The National Endowment for the Arts announced the 2024 class of NEA Jazz Masters July 12, recognizing the contributions of trumpeter Terence Blanchard, saxophonist Gary Bartz, and pianist Amina Claudine Myers. The nation’s highest honor for jazz artists shines a particularly bright spotlight on the Bay Area this year, as Bartz settled in Emeryville about six years ago.
A Baltimore native who’s still an incandescent improvisor at 82, he’s been a regular presence on Bay Area stages since the mid-1960s, when he put in a brief, formative stint in the proving ground of Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. The first rising artist signed to Orrin Keepnews’s Milestone label, Bartz released a series of classic albums documenting music that “runs the gamut from freedom to soul,” Keepnews wrote in his liner notes, capturing the capacious nature of the saxophonist’s sound. “It covers that broad a range, not in order to prove any point, but strictly because these are ways in which this young altoist can and does compose and play.”
Bartz’s indelible link to pianist-composer McCoy Tyner provided another Bay Area connection. After Keepnews relocated to the East Bay, Bartz contributed to several Tyner sessions for Milestone, like 1974’s Sama Layuca and 1976’s Focal Point (which was recorded at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley). When Tyner started his annual two-week residencies at Yoshi’s in the late ’90s, Bartz was often in the mix, a role he reprised at SFJAZZ’s Joe Lovano-led Tyner tribute in January.
SFJAZZ is also the Bay Area’s primary claim on Blanchard, who was just named executive artistic director, stepping into a role created by the organization’s founder Randall Kline. A seven-time Grammy Award-winning trumpeter, composer, and bandleader, Blanchard has performed around the region for decades, while also pursuing a busy career as a composer for film and television (and more recently of groundbreaking opera).
The New York-based Myers, 81, sadly has few direct ties to the Bay Area, though she’s performed several times at the Healdsburg Jazz Festival and appeared most recently at the 2019 Monterey Jazz Festival. An early member of Chicago’s radical Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, she’s a singular player whose exploratory music is steeped in gospel.
Writer, broadcaster, educator, and historian Willard Jenkins was also announced as the recipient of the 2024 A.B. Spellman NEA Jazz Masters Fellowship for Jazz Advocacy. A major force as a journalist, advocate, and festival producer in Washington, D.C., Jenkins recently edited the anthology Ain’t But a Few of Us: Black Music Writers Tell Their Story.
This year’s four honorees will each receive a $25,000 award to go along with the title. Jenkins and the three musicians will be honored April 13, 2024, with a tribute concert presented by the NEA in collaboration with The Kennedy Center.
