Biography All Music Guide Wikipedia
All Music Guide:
Alto saxophonist Gary Bartz attended the Juilliard Conservatory of Music and became a member of Charles Mingus' Jazz Workshop from 1962-1964 where he worked with Eric Dolphy and encountered McCoy Tyner for the first time. He also began gigging as a sideman in the mid-'60s with Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach, and later as a member of Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers. His recording debut was on Blakey's Soul Finger album. Tyner formed his famed Expansions band in 1968 with Bartz on alto. In addition, Bartz also formed his own bands at this time and recorded a trio of albums for Milestone, and continued to tour with Max Roach's band. In 1970, Miles Davis hired Bartz and featured him as a soloist on the Live-Evil recording. Bartz formed the Ntu Troop that year as well, an ensemble that fused soul and funk, African folk music, hard bop, and vanguard jazz into a vibrant whole. Among the group's four recordings from 1970-1973, Harlem Bush Music: Taifa and Juju Street Songs have proved influential with soul jazzers, and in hip-hop and DJ circles as well. From 1973-1975 Bartz was on a roll, issuing I've Known Rivers and Other Bodies, Music Is My Sanctuary, Home, and Another Earth, all stellar outings. He meandered for most of the 1980s, coming back in 1988 with Reflections on Monk. Since that time, Bartz has continued making records of quiet intensity and lyrical power -- notably Red & Orange Poems in 1995 -- and has with become one of the finest if under-noticed alto players of his generation.
Wikipedia:
Gary Bartz (born September 26, 1940, Baltimore, Maryland) is an American alto and soprano saxophonist and clarinetist.
Biography
Bartz' break into the music industry came when filling in with Art Blakey's band at Bartz' father's club in Baltimore. Bartz graduated from the Baltimore City College high school and The Juilliard School. He has worked with Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, Max Roach, and Jackie McLean. His group the "Ntu Troop" combined soul, funk, the music of Africa, hard bop, and avant-garde jazz. His performances with Miles Davis represented one of the few times from 1969 to 1974 at which a saxophonist played a saxophone other than soprano saxophone.
In the liner notes to his 1994 album The Red and Orange Poems, Jazz critic Stanley Crouch calls Bartz "one of the very best who has ever picked up the instrument".
In 2005 he won a Grammy Award for playing on McCoy Tyner's album Illuminations.
He currently teaches at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music when not touring.
