Gary Bartz

Gary Bartz stands out as an award-winning alto saxophonist who also performs on multiple instruments, composes, leads groups, teaches, and contributes as a sideman. He launched his professional path in 1964 alongside the Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln ensemble while connecting with fellow musicians and guides such as McCoy Tyner, Pharoah Sanders, Woody Shaw, and Terumasa Hino. Early in the 1970s he assembled NTU Troop and put out a run of innovative recordings that featured Follow the Medicine Man and I've Known Rivers and Other Bodies. The ensemble's releases wove together funky soul, African folk musics, post-bop, and spiritual jazz without seams. Throughout those years Bartz also partnered frequently with Norman Connors, Donald Byrd, and the pioneering jazz-funk producers known as the Mizell Brothers. Although he issued fewer leader sessions across the 1980s and 1990s, he stayed busy in supporting and collaborative roles. Bartz accepted a teaching post in the Jazz Studies department at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in 2003. He earned a Grammy for his contributions to Tyner's Illuminations in 2005 and followed with the widely praised Coltrane Rules: Tao Music Warrior in 2012. At the 2019 Newport Jazz Festival he marked the fiftieth anniversary of Another Earth with Ravi Coltrane plus original band members Charles Tolliver and Nasheet Waits. The next year brought a collaboration with the London-based jazz-funk group Maisha that yielded Night Dreamer: Direct to Disc Sessions. In 2021 he worked with Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad on Gary Bartz JID006, the installment devoted to him in their continuing Jazz Is Dead series.

Born in Baltimore during 1940, Bartz grew up as the child of parents who owned nightclubs. He began playing alto saxophone at age 11, shaped by the high-caliber jazz artists who passed through his family's venue, and he even joined Art Blakey and George Benson onstage while still a teenager. After finishing high school he enrolled at the Juilliard Conservatory of Music. From 1962 to 1964 he belonged to Charles Mingus' Jazz Workshop, where he performed with Eric Dolphy and first met McCoy Tyner. In the mid-1960s he also started working as a sideman with the Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach group. He spent a short time with Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers, making his recording debut on their 1965 album Soul Finger and staying for the following year's Hold On I'm Coming. Bartz started his own band in 1968 and signed with Milestone; his debut Libra featured a quintet that included drummer Billy Higgins, bassist Richard Davis, pianist Albert Dailey, and trumpeter Jimmy Owens, even as he continued touring with the Roach/Lincoln outfit. Another Earth appeared the next year and has since been recognized as influential on jazz scenes in both America and Europe; its personnel included Pharoah Sanders, Reggie Workman, Charles Tolliver, Freddie Waits, and Stanley Cowell. Miles Davis selected Bartz for the Bitches Brew tour in 1970 and featured him as a soloist on Live-Evil; fuller documentation of that association later surfaced on The Cellar Door Sessions. Bartz formed NTU Troop, which from its outset combined soul, funk, African folk music, hard bop, and spiritual jazz into one lively, many-sided sound. Vocalist Andy Bey participated on Harlem Bush Music: Taifa, Harlem Bush Music: Uhuru, and Juju Street Songs and stayed with the group for several years. In 1972 Bartz began a long-running association with drummer Norman Connors on the groundbreaking soul-jazz album Dance of Magic and continued recording with him through the decade. Between 1973 and 1975 Bartz maintained strong momentum; NTU Troop's I've Known Rivers and Other Bodies ranks among the decade's most respected jazz fusion releases and has shaped two generations of players. That same year he joined Jackie McLean on the well-regarded Ode to Super for Steeplechase and appeared with Charlie Mariano on Altissimo for Philips.

NTU Troop delivered its last recording, Singerella: A Ghetto Fairy Tale, in 1974 with producer Larry Mizell, initiating a studio partnership that continued for years. In 1975 Bartz, the producer, his brother Fonce Mizell, and Davis bandmates Reggie Lucas, James Mtume, and Michael Henderson created The Shadow Do. Two years afterward, working with the same production team and guests including Syreeta, Mtume, James Gadson, David T. Walker, and others, Bartz released the charting Music Is My Sanctuary, an album many jazz critics initially found excessively funky. He continued in a radio-friendly, pop-oriented jazz-funk vein for the rest of the decade, issuing Love Affair in 1978 and Bartz in 1980. For most of the 1980s the saxophonist operated chiefly as a sideman and co-billed collaborator, maintaining steady work with Tyner, Phyllis Hyman, Mtume, Ndugu Chancler, and Woody Shaw. He resumed recording hard bop as a leader with Monsoon in 1988 and Reflections on Monk the next year. Beginning with West 42nd Street in 1990, Bartz immersed himself in the hard bop tradition; There Goes the Neighborhood appeared in 1991, followed by Shadows, the latter featuring pianist Benny Green, bassist Christian McBride, drummer Victor Lewis, and tenor saxophonist Willie Williams. Bartz signed briefly with Atlantic in 1994 and released the charting Red & Orange Poems, one of his most lasting works; critic Stanley Crouch noted in the liner essay that "he is one of the very finest to have ever picked up the instrument." A few months later he issued Episode 1: Children of Harlem with pianist Larry Willis, drummer Ben Riley, and bassist Buster Williams. In 1996 Bartz broadened his sound once more, forming a studio band for Blues Chronicles: Tales of Life that included Jon Hendricks, Cyrus Chestnut, Dennis Chambers, Russell Malone, and rappers Nezkar Keith and Ransom. That year he also joined organist Robert Walter on the Greyboy-produced Spirit of '70 alongside saxophonist Karl Denson. He closed the decade with the live Music for Ebbe: Live at San Sebastian featuring Jeanne Lee and Jorge Pardo.

Bartz resumed a collaborator role early in the new century. In 2000 he shared billing with Jarek Śmietana on African Lake, which also featured bassist Cameron Brown and trumpeter Jeremy Pelt. Three years later he appeared on Blue Jazz with Malachi Thompson & Africa Brass and guest Billy Harper while releasing Jazz Time co-billed with Kankawa Toshihiko. Also in 2003 he joined the faculty of the Jazz Studies department at Oberlin Conservatory of Music, where he continues to teach. He issued Soprano Stories with pianists John Hicks and George Cables, bassist James King, and drummer Greg Bandy, marking his first full-length showcase for soprano saxophone. Over the next seven years Bartz focused primarily on teaching and performed only occasionally. He received a Grammy for his sideman work on McCoy Tyner's Illuminations in 2005. He returned as a bandleader with Coltrane Rules: Tao Music Warrior on his own OYO label in 2012. In 2015 he served as a featured guest on tenor saxophonist Allen Lowe's electro-acoustic score for Man with Guitar: Where's Robert Johnson? and received the BNY Mellon Jazz 2015 Living Legacy Award. That same year Revive Music invited him to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Another Earth at New York's Winter Jazzfest; he repeated the performance at the North Sea and Newport Jazz Festivals, the latter with original personnel Charles Tolliver and Nasheet Waits plus Ravi Coltrane. In 2019 DJ and producer Gilles Peterson asked Bartz to appear at the annual We Out Here festival and chose the London-based spiritual jazz ensemble Maisha—Amané Suganami, Twm Dylan, Tim Doyle, Yahael Camara-Onono, Shirley Tetteh, and Nubya Garcia—to back him. The performance proved so successful that the group began touring Europe, reconvened for a Peterson-curated We Out Here event at London's Royal Festival Hall, and later performed as part of the annual EFG London Jazz Festival. While on their European dates they booked two studio days in the Netherlands and recorded five pieces for the direct-to-disc label Night Dreamer Records. Two early Bartz compositions, "Uhuru Sasa" and "Doctor Follows Dance," were re-arranged by the ensemble from the original Harlem Bush Music: Uhuru and Follow the Medicine Man recordings, while the remaining three were composed and arranged collectively during the tour. The album appeared in mid-2020, shortly before Bartz's eightieth birthday. Soon afterward he traveled to Los Angeles to work with Jazz Is Dead producers Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad, resulting in Gary Bartz JID006 released in 2021.