t hear the future if you’re reading music.

‘Eternal Tenure of Sound: Damage Control’ will be released on OYO Records on September 26, 2025. It can be purchased on Bandcamp. You can go further in depth on with Jim Hynes’ review of the album.

Photo credit: Brian BPlus Cross