Barry Harris: Keeper of the Jazz Flame
Last week Barry Harris, the great jazz pianist and grandmaster teacher, was laid to rest. He was a standard-bearer and embodiment of the idiom, a link in the great chain of being of the music. We honor his legacy as a leader by example, as a servant leader, a band leader, and a wisdom-bearer who passed on knowledge to professionals, amateurs, and fans alike.
To see him swing softly and to read more detailed notes about his career, check out this video posted after his death on December 8th by Bret Primack, the “Jazz Video Guy.”
I last had honor of being in his presence at a program I organized in May 2019 at Jazz at Lincoln Center. That evening, focusing on “The Art & Science of Improvisation,” featured jazz education royalty: Harris and Hal Galper. One of the most memorable aspects of the night was an Ellisonian twist: the Detroit-born and bred Black American Harris, then 89, emphasized the European underpinnings of jazz music; Galper, from Salem, Massachusetts and schooled at the Berklee School of Music in the 1950s, emphasized the oral tradition of the music as he believes derived from Africa.
Barry Harris performing Strayhorn’s “Lotus Blossom” in 2019 as Hal Galper (left) mimes the chords.
Perhaps the most memorable moment was when Barry sat at one of the pianos and gently touched the keys. Beautiful harmonies filled the room in the Irene Diamond Educational Center, as he rendered Billy Strayhorn’s “Lotus Blossom” with a sublime rainbow of touch and taste. As Barry played, I whispered to Hal, asking if he wanted to play next. He looked at me like I was crazy, saying: “No way I’m going to play after that.”
In the mid-1980s, I attended several sessions of Barry’s Jazz Cultural Workshop, with voices and instrumentalists led by a keeper of the bebop flame. I interviewed him in 2008 at Marcus Garvey Park during the Charlie Parker Festival. At the time I was hosting an online television program called “Jazz it Up.”
In 2012, as the jazz columnist for the New York Daily News, my feature story promoting his trio’s gig at the Village Vanguard, seemed to please him a lot. The following is derived from that story:
Barry Harris was a repository of the songs and stylings of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, and other founders of the jazz style that came to be called bebop. This school emphasizes angular rhythms, instrumental virtuosity, harmonic complexity, and tempos from super slow to blazing fast.
But Harris was also one of the greatest teachers of jazz.
From 1982 to 1987, he led the Jazz Cultural Workshop on Eighth Ave. between 28th and 29th Streets. The space was used for performances but was most famous for his classes for instrumentalists and vocalists. Members of the vocal choruses from those days would still accompany Harris at gigs. Yet his journey as a master teacher really began decades before, as a student.
Harris learned to play the piano at four years old and was in a big band in intermediate school. Early on, he’d look over the shoulders of Tommy Flanagan and Will Davis, fellow Detroit pianists. When Harris heard the music that became known as bebop (because, reputedly, many of the phrase endings sounded like “be-BOP”), he fell in love. He never looked back.
“See, I was a quiet cat. I’d come home from school and practice, to learn how to play like them.”
From a blind girl, he borrowed a machine that allowed records to be slowed up to any musical key.
“I got that machine,” Harris recalled, “and the first record I learned was ‘Webb City’ by Bud Powell, with Sonny Stitt, Fats Navarro and Max Roach. And because I practiced all the time, all these guys started coming to my house.”
That’s an understatement.
A roll call of major improvisers such as Donald Byrd, Joe Henderson, Buddy DeFranco, James Jamerson (a major Motown bassist) and Paul Chambers learned from Harris. He says pianists Walter Davis and Walter Bishop were hip to him. John Coltrane, too.
“Coltrane came to my house and I let him hear Charles McPherson and Lonnie Hilliard play when they were kids. ’Trane took all my rules. I made up rules for cats to practice.”
Some of the Harris rules involved the use of scales in relation to chord patterns. Others allowed musicians to “feel exactly how to end rhythmically right.”
When he taught, Harris didn’t just tell others how to do something. He demonstrated.
“I can improvise as a teacher in front of a student better than I can playing the piano. I can sing phrases to them that I don’t even play at the piano,” he said.
Teaching in New York every week he was in town started because of a 1970s mishap.
He was working with an organization, Jazz Interactions, doing a week-long set of classes. He blanked on the last session, going to OTB, having a ball betting on the horse races. A few hours after the class start time, he realized his error and panicked. Harris took a cab to the class, thinking all the student would have left.
He was wrong. Every student was there, waiting.
“I said to them: ‘I will keep a class forever in New York, because I’m sorry I wasn’t here to teach you today like I was supposed to be,’” he remembered. “‘All you’ve got to do is bring $3 or $4 to pay for the place and the bass player and the drummer.’”
When I wrote that story nine years ago, it was only $10 a session to study with him on Tuesdays.
Harris, who was married for over fifty years and has a daughter, told me his students kept him young. In particular, he recalled a group of young students from New Jersey.
“I couldn’t believe it. For the last two weeks, a young man from Camden, N.J., Jamal Dickerson, brought some high school students from the Creative Arts Morgan Village in Camden. I have never seen any high school students so prepared for me,” Harris said. “They play their instruments so well. And dig this: three girls on trumpet!”
Harris estimated that he’d played the Vanguard for more than 50 years, but that gig nine years ago was his first two-week run. During the 1960s, he even worked the room with Coleman Hawkins, the father of the jazz tenor sax. Other legends he’s performed with: Lester Young, Sonny Rollins, and Charlie (Bird) Parker himself.
“I sat in with Bird four or five times,” he said. “Just think: I played with Charlie Parker, man. That’s my life. My life is devoted to this music."
I urge you to take a moment to listen to two of Barry Harris’s most beloved compositions, “Nascimento” and “Bird of Red and Gold,” which has these lyrics:
Within the confines of one's soul
There sits a bird of red and gold.
Its wings at all times set to fly,
For if it does not, it will die.
If set free, it will soar to
Heights unknown to other men,
Lands unseen by other eyes;
And as the beauty of the universe
Unfolds, what joy the pleasure then
Of truth revealed, limitations
Then unsealed
This is the Almighty's gift to you.
In order for the bird to fly,
The seven deadly sins must die,
and then the seven walls will fall.
The bird will answer to the call.
Its wings will spread and harken
to the prince of peace's voice.
One's heart will surely then rejoice,
engulfed by love and peace
and beauty truth and right,
and then the day will pass,
unshackled by the things
that make one's soulbird die.
This is the almighty's gift to you.
This is the almighty's gift to you.
As we leave 2021, honoring revered elders and ancestors, we wish you a happy and safe holiday season. We’ll be back in early January 2022.