Gary Bartz put out Where Rivers Meet in July 2026 with Your Brother's Keeper, the British soul and post-acid jazz ensemble that used to record as Maisha. JazzTimes profiled him around it on 8 August, and made the reasonable point that trying to contain what Bartz does is a fool's errand.
He has been working from one idea since his post-bop youth: that all music flows into a single circular sound. That youth was spent interning for Art Blakey, Charles Mingus and his first employer, Max Roach. A 2024 NEA Jazz Master, he has kept Black consciousness and the spirituality of the natural world at the centre of the work.
His own band carried that furthest. NTU Troop, the Africana-inflected jazz-funk ensemble he started in 1970, produced I've Known Rivers and Other Bodies, Home! and Follow the Medicine Man, and he joined Miles Davis around the same time for the Live-Evil period.
The catalogue since then refuses to sit still. He brought NTU Troop back for Singerella: A Ghetto Fairy Tale, made the quirky R&B record The Shadow Do with the Miles alumni Michael Henderson and James Mtume, worked through smooth soul and Thelonious Monk in the 1980s, returned to hard bop on There Goes the Neighborhood, and won a Latin Grammy for Habana with the late Roy Hargrove.
In this century he recorded with Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad for their Jazz Is Dead series, which was built in part around his own rhythmic language. In 2025 he rebuilt NTU Troop again with new members for The Eternal Tenure of Sound: Damage Control, with another album and another lineup promised for 2027.
He also collected an honorary doctorate from the New England Conservatory. Asked what it meant, he said it makes him feel as though people notice him and what he is doing, which for a musician with sixty years of records behind him is either modesty or a joke.
On what has lasted from what he brought into jazz, he was expansive. Music, he said, is nature's gift to the universe, and anyone looking for a religion need not look further than it. More jazz coverage sits on our jazz hub, including the restored Ma Rainey box set and Renée Fleming and Béla Fleck at the Tiny Desk.
The facts
- Where Rivers Meet was released in July 2026
- Your Brother's Keeper previously recorded as Maisha
- Bartz interned for Art Blakey, Charles Mingus and Max Roach
- He was named an NEA Jazz Master in 2024
- He founded NTU Troop in 1970 and joined Miles Davis for Live-Evil
- He won a Latin Grammy for Habana with Roy Hargrove
- He rebuilt NTU Troop in 2025 for The Eternal Tenure of Sound: Damage Control
- He received an honorary doctorate from the New England Conservatory
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