NEA Jazz Master Gary Bartz has been one of the best purveyors of what he calls “informal composition” (as opposed to improvisation) on alto saxophone since the 1960s, working with such luminaries as Max Roach, Charles Mingus, Art Blakey, and Miles Davis. He has released more than forty-five solo albums and appears on more than two hundred as a guest artist, as well as working with some of the up-and-coming artists in jazz today, such as Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Adrian Younge for their Jazz Is Dead series, and the jazz-funk band Maisha.
Bartz was born in Baltimore, Maryland, to nightclub-owning parents, and was exposed to many great jazz artists who played at their club. He was six when he was inspired by the sound of Charlie Parker, and received his first alto saxophone at the age of eleven. He attended the Juilliard School in New York City in 1958. He joined the Charles Mingus Jazz Workshop from 1962 to 1964, meeting jazz giants Eric Dolphy and Rahsaan Roland Kirk. He also began working with the Max Roach/Abbey Lincoln group in 1964.
In 1997, he was awarded a GRAMMY Award for Best Latin Jazz Performance for his work on Roy Hargrove’s Habana album, and, in 2005, he received a GRAMMY Award for his work as a sideman on McCoy Tyner’s recording Illuminations. In 2015, Bartz received the BNY Mellon Jazz Living Legacy Award that honors jazz musicians from the mid-Atlantic region who have achieved distinction in performance and education.
Since 2001, Bartz has been a professor of saxophone and jazz performance at Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio. Bartz focuses his teaching on finding new ways for his students to “open their ears” and presses his Oberlin students to truly hear the music they think they know so well.
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