Collection: Gary Bartz

Gary Bartz grew up in Baltimore in a house that opened onto jazz. His father owned the North End Lounge, where Art Blakey, Charlie Parker and Max Roach played, and Bartz was six when he heard Parker for the first time and understood what he wanted to do. He received his first alto saxophone at eleven, went to Juilliard at seventeen, joined Charles Mingus's Jazz Workshop in 1962 alongside Eric Dolphy and McCoy Tyner, worked with Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln from 1964, and took John Gilmore's chair in Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers in 1965. The Blakey connection came the way it sometimes does: Bartz's father booked the band at the North End Lounge, a saxophone chair opened during the gig, Bartz stepped in, and Blakey hired him on the spot. His first leader recordings came in 1968 on Milestone with "Libra" and "Another Earth," the latter featuring Pharoah Sanders on tenor and Charles Tolliver on trumpet. Miles Davis hired him in 1970 for the Isle of Wight Festival and the December Cellar Door sessions documented on "Live-Evil," Bartz's first experience playing electric music. He formed the NTU Troop the same year: the name is from the Bantu word for unity in all things, seen and unseen. The Troop's seven albums between 1970 and 1974 fused hard bop, soul, funk and African folk music around compositions that drew on Langston Hughes's poetry on "I've Known Rivers" (Prestige, 1973) and moved toward the Black Arts Movement in the Harlem Bush Music series. NTU Troop recordings became some of the most sampled jazz records in hip-hop. He received the NEA Jazz Masters Fellowship in 2024, has taught at Oberlin Conservatory since 2001, and is still recording: his 2026 collaboration with London collective Your Brother's Keeper on Brownswood is his most recent release.