Gary Bartz, Alto and Soprano Saxophone | b. 1940

Gary Bartz grew up in Baltimore with jazz playing in the house, literally: his father owned the North End Lounge, where Art Blakey, Charlie Parker and Max Roach came through regularly. He was six when he first heard Charlie Parker and understood the direction his life would take, eleven when he received his first alto saxophone. He attended Juilliard from 1958, joined Charles Mingus's Jazz Workshop from 1962 to 1964 alongside Eric Dolphy and McCoy Tyner, worked as a sideman with Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln, and in 1965 took John Gilmore's vacant chair in Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers while Blakey played a gig at his father's club. His first Milestone albums as a leader, "Libra" (1968) and "Another Earth" (1969), established him before Miles Davis hired him in 1970 for the Isle of Wight Festival and the Cellar Door sessions that became "Live-Evil." He formed the NTU Troop the same year, named for the Bantu concept of unity across all things, and spent the next four years making records that fused hard bop, soul, funk and African folk music, drawing on Langston Hughes's poetry and the energy of the Black Arts Movement. The Troop's seven Milestone and Prestige albums have been sampled extensively in hip-hop. His 1977 Blue Note album "Music Is My Sanctuary," produced with the Mizell Brothers, reached a broader audience and is now among the most collected of his records. He received the NEA Jazz Masters Fellowship in 2024. Bartz has taught at Oberlin Conservatory since 2001 and remains active as a performer.