Chris Parks · Stage 7: Building phrases over changes

Harmony versus soloing: what you’re getting wrong

Episode 154 · 15:10 · On YouTube · In the lesson player

Chris explains that Barry’s method had two prongs that matched his classes: the piano class, where chords such as A minor 7 to D7 were seen through the eight-note scales of chords, and the horn class, where soloing used plain major and dominant scales broken into small pieces. Lines come from fitting those pieces together in your own way, with taste.

Step by step

0:42Barry’s classes: the piano (harmony) class with the eight-note scales, a singers’ class, and the horn class where he built lines on a standard.
1:57In the piano class, A minor 7 to D7 means C6 diminished moved parallel, contrary, oblique or by borrowing, then D7 diminished or E flat minor 6 diminished for the D7.
2:38In the horn class the same change is just the D7 scale: don’t think ii-V.
3:17On D7 practise the small pieces: scale, thirds, triads, chords, arpeggios, half-step rules, pivots, chromatics.
4:44Build a line from pieces: run up from D to F sharp, come down the important arpeggio, add half steps, pivot a chord, come down the scale.
6:37Barry called out lines as such instructions, and a Bud Powell phrase can be broken into the same small pieces.
8:27Scale outlines mostly use a dominant and a major scale, such as D7 up and down then G major.
10:58The only overlap: on a real minor tune, he played the minor 6 diminished as a scale.
12:52Use even long pieces such as Barry’s chromatic scale only in part, connected to other pieces, with taste.

Barry’s own words on this

7.2 Building phrases from small pieces (class phrases)7.1 Think in scales and phrases, not chords 8.1 Put the ii chord away 0.1 How a Barry class worked

In the course

Scale-wise runs of any length Puzzle pieces Think the dominant: put the ii away The three scales for scale outlines Scale outlines The descending half-step rules for the dominant Half step below Dissect the masters’ phrases Two prongs: the piano class and the horn class Barry’s four scales of chords The major 6 diminished scale The minor 6 diminished scale Parallel, oblique and contrary motion Barry dictating lines Use pieces with taste; disguise them Freedom and your own voice Teach Barry’s material accurately

Transcript

0:00Hello and welcome to episode 154 of Things I Learned from Barry Harris. And today I thought we would discuss a couple of things that I see online all the time about Barry Harris’ method. And I just wanted to clear up because there’s a couple of ways that people are looking at this wrong, I think. the first thing is I always viewed Barry’s methodology as two-pronged even though they’re connected it’s kind of like one way to look at harmony and one way to look at soloing single notes and as a matter of fact the reason why I thought of it that way was because that’s how his
0:42classes were broken up the first class was what he would call piano class harmony where he would discuss his uh idea of his eight note scales major six diminished minor six diminished dominant seven diminished dominant 755 diminished and even sometimes a diminished scale itself the full diminished scale and then he had a singer’s class where all the singers got a chance to sing the same song in different keys and then he had what was called the horn class where he would create lines take a standard, whatever the standard was,
1:18if he was working on Indiana, he would have a whole line. He would work out a whole line. And when I first started going to him, he would work out like two choruses of a line, just right off the top of his head. And that was the separation. So I never got the things confused. But I feel like people online get it confused because they weren’t at the classes, so they just assume that everything is the same. I’ll show you what I mean. So if we were in Barry’s piano class and we were talking about, let’s say, A minor 7 to D7, how many different ways we can play that, right? So in Barry’s world, the A minor
1:577 belongs to one of the scales of chords. It belongs to C major 6 diminished scale. So he would show us a million little things, or sometimes just one or two, and then have everybody try it, of things to do on C6 diminished going going to D7 and then he would show us he has a C major 6 scale here’s all the things you could do with it you could go up parallel you could move it contrary you could move it oblique you can borrow and then for the D7 you could do the same thing you have several different scales of chords that you could use for that you could use the D7 diminished scale most of the time
2:38he would show everybody the E flat minor six diminished scale. Same thing that he showed for the C major six diminished scale. Now that’s harmonically. But now if we were in the horn class and he was talking about A minor to D7, what he would talk about is just plain D7 scale. Just D7. Because when Barry was thinking about soloing, he said don’t think 2-5. even though you thought 2-5 when you’re thinking harmony and you can create all this beautiful movement when he was thinking just soloing he said just think plain d7 now that might seem like a
3:17contradiction but it really isn’t it really isn’t so but what he meant by d7 for those of you that don’t know it’s like a d mixolydian scale and he would have his practice different things on it he would have his practice scale up and down, thirds, triads, chords, what he called chords, arpeggios, what he called arpeggios, half-step rules. He would have you, you had to know how to do a pivot. You had to know all those things on the scale. Now, the way that he used to call out what he wanted you to do on the scale was those things that he had us do in the beginning scale
4:01up and down thirds triads chords pivots all that stuff half step rules chromatics whatever those were all smaller pieces some of those smaller pieces are harder to get together on your instrument than others and take a lot of time so it’s kind of hard to look at them as a smaller piece because it’s like oh man like just his half step rules descending half step rules that’s going to take you a while to get together or his chromatic scale it’s going to take you a while to get together but in the end it’s just a taste of each one of those when you’re playing okay so um what it becomes is he would say start on this note run up the scale to here put two half steps pivot a
4:44chord he would talk to you and break it down into those smaller pieces so it’s all connected if in the beginning he has you practicing let’s say thirds with a half step below you’re not going to play a whole thing on d7 with just that exercise of course not but what you might do is start on the d and then once i do that i’m going to do something else now i went up from d to f sharp so now i’m going to do something else from the f sharp i might go down a
5:22scale degree up to the second and then come down and import an arpeggio watch or i might do two half steps one two three or or maybe i’ll do one half step because i’m going to end up on the third which is on the beat so i’ll say and then maybe i’ll pivot a chord from the last note that i started on and then maybe i’ll come down scale wise down the scale because remember the first thing you practice on d7 is scale up and down but that’s not just scale tonic to seven that’s saying you should know how to run a d7 scale scale wise meaning no jumps just this way
6:04or this way that’s it so that means i should know how to do it five notes i should know how to do it six notes six notes starting on the end ah see watch one two three That’s putting a couple of things together. But what was brilliant about his class, and why he never had to say it like that, like, oh, these are small pieces that I’m putting together, is because in the horn class, he would just say,
6:37start on this note, run up to this scale degree, put in two half steps, and then come down the important arpeggio. And since you were a member of the class, you knew what he was talking about. so I digested it as I get it it’s all of these smaller pieces that you get to put together so the brilliance of that is since all of these are smaller pieces that you put together we’re all going to sound different we’ll never put the same things together at the same time never on top of that when Barry used to take a phrase like said oh Bud Powell played this beautiful
7:16phrase and then he would give us this phrase you could then break it down into instead of a two or three or four bar phrase you could break it down into smaller segments of oh look look what bud did he did he went down a half step he came a half step below and came up a chord to use the triplet or he you know he put a half step below and then jumped up a sixth or whatever what whatever thing that it was that we were looking at but you can always now see it through the prism of smaller things that’s what was brilliant about his um his both of his classes are brilliant but
7:54specifically his horn class that’s what was so brilliant about it it was using basic scales that everybody knows that everybody’s learned it wasn’t using the six diminished or the dominant seven It wasn’t using any of those. It was just plain. I would say in Barry’s class, probably when he would do the scale outlines, which is another beautiful thing that he did, he would only use primarily, I would say, well, it was really the majority was two scales.
8:27He would use a dominant scale and he would use a major scale. Now, I don’t mean major six diminished. I mean regular major scale. So for instance, if we had a measure of A minor, a measure of D7 going to a measure or two of G major, his scale outline would be D7 up and down, and then G major up and down. You can’t get any easier than that. But the point was, what small things do you know how to do on D7? What small things do you know how to do on G major?
9:01You see, it’s that. it’s that that’s what was so clear so he didn’t necessarily say it in those words but that’s what he was giving us so i i can’t even tell you he would come up with um i mean at least at the time when i started studying with him which was uh 93 he would come up with like two choruses of like he would start us practicing on cherokee he would give us the scales and then from the scales he would just off the top of his head come up with the most beautiful phrases like master level phrases off the top of his head and then by the end of the class we would have this whole either chorus or sometimes
9:42chorus and a half depending on how long the form is of just the the greatest solo you’d ever want to play in your life filled with all of these little things that as he’s telling us to do these things, he’s explaining them as smaller pieces. Now he never used the term smaller pieces. He never used that term. That’s something that this is what I had to understand, but I didn’t, I only had to understand it to teach it, but I got it because I was in the class all the time and that’s how he explained it. But again, totally separate from if we were talking about, hey, how would I
10:24chord something on this how would I how would I chord a pretty a minor to d7 you know that was the piano class and we use that as guitarists or as pianists of course or any instrument that can play chords we use that to comp yes but the single note stuff which is why he called it the horn class because that’s where all the horn players came. But really, the horn players, and I know a lot of good ones, went to the piano class too because they wanted to learn something about harmony
10:58and about movement. So those are the two differences. But I see it so often being explained as the same thing. It’s the only overlap that Barry had. Like I was saying earlier about the dominant scale. He used primarily all of his scale outlines, use a dominant scale, either just a plain dominant scale or one dominant scale running into another dominant scale, a major scale. And if we were playing a real minor tune, like Lubasa or Softly is in a Morning Sunrise,
11:34let’s say it’s in C minor, then he would think to play the minor six diminished as a real scale. He had all sorts of pretty things that he did on the minor six diminished. um but that’s the only overlap that’s the only overlap i’m telling you like literally you might find an example here or example there but i’m telling you in studying with barry 99.9 percent of the soloing stuff was just basic scales and the things that we all know already who doesn’t know a g major scale who doesn’t know a d7 scale the brilliance was looking at it in a smaller way so
12:14that you could look at it as little, almost like little puzzle pieces that you could fit. But the thing about it is there wasn’t just one way to put the puzzle piece together. You could put them any way you want. And that’s what makes all of us sound different. So you could study Barry Harris. All of us could study Barry Harris. And we might as Barry Harris people be able to identify like, oh, I know what that person’s doing. That’s a pivot with a half step below, or that’s a pivot with a play notes given a play note or whatever but we’ll all sound different we’ll all sound different because it’s impossible to put it together so remember it’s not like okay i’m
12:52going to learn one of various things like the chromatic scale the chromatic scale as long as that’s going to take you to learn you should still only make it part a piece of what you do if you start playing chromatic scale all the time just over everything nobody sounds like that nobody should want to sound like that that’s not that’s not anything that’s not anything it’s you’re supposed to put it as a piece of something so if i say i’m going to start a chromatic scale i’m going to start on flat seventh go barry’s chromatic scale up to the
13:27second but now i want to i don’t want to just keep going i want to maybe at the second i want to do something so I might come down a chord or maybe I’ll come down an important arpeggio from the fifth or maybe I’ll come down an important arpeggio from the flat seventh see and then just add some some uh scale things after that but do you see the difference if I said or now it’s, I’m connecting it in a different way. So all of these things should be used with the greatest amount of taste that you have.
14:12You don’t want to overuse any of them. In my opinion, you don’t want to overuse any of them. Because if you overuse one of them, it can sound corny. You don’t want to sound corny. And then, you know, we as musicians can make anything sound corny. Of course we can. I do it all the time. But the point is you want to take these things and even the longer things that you have to work on, like the chromatic scale, you still only want pieces of it. It’s pieces of these things. So anyway, I just thought I would make this video about that because I’ve seen quite a few videos talking about Barry’s stuff.
14:50And it’s not really Barry’s stuff. It’s how somebody else interprets Barry’s stuff, which is totally fine. I’m not saying that this is wrong. I’m just saying he never taught it that way. Never. So, anyway, hope that clears things up. And until next time, enjoy practicing your Barry stuff.