{"title":"Gary Bartz","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003eGary 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"your-brothers-keeper-gary-bartz-where-rivers-meet-2026-brownswood-vinyl-lp","title":"Your Brother's Keeper \u0026 Gary Bartz - Where Rivers Meet (2026 Brownswood Vinyl LP)","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eYour Brother's Keeper \u0026amp; Gary Bartz - \u003cem\u003eWhere Rivers Meet\u003c\/em\u003e | Vinyl LP - 2026 Brownswood Recordings (BWOOD445LP)\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe story starts in 2019, when Gilles Peterson put the American saxophonist Gary Bartz in front of Maisha, the London septet led by drummer Jake Long, for a set at the first We Out Here festival. It worked so well they kept going. Maisha has since become Your Brother's Keeper, a collective of Ali MacSween on piano and modular synths, Axel Kaner-Lidstrom on trumpet, Twm Dylan on double bass, Tim Doyle on percussion and Chelsea Carmichael on tenor, and \u003cem\u003eWhere Rivers Meet\u003c\/em\u003e is the studio record that partnership was building toward. Cut at Lightship95 and released for Brownswood's twentieth anniversary, it drops Bartz into a setting made from modular synthesis, electronics and acoustic playing, his alto sometimes run live through the modular rig so the lines smear and shift as he plays. This is not a legend parked in front of a young band. It is a proper group conversation.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBartz carries a lot of history into the room. He played with Charles Mingus, Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln and Art Blakey, spent the early 1970s in Miles Davis's electric band, and led his own NTU Troop through some of the defining spiritual jazz of that decade. At eighty-five his tone is still warm and searching, and the London players meet him with patience rather than fireworks, letting the pieces build slowly. \"Eclipse\" smoulders over cinematic synths, and the nine-minute closer \"Mantra\" opens into a long, gospel-tinged Bartz solo that is the high point of the record. It was widely praised on release, with several critics calling it among the year's best jazz records. This is the standard black vinyl LP on Brownswood, mastered at Gearbox Studios.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Brownswood","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44037083136059,"sku":null,"price":90.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0630\/3203\/3339\/files\/a2396054375_10.jpg?v=1787569770"}],"url":"https:\/\/lushliferecords.com.au\/collections\/gary-bartz.oembed","provider":"Lush Life Records","version":"1.0","type":"link"}