Gary Bartz, Ali Shaheed Muhammad & Adrian Younge - Jazz Is Dead 6 (2021 Jazz Is Dead Vinyl LP)

Gary Bartz, Ali Shaheed Muhammad & Adrian Younge - Jazz Is Dead 6 | Vinyl LP - 2021 Jazz Is Dead (JID006LP, pressed at Pallas, Germany)

• The sixth instalment in the Jazz Is Dead series, pairing Baltimore alto saxophonist Gary Bartz with producers Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Adrian Younge on eight tracks of spiritual jazz, soul and groove-heavy funk.
• Bartz brings six decades of playing behind him, from Charles Mingus’s Jazz Workshop and Art Blakey’s Messengers through Miles Davis’s Live-Evil band and the NTU Troop albums that laid the ground for jazz-funk as a genre.
• Pressed at Pallas in Germany, heavyweight vinyl. All compositions by Bartz, Younge and Muhammad. 

The Jazz Is Dead label runs on a simple idea: Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad invite a jazz musician they grew up listening to into their Los Angeles studio, surround them with vintage analogue equipment, and make a record together. The series has featured Roy Ayers, Marcos Valle, Azymuth, João Donato, Brian Jackson and dozens more. For the sixth volume, they brought in Gary Bartz. The fit makes sense. Bartz has been moving between straight jazz, funk, soul and African music since the early 1970s, when he formed NTU Troop and released records like Harlem Bush Music and I’ve Known Rivers and Other Bodies that were doing what most of the Jazz Is Dead catalogue tries to do, just fifty years earlier. Before that, he was in Mingus’s Jazz Workshop alongside Eric Dolphy, played with Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln, and joined Miles Davis’s electric band in 1970 for the Cellar Door residency and the Isle of Wight festival. His tone on alto is one of the most recognisable in post-bop, and it sits on top of Younge and Muhammad’s production here with the same ease it had on the Mizell brothers’ sessions in the mid-seventies.

Younge and Muhammad play almost everything behind Bartz: Fender Rhodes, Hammond organ, electric bass, guitar, mellotron, vibraphone, synths, flute, autoharp, Navajo flutes and tubular bells between them. Greg Paul plays drums on the closing track “Soulsea”. The palette is dense but the mixes are warm and uncluttered, leaving Bartz room to work. “Spiritual Ideation” opens the album with a meditative groove and alto lines that recall the NTU Troop records. “The Message” switches Bartz to soprano saxophone over a bed of mellotron and autoharp. “Day by Day” is the longest track at nearly five minutes and probably the closest thing here to a conventional jazz-funk cut. The whole album runs just over half an hour and nothing on it sounds like filler. Bartz was eighty when this was recorded and plays like he has nothing left to prove and no reason to hold back. Pressed at Pallas in Germany.