Your Brother's Keeper & Gary Bartz - Where Rivers Meet (2026 Brownswood Vinyl LP)

Your Brother's Keeper & Gary Bartz - Where Rivers Meet | Vinyl LP - 2026 Brownswood Recordings (BWOOD445LP)

The 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 Where Rivers Meet 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.

Bartz 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.