Anniversaries. Brilliant stuff. You turn half a century old – er, young – and people are once again just staring at black discs that aren’t records at all, but phones, and constantly tapping away. Gary Bartz once said to us that we don’t even see reality anymore. The man’s right. We really do spend all our time staring at screens. For hours on end. But sometimes something pulls us away. Take, for example: Ju Ju Man, that record, 50 years old. Not really old, mind you, because Gary flings the window open and lets the air in – which means: he presses his lips to the swan and spits out this mad, seventies-era truth. Why bother playing it politely when you can shove that alto sax straight through your eardrums and into the present? You can’t even begin to imagine what that must have sounded like 50 years ago. Gary, who burst onto the scene from Miles’ and McCoy’s bands, certainly had quite a bit of anger in him. And he lashes out at us here with post-bop intensity. As I said. Anniversaries – a brilliant thing.
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Interview
Ju Ju Man
