Bootsie Barnes Still Loves a Challenge

Or, why does a 70-year-old local bebop legend have a folder labeled "Ass-Kickers"?

by Shaun Brady

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Published: Mar 4, 2008

Michael T. Regan

There was no need for a detailed map to Bootsie Barnes' door once inside the senior citizens' complex on City Line Avenue. Stepping out of the elevator, I was immediately greeted by the distinctive sound of Barnes' tenor — like one of those finger-sprouting tendrils of aroma that draw starving men toward food in old Looney Tunes cartoons — which led me directly to his one-room apartment.

Barnes had picked up his horn again after buzzing me in to the front door, the 70-year-old standard-bearer of Philly bebop still eager to squeeze in an extra minute or two of practice even with 50 years' experience under his belt. Against a backdrop of jazz pumping out of one of the digital music channels on the TV, a stack of sheet music is piled on a music stand. "I have a folder of my music that I pull out with about 50 tunes written by great musicians that kicks your ass," Barnes explains. "And I wrote on the folder, 'Ass-Kickers.'"

Hard to believe that this veteran jazz man, his walls covered with accolades and citations ("Most of 'em are still in boxes," he's quick to point out) and photos of himself alongside some of the music's legends, could still have his ass kicked by anything a jazz composer could commit to paper. But as Barnes concedes, "You never learn it all. I can go on any stage in the world, and when the cats start calling tunes, I won't have no problems. But it's a learning experience every day."

Lately, though, Barnes has been getting that ass-kicking from health issues. Typically a ubiquitous presence on the local scene, he's played only a handful of gigs this year, largely sidelined by a flare-up of sciatic nerve problems. Despite three epidurals, he continues to suffer, pain shooting into his legs from the mere act of standing to shave. His doctors recommend not lifting anything over 5 pounds. His horn weighs 9.

Robert "Bootsie" Barnes was born in 1937 and grew up in the Richard Allen Homes, North Philly's notorious housing project. He was surrounded by music, his father a trumpet player who Barnes says played in the big band led by organist Bill Doggett and alongside Dizzy Gillespie in Philly-based bandleader Frankie Fairfax's orchestra, but spent most of his time in Air Force bands during decades of service. Barnes' cousin, Jimmy Hamilton, played clarinet with Duke Ellington for 26 years, sneaking the adolescent Barnes into the back door of the Earle Theatre at 11th and Market streets to see the band. Barnes wanted to be a drummer, and recalls being presented with a set of sticks by Ellington's drummer, Sonny Greer.

Despite his percussive aspirations, Barnes began his musical training on the piano at the age of 6 — at his parents' insistence. "They forced me to take piano lessons," he recalls, "they said I'd get a bike if I practiced after school." He finally got his wish, though, and switched to the drums at age 10, taking lessons at the old Gimbel Brothers department store at Eighth and Market.

During his time in the Allen Homes, Barnes was literally living next door to history, albeit unwittingly. His neighbor was a high school-age alto saxophonist named Howard Cunningham, who led regular jam sessions. "I'd sit on the couch and listen to them practice, and I didn't have any idea I was listening to John Coltrane and Benny Golson."

While the two future sax legends were each about a decade Barnes' senior, he counts bassist Spanky DeBrest, trumpeter Lee Morgan, and fellow drummers Lex Humphries and Tootie Heath as his contemporaries and friends, along with Bill Cosby, who later cast Barnes along with Tito Puente, Tommy Flanagan, Art Blakey and Jimmy Heath as an all-star jazz band on a 1986 episode of The Cosby Show.

He played drums in the Ben Franklin High School band, but by then, Barnes says, "I was torn between playing the drums and chasing the girls, and kinda stopped for a while."

History, they say, is written by the victors, and if that rule can be extended to include individual survivors, then Bootsie Barnes has long since outlived the certain dark periods, which he dismisses as irrelevant to his lifetime of music and, understandably, refuses to discuss. In any case, by his late teens, he'd abandoned the drums, flirted briefly with the trumpet, then landed on the alto sax. DeBrest played him a record by Jackie McLean, whom Barnes still refers to as his idol.

"I heard Jackie before I heard Charlie Parker," he says, "and that was it. I knew I could never play like Bird, but when I listened to a lot of ideas that Jackie had, I was thinking the same way. I figured he was gonna hit a certain note and he'd hit it, so I thought maybe I could emulate what he did."

At the time, it was essential for a saxophonist to play tenor. "We used to call that the 'meat and bread horn.' Everybody that played alto had to get a tenor in order to make gigs, and I just fell in love."

The key to jazz success, then as now, usually necessitated a move to New York — a move that Barnes never made, and doesn't regret. "At that particular time," he explains, "I was enjoying life so much I might've gone to an early grave."

That wasn't the main reason stayed in Philly. "There wasn't enough gigs for everybody. So I was told, when you move to New York, move there with a gig," he says. "I know great musicians who went to New York and stayed 40 years, and you still don't know who they are."

There were close calls, he says, times when having been home when the phone rang might have changed everything, a near-opportunity to play with percussionist Mongo Santamaria that went instead to Sonny Fortune. But Barnes stayed busy in Philly, playing R&B gigs, backing groups like Smokey Robinson and the Miracles and the Jackson 5 in the legendary house band at the Uptown Theatre, and taking to the road with organ groups, a Philly specialty.

While he's stayed busy over the years, Barnes has seen opportunities dwindle since the days when clubs lined Philly's streets. "Every corner bar had a band. That started to change, I guess, around the '80s. Crime and drugs had a lot to do with it. People just don't want to go into the neighborhoods anymore. But it was great; you could walk anywhere you wanted to walk, and there was jazz going on in every part of town. A jazz club becomes a jazz club when the jazz is put in there."

While he keeps his ears open, Barnes is content with his old-school style. "I'm just a bebopper at heart. Everything I hear that's kind of cutting edge, I really enjoy, but there's just certain roads I don't see myself traveling. Not everybody can be an innovator."

Barnes is not alone in his regional-legend status, pointing to Von Freeman, the Chicago tenor player who's an underground icon in the Windy City but has remained obscure in most of the rest of the country. "It takes guys like me in every city to keep the music alive," Barnes says.

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

 

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