SANTA CRUZ >> Joe Ortiz is many things: a published author and poet, painter, songwriter, theater director and businessman. With all these skills, it should come as no surprise that he is well-versed in the creative process and will be passing along some of his songwriting tips — with music — in a masterclass at Kuumbwa Jazz Tuesday.

Ortiz said he was approached by Kuumbwa Jazz to host a masterclass, something the venue has hosted for years. Past classes have included Steve Wilson instructing students on how to play conch shells, Katie Thiroux imparting skills in performing melodic walking bass lines and drumming tips from Grammy-winning drummer John “JR” Robinson, who has provided stick work for the likes of Michael Jackson, Madonna and Rod Stewart.

“They’ve been doing these master classes for many years,” said Ortiz. “It’s part of their mission statement because they’re a nonprofit, and they do a lot of things free on Tuesday nights that are workshops for musicians and singers and things like that. It’s a great service to the community.”

Santa Cruz County residents may know Ortiz best as the co-owner of Gayle’s Bakery & Rosticceria in Capitola, which he runs with his wife, Gayle. Since opening in 1978, the bakery has attracted legions of fans throughout the county and beyond to its array of gourmet pastries and sandwiches. However, Ortiz also has an artistic side. He is the author of plays and musicals that have included “Bread! — The Musical,” “Smoke,” “Kitchen Kabaret,” “Escaping Queens” and “Circus,” which have been performed at venues like Cabrillo College, Michael’s on Main, Kuumbwa Jazz and even as far away as New York. He was also the recipient of a 2016 Gail Rich Award, which honors local artists.

Ortiz’s music career began in the late ’70s in a country band that played clubs in San Jose, Sunnyvale and Los Gatos.“I was playing guitar and bass and performing two or three times a week, but I got tired of going on the road,” he said. “I got to a place where I started writing, and what happened for me was I writing material for other people, and I got into theater a little bit.”

Ortiz’s lyrics found their way into a cabaret show performed at the Santa Cruz Yacht Club, and his experiences as a baker led to his first play about a baker who gets stoned on his own bread. He later turned it into a musical, which was performed at a dinner theater production at several Santa Cruz restaurants. His first full musical, “Escaping Queens,” was performed at Cabrillo in 2012 and returned to the college the following year to a sold-out audience.

“Since then, I’ve done two or three other small musicals, always with the idea of writing something that is funny and quirky and had some dramatic quality and some conflict to it,” he said.

Ortiz’s masterclass at Kuumbwa Jazz will talk about his experiences in writing songs while also using examples from the likes of Miles Davis, Stephen Sondheim and Rodgers and Hammerstein. He will begin by answering the often asked question, “What comes first: the lyrics or the melody?” As he will demonstrate, there are many different answers to this. In one anecdote he plans on sharing, Cole Porter met Rodgers and Hammerstein and asked, “It takes two of you to write a song?”

“Cole Porter wrote both lyrics and music,” said Ortiz. “Rodgers and Hammerstein came from the point of view of: Hammerstein would lyrics the music first, and Rodgers would put the music onto them.”

However, prior to his partnership with Oscar Hammerstein, Ortiz noted Richard Rodgers did the opposite when working with Lorenz Hart, with Rodgers composing the music while Hart wrote the lyrics. Even then, Ortiz said these are not the only two options, citing Tin Pan Alley songwriters.

“There were a bunch of rooms, and in each room was a piano,” he said. “A writing team would go in — a lyricist and a piano player/composer — and pound these tunes together literally back and forth, a line at a time. It was a totally different way.”

Ortiz said songwriters can write from a riff, melody passage, lyric or chord progression, as country singers like Merle Haggard have often done. He also cited the approach of Bruce Springsteen who has frequently written from the point of view of a persona.

“It’s as if he’s a character in a play reciting a monologue,” said Ortiz. “This is where my expertise comes from, and that is writing for theater so that you have the disguise of being a character in an emotional situation to write something that describes an important point in a story.”

To that end, Ortiz will discuss what he has learned from Sondheim, the legendary Broadway composer and lyricist behind musicals ranging from “West Side Story” to “Into the Woods.”

Ortiz will also showcase examples from his own work, like “Oysters Any Time of Day” from “Smoke,” and will be joined by vocalist Nicole Wilson and pianist Glen Rose.

“He’s an accompanist to singers, which is really important in this kind of aspect,” he said of Rose. “The beauty of it for me is that he reads musical charts, so I can just give him a piece of music that’s written.”

Ortiz said it should be an enlightening program that highlights how a song is put together. People may come from different musical backgrounds, whether jazz or folk or hip-hop, but he said studying songwriting is important.

“All musicians and all songwriters and composers study a variety of techniques,” he said. “They can use these other techniques, either when they have a block or when they want to try and strike something new, so it’s all a matter of having enough tools in your tool belt to when the inspiration arises and you have an idea for a song, you can pull from a lot of areas.”

The masterclass is 7 p.m. Tuesday at Kuumbwa Jazz, 320 Cedar St. It is free and open to all ages. Ortiz will also have CDs and copies of his poetry anthology available for purchase. For more information or to join virtually, go to KuumbwaJazz.org.