Gary Bartz NTU Troop - Home! (1969)

Gary Bartz is an award-winning alto saxophonist, multi-instrumentalist, composer, bandleader, instructor, and sideman. Though he began his career with the Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln group in 1964 as well as many peers and mentors including McCoy Tyner, Pharoah Sanders, Woody Shaw, and Terumasa Hino. During the early 1970s Bartz founded NTU Troop and issued a series of pioneering albums including "Follow the Medicine Man" and "I've Known Rivers and Other Bodies". The band's albums seamlessly integrated funky soul, African folk musics, post-bop, and spiritual jazz. 

During that decade Bartz worked extensively with Norman Connors, Donald Byrd, and groundbreaking jazz-funk producers, the Mizell Brothers. Though he led fewer dates during the '80s and '90s, he remained active as a collaborator and sideman. In 2003, Bartz joined the faculty of the Jazz Studies department at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. He won a Grammy for his playing on Tyner's "Illuminations" in 2005 and released the acclaimed "Coltrane Rules: Tao Music Warrior" in 2012. In 2019 Bartz celebrated the 50th anniversary of his "Another Earth" at the Newport Jazz Festival alongside Ravi Coltrane and original personnel Charles Tolliver and Nasheet Waits. In 2020 he collaborated with London-based jazz-funk outfit Maisha on "Night Dreamer: Direct to Disc Sessions". The following year, he collaborated with Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad on a dedicated volume in their ongoing "Jazz Is Dead" series, "Gary Bartz JID006".

"Home!" is a live album by saxophonist Gary Bartz's NTU Troop recorded in 1969 and released on the Milestone label. "Recorded in actual performance at a Left Bank Jazz Society concert, in Baltimore, Maryland; March 30, 1969."


Tracklist:

"B.A.M." - 11:17
"Love" - 11:28
"Rise" - 8:45
"Amal" - 7:18
"It Don't Mean a Thing" (Duke Ellington, Irving Mills) - 5:12

Gary Bartz NTU Troop - Home! (1969)

(320 kbps, cover art included)