We were lucky to catch up with Gage Retz recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Gage, thanks for joining us today. Did you always know you wanted to pursue a creative or artistic career? When did you first know?

The first time I ever received a compliment on my saxophone playing was when I knew I wanted to follow a creative path in life. It was Sophomore year in High School and we would meet on Monday mornings in band rehearsal and listen to Judges tapes with doughnuts and milk if we had a marching band competition the preceding Saturday. The first one of the season was pretty standard and was just some other HS band teacher walking around critiquing minors with instruments. “Misstep in percussion” and ” Out of tempo in the brass” sort of comments. Then, out of nowhere, he goes “WOW, LISTEN TO THAT BARI (referring to the baritone saxophone I played) GREAT SOUND YOUNG MAN”. From that point all the way through my senior year we kept a tally on the white board just for comments on the Bari sax. After our State Finals champion tapes my final tally was 21 compliments on my playing. An average of about 1.67 per tape. Pretty good considering those tapes were meant for criticisms.

Gage, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

All through Middle School and High School I was involved with Band, school plays, and other productions of that sort. I remember in my eighth grade talent show my friends and I wore dresses and performed a Monty Python sketch for our talent show and it got newspaper coverage in our county’s newspaper. Small town Ohio didn’t have many cross dressing, opera singing middle school boys, and they probably haven’t since. That performance bombed but I always knew comedy was part of my personality. There weren’t many outlets where I grew up to exercise the chops, and there were even less people to tell me it was something I could do for a living. To stay with the arts I decided to go the more lucrative route of Saxophone player. How simple I thought the world was that a saxophone player was a more lucrative decision…luckily I came to my senses and circled back around to comedy. I did go to college, though, and I did do it to play the saxophone. More specifically Music Education. I compromised and began my path of becoming a band teacher. I went to all the conferences, some of the classes, and a few of the exams. I had started to come to the conclusion that it may not work out, but I wanted to give myself another semester to turn it around. To do this I made the decision to “borrow” and instrument I was using from the School of Music and pawn it for $600 to pay for the following semesters classes. “Just one week and I’ll use my paycheck to get it out”, I told myself. 3 days later I get a text while I’m at work from my saxophone professor and it informs me that I need to turn myself in to campus police because they found the school’s instrument under my name at the pawn shop. Looking back I should have known not to commit a crime at a pawn shop that had its own syndicated television show. I knew what I did was illegal and I thought I had taken the right precautions by making the “value” of my wrong doing below criminal standards. A felony is anything over $2,500 in Michigan. I had pawned this item for $600. I thought I had a slap on the wrist coming my way. The next day when I reported myself I learned 3 things: handcuffs are cold, my particular crime is charged by the value of the item, and a Bass Clarinet is worth $12,000. I was sentenced to 3 years probation with some jail time and house arrest accounting for about a year of that. During that time I was lucky enough to get a shipping job for a medical equipment company, that didn’t do a background check, and continued to work extra hours and train on the job to become a technician. Now, 5 years after starting, I am running the service department for the same company and the job itself has provided much needed security through the darkest time of my life. It was soon after my sentence was up and I got the judgement saying I was released from probation that I had this realization that my job, alone, was no longer cutting it for me. I was a rehabilitated workaholic. I caught myself listening to comedy podcasts and these comedians stories and realizing that if people like this existed, I needed them to be my friends. I started my first notebook of jokes during the pandemic and when the quarantine was over and comedy clubs opened back up I took the first class I could and started performing at open mics around Detroit. I still have my day job, and I still enjoy it, but I’m constantly looking for that next step to allow me to devote more time to writing and performing stand-up.

I pride myself on being completely real and not feeling ashamed of my mistakes as long as I feel that I’ve learned from them and am making an effort to resolve them. I love sharing my stories so people, hopefully, become more willing to open up themselves after they realize everyone has gone through something or is currently dealing with a lot of strife and I think that’s what we should think about when we interact with anyone in our lives. That’s why I believe comedy is important for people and I know I’m not the only one.

In your view, what can society do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

The best way to support an artist is to not stifle them. Don’t take words away from comedians just like you would take flesh colored paints from artists in the hopes that wouldn’t prevent them from creating nude images of the human form. If you don’t like something, then it’s not for you. Move on. There is too much art to consume for people to focus on the negatives of things they don’t like when it is so easy to search a little further and find something they enjoy. Let artists express themselves how they deem fit and appreciate it or avoid it. It’s as simple as that.

: Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

I’d love to make a living writing original content so I’d say my goal would be to free myself up from my 9 to 5 job to focus on all the ideas that fly through my head all day.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @incrediblegage
• Facebook: Gage Retz
• Twitter: @incrediblegage

Image Credits
Madison Pollard