George Garzone was born September 23, 1950, in Boston, Massachusetts. He began on tenor saxophone at six, playing in a family band before enrolling at Berklee College of Music, where he studied under the legendary saxophone pedagogue Joe Viola.

While still a Berklee student, Garzone fell in with bassist Rich Appleman and drummer Bob Gullotti, and in 1971 — during Gullotti's senior year — the three founded The Fringe as an outlet for the free improvisation they weren't finding room for elsewhere (Garzone's own site and several later profiles round the founding to 1972). The trio pressed its first three albums on Ap-Gu-Ga Records, a label the group founded and named for the first two letters of each member's surname: The Fringe (1978), Live! (1980, recorded at the Berklee Performance Center), and Hey, Open Up! (1982). Appleman left in 1985 to chair Berklee's bass department and was replaced by John Lockwood, who is audible for the first time on The Raging Bulls (1986), a live document of a Fringe performance in the Azores. Under the Garzone-Lockwood-Gullotti lineup the group went on to record for Northeastern, Soul Note, Resolution Recordings, and Stunt — including It's Time for the Fringe (1993), Live in Israel (1997, taped at the Red Sea Jazz Festival), Live in Iseo (2001), Live at Zeitgeist (2004, with guest Joe Lovano sitting in on tenor), and the 40th-anniversary concert recording 40 Years on the Fringe (2013). For nearly five decades The Fringe was a fixture of Boston's Monday-night club circuit — at Michael's, The Willow, and later the Lilypad in Cambridge — a level of stability rare in any working improvising group. Bob Gullotti died on January 25, 2020, at 70; drummer Francisco Mela has held the chair since. The current lineup — Garzone, Lockwood, and Mela — continues to perform and record under the Fringe name.

Garzone's leader discography runs in parallel to The Fringe's group output. Alone (1995, NYC Records) paired him with bassist Eddie Gomez, drummer Lenny White, pianist David Kikoski, and a young Luciana Souza on vocals. Four's and Two's (1995, NYC Records) matched his tenor against Joe Lovano's in a two-saxophone frontline with Joey Calderazzo, John Lockwood, and Bill Stewart — Discogs' session notes for the release oddly place the recording dates a year after the catalog year, an inconsistency in the label's own paperwork that this profile flags rather than silently resolves. Moodiology (1999) and One Two Three Four (2006) followed on NYC Records and Stunt Records respectively, the latter recorded with guitarist Chris Crocco, bassist Dennis Irwin, and drummer Pete Zimmer. Night of My Beloved (recorded 2006, released 2008 on the Japanese label Venus Records) teamed him with the Brazilian trio Trio da Paz — Nilson Matta, Duduka Da Fonseca, and Romero Lubambo — plus pianist Kenny Werner. Among Friends (2009, Stunt Records) is a trio session with the late Paul Motian on drums and Steve Kuhn on piano. Audacity (2011) is a tenor-battle date co-billed with veteran Woody Herman Orchestra saxophonist Frank Tiberi; the same year, Filing the Profile documented a 2008 session in Gdańsk with Polish drummer-composer Jacek Kochan's trio. The Monash Sessions (2013, Jazzhead) is a solo/duo teaching-tour recording from Australia. Quintonic (2014, Stunt Records) again pairs Garzone with a second tenor, this time Jerry Bergonzi, alongside a Danish rhythm section. That same year, Crescent (2014, Jazz Hang Records) put him in a trio with pianist Leo Genovese and bassist Esperanza Spalding. In January 2019, Garzone joined drummer Peter Erskine, pianist Alan Pasqua, and bassist Darek Oleszkiewicz for three nights of live recording at Sam First in Los Angeles, released as the triple album 3 Nights in L.A. (Fuzzy Music) — Erskine and Garzone had already recorded together a decade earlier, as part of the sprawling all-star lineup on The Avatar Sessions: The Music of Tim Hagans (2009, also on Fuzzy Music), alongside Randy Brecker, Tim Hagans, David Liebman, and Rufus Reid with Sweden's Norrbotten Big Band.

Garzone's sideman work reaches beyond his own working groups. He plays tenor saxophone on Joe Lovano Nonet's 52nd Street Themes (2000, Blue Note), which won the Grammy Award for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album in 2001 — a genuine, release-level-confirmed credit, not a compilation or various-artists appearance. He appears on pianist Danilo Pérez's "Panama 2000," a track from Pérez's 1994 album The Journey, later anthologized on the RCA Victor compilation The Collected (1998); Pérez, whose own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile, and Garzone are also faculty colleagues at Berklee's Global Jazz Institute, which Pérez heads. In the 1980s Garzone recorded with composer George Russell's Living Time Orchestra (The African Game, 1985; So What, 1986), and in 1988 he joined pianist Bert Seager's quintet — alongside trumpeter Tim Hagans — for the Antilles album Because They Can, the recorded root of Garzone's connection to Seager, whose own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile. His own biography and other press materials also describe him touring Europe with bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma; no recorded release from that pairing turned up in this pass, so it is reported here as stated in his own materials rather than as independently verified.

A widely sought-after jazz educator, Garzone teaches at Berklee College of Music and has previously taught at the New England Conservatory, Longy School of Music, New York University, Manhattan School of Music, Northeastern University, and the New School. He pioneered the Triadic Chromatic Approach, an improvisation method developed while teaching in Boston and New York that lets a soloist move freely between triads by half-step without being tied to the underlying harmony; it has since been documented in a DVD set (The Triadic Chromatic Approach, 2016, JodyJazz) and companion books. His teaching legacy is well corroborated across independent sources: saxophonists Joshua Redman, Mark Turner, Branford Marsalis, and Donny McCaslin, and vocalist Luciana Souza — who went on to sing on his own 1995 album Alone — have all confirmed studying with him.

Garzone's playing sits at the free-jazz edge of the post-bop tradition — the sound of five decades leading The Fringe through open, harmonically unmoored improvisation, tempered by a hard-bop sense of swing and blues vocabulary underneath. The Triadic Chromatic Approach he developed for his students doubles as a description of his own soloing: dense chains of major and minor triads slipping by half-step past the stated changes, giving him a way to sound simultaneously "outside" and rhythmically grounded. That same quality made him equally at home opposite a second tenor in a cutting-contest format (Joe Lovano on Four's and Two's, Jerry Bergonzi on Quintonic, Frank Tiberi on Audacity) and inside more harmonically conventional company, from Paul Motian's trio on Among Friends to the Brazilian songbook of Night of My Beloved. His influence runs at least as deep through the players who passed through his studio — Redman, Turner, Marsalis, and McCaslin each carry a trace of his triadic vocabulary into otherwise very different saxophone styles.