Artists at this year’s Chicago Jazz Festival offer a range of approaches to the genre, including the sonic explorations of bassist and singer Esperanza Spalding and the traditional strains of trumpeter Kermit Ruffins. There’s a bit of big-band action, as well as reverential references to the music’s development in Chicago in the form of appearances by locals such as saxophonists Ernest Dawkins and Ari Brown. Before Ruffins’s headlining set on Saturday evening, a relentlessly creative troupe led by 84-year-old saxophonist Gary Bartz plays the main stage. Ntu Troop’s lineup includes trumpeter Theo Croker and drummer Kassa Overall, both born decades after the bandleader began his career, and though Bartz and his ensemble aren’t billed among this year’s headliners, they certainly could be.
During Bartz’s 1970s peak, he voiced a political perspective through his lyrics, as well as by merging Black popular musics and jazz—often with Ntu Troop, which he formed in 1969. Since 2001, he’s taught at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio while continuing to release his own material. Among his recent projects is a 2021 entry in the Jazz Is Dead catalog, for which he worked closely with the label’s cofounders, Ali Shaheed Muhammad of A Tribe Called Quest and producer Adrian Younge. They wrote all the material with Bartz, and they lean into its loping funk grooves, playing mostly bass and various keyboards as Bartz paints saxophone lines atop the rhythms.
In late September, Bartz, who has released more than 45 solo albums, will put out the new record Damage Control. He convened a new version of Ntu for the occasion, and the recording represents a retrenchment of purpose for the NEA Jazz Master. “Had they been the same age and in the same city at the same time, John Coltrane could have gone to school and graduated with James Brown,” says Bartz. “It’s really all the same music to me.” He proves that on “In Search of My Heart–Love Surrounds Us,” a slinky track where he uncorks narrative solos across an arrangement that would’ve suited Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters. Other offerings, such as “Fantasy” and “You Are My Starship,” recall 1970s CTI Records productions—pop tunes with the artistic gravitas of jazz music’s history.
Gary Bartz & Ntu Troop Part of the Chicago Jazz Festival. Bartz performs at Jay Pritzker Pavilion, where the day’s lineup consists of the Ava Logan Quintet (4 PM), Ernest Dawkins Ensemble New Horizons Redux (5:05 PM), Gary Bartz & Ntu Troop (6:25 PM), and Kermit Ruffins & the Barbecue Swingers (7:45 PM). Sat 8/30, 6:25 PM (music begins at 11 AM), Millennium Park, 201 E. Randolph, free, all ages
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