barry harris

<give:culture+education> support the barry harris institute

<learn:culture> ‍I don’t exactly recall where I first came across the legendary pianist and music educator barry harris. It wasn’t his music, but a video of him teaching a workshop at the royal conservatory in the hague (recorded by another accomplished pianist, Frans Elsen, between 1989 and 1998). In the video, Barry describes “feeling the and”, the space between two beats, and making conscious choices whether to fill that space or leave it empty to amplify and syncopate the notes surrounding it. He is a masterful teacher, weaving the spoken english language with musical language as he describes ways to manipulate the composition by describing it verbally and through onomatopoeia like a Spanglish speaker who unconsciously pieces together hybrid words from separate languages to form a new type of communication.

‍i followed the breadcrumb trail to The Barry Harris Institute of Jazz, which was formed for the purpose of protecting, preserving, and promulgating the musical compositions, teachings, and musical legacy of Barry Harris. Imagine that … Listeners, students, musicians, and acolytes of a musician that many casual listeners (and even jazz enthusiasts like myself) may have never heard of, who so recognize the brilliance of the artist and educator that they are compelled to the commitment to support one another to keep his flame alive for others to listen and learn.

This brief education on Barry Harris would be incomplete without  listening to his music. barry was a significant contributor to the development and evolution of bebop. “Listen to Barry Harris … Solo Piano” in masterful. His solo piano carries the entire album, which opens with The Londonberry Air, a song that gracefully emerges, as if from a mist, fully-formed and graceful before stepping back to hide. That is followed by the warm, wistful, yet confident, Louise. His rendition of Body and Soul is graceful, soulful, balanced, and presents shadows of phrases from Theloneus Monk’s Round Midnight. That’s no surprise, as Harris and Monk lived together the Weehawken, New Jersey, home of the jazz patron Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter.[12] in the 1970s, and Harris substituted for Monk in rehearsals at the New York Jazz Repertory Company in 1974. you can almost hear whispers of a dialogue between harris and monk at points in the song. implied sketches of Monk’s angular, uneven, abstract phrasing layered into barry’s warm, wistful, and confident construction and execution of the song. This is a master of the instrument in complete control over the tone, phrasing, and improvisation.   

In the song marz, barry’s sing/speak of the phrase, ‘uh … one!’ at the 0:29 second mark (and throughout the remainder of the song) is processed with an added lowered octave, creating a bounce and dropping one of the syllables into the ‘and’ space – the very same void that Barry describes to his students in the video. The musical knowledge imparted even in that briefest of phrases incorporated into the song, expresses the musical concept that Barry explained to his students with an economy and directness that can only be imparted through music. Barry didn’t know that his words would be added into a stranger’s electronically produced song twenty-five years after; but his connection to these ephemeral yet fundamental musical concepts was so deep that even a two-second shred of this explanation carries the weight of creating the groove, the bounce and the syncopation that powers the song and that he literally describes with that sampled phrase.   

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‍ “you must know about ‘ands. you must know things that others [don’t] know … if I am going to consider you my school.” - barry harris