Chicago saxophonist Ernest Dawkins has pursued music professionally for nearly 40 years, and in that time he’s built a legacy that’s among the city’s richest. Over the decades his New Horizons Ensemble, active since the late 70s, has included some of modern jazz’s most gifted stylists and innovators, among them bassist Yosef Ben Israel, guitarist Jeff Parker, drummer Avreeayl Ra, and trumpeter Marquis Hill (who won the Thelonious Monk Competition this year). His extended compositions for larger groups have been presented at prestigious festivals on both sides of the Atlantic, among them Sons d’Hiver in Paris and the DC Jazz Festival; the most recent piece, last year’s Memory in the Center, an Afro Opera: Homage to Nelson Mandela, premiered as part of the 2014 Chicago Jazz Festival. Much of Dawkins’s work exemplifies an activist commitment to African-American heritage and social justice—an outlook he shares with his colleagues in the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the Chicago-­based collective that helped accelerate the embrace of black free jazz by the global avant-garde. (The AACM celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, and he’s currently its chairman.) His compositions are militant yet celebratory, interspersing declamatory narratives from spoken-word artist Khari B. and passages of iconoclastic dissonance with hard-swinging, exultant celebration.

“I had the belief,” Dawkins says. “I said, ‘It’s going to take between ten and 20 years.’ In the black community, it takes at least ten to 15 years to really get your feet on the ground, unless you’ve got major sponsors and major funding. Usually that comes along with some kind of political connection, and if your political connection gets voted out, then there goes your festival. So from the grassroots, it takes 15 to 20 years—and that’s how I tried to build this festival, from the grassroots up.”

Dawkins was about three, he remembers, when his father began taking him to the Regal Theater on 47th Street to see shows. By the time he was eight, he was going by himself (“Catch the jitney, 15 cents, go to the Regal, see the Motown Revue, no one would bother me”). He’d also begun to play music on his own. His first instrument was the electric bass; within a few years he’d added percussion. But he didn’t really consider making music his life until he was about 18.

“So I ran into James Johnson. He said, ‘Man, you need to go to the AACM School of Music.’ I said, ‘The AACM School of Music? What is that?’ He said, ‘Just go.’ So I went. It was at Child City [a day-care center at 8701 S. Bennett run by Collenane Cosey, mother of guitarist Pete Cosey]. I forgot who taught me my first lesson; it might have been [Joseph] Jarman, [Henry] Threadgill, and Chico [Freeman]. They were trying to teach me [the Tadd Dameron standard] ‘Hot House’ after I had been playing for a month or so, and I was scufflin’, man! So anyway, I just told ’em I’d be back, and I started taking classes, and I became a member, and the rest is kind of history.”

In part because Dawkins was mentored by some of jazz’s most gifted and influential pioneers, he quickly developed an interest in passing along that legacy. He began teaching students of his own in the mid-70s, when he was in his early 20s. “It started,” he says, “when I started teaching at the AACM School. I met Aaron [Getsug] when he was eight; later I met Isaiah [Spencer], then Corey [Wilkes], then Maurice [Brown]. I ran into them in the suburbs when they were teenagers. We played out there with New Horizons, and they came in and sat in with us.”

After he received the money, one of the first things Dawkins did was assemble the Live the Spirit Big Band. “I got all the young [musicians] that I knew and gave them stipends to come play. Nicole [Mitchell] was in that, David Boykin, [saxophonist Doug] Rosenberg, Jeff [Parker]. A lot of people came through. That’s how that happened, and that’s how the [Englewood] Jazz Festival happened. We didn’t pay them that much, but they were loyal. That’s why I have loyalty to the cats who had loyalty to the cause.”

Sat 9/19, 12-6 PM Hamilton Park Cultural Center 513 W. 72ndenglewoodjazzfest.org All ages Free