![]() ![]() ![]() “Watching him was like getting transported via time machine back to a 52nd St jazz club in 1945 hearing modern jazz from the source,” music writer and historian Ted Gioia wrote on Twitter. Never, however, did it lack for soul or a full embrace of the music’s cultural heritage. His playing style, while showing an undeniable Bud Powell influence, was much like his learning had been: thoughtful, logical, and careful-even at the breakneck tempos he could easily achieve. Thus, only a small handful of musicians can claim to have learned from Harris in a formal-education sense, but those who learned from him at an open workshop, in private lessons, at a jam session, or just in conversation are innumerable. His academic CV was entirely in the realm of temporary residencies and master classes his real work as an educator was done at the piano, whether in one-on-one interfaces or on bandstands. Unlike many other postwar jazz didacts, however, Harris did little of his teaching in a classroom. “Harris codified the language of modern jazz into an integrated system,” journalist Mark Stryker wrote in his seminal book Jazz from Detroit, “and, like a swinging Socrates, has guided students for more than 60 years in a quest for truth, beauty, and the hippest chords to play on ‘Embraceable You.’” He even formulated his own approach to harmony, the Barry Harris harmonic method, still a bedrock of jazz education. Listening to records by Thelonious Monk and (especially) Bud Powell, he puzzled out the structures and devices of bebop piano and translated them into rubrics that could be taught, studied, and replicated. He also launched an impressive solo career that included 25 albums under his own name across five decades.įar more so than his contemporaries, however, Harris was a scholar and theoretician of the music. Along with fellow Detroiters Hank Jones and Tommy Flanagan, he was a key pianist in that wave, working with the likes of Max Roach, Hank Mobley, Lee Morgan, and Cannonball and Nat Adderley in the late 1950s and early ’60s. A native of Detroit, Michigan, he was part of a bumper crop of musicians from that city who became crucial players in the second wave of bebop. Cause of death was complications of COVID-19.Īlthough the term “authenticity” has lost some of its luster in discussions of jazz, Harris was absolutely redolent of it. ![]() His death was reported widely on social media and confirmed by a friend, Kira von Ostenfeld-Suske, who told National Public Radio that Harris had been hospitalized for two weeks. He was one week shy of his 92nd birthday. ![]() Barry Harris, a pianist, educator, and bebop true believer who spread its gospel far and wide-to audiences, record buyers, and students in equal measure-died on the morning of December 8 at Palisades Medical Center in North Bergen, New Jersey. ![]()
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