Music is like math; finding your own voice; the teacher’s job

Barry often recalled a writer who complained in Down Beat that he was tired of playing the major scale. Barry called that foolish: no single player has played all the ways of playing the major scale, and if everyone in the country played it, each would play something different.

Believe: a talk to musicians27:4428:20Student performances and coaching26:09

To show why, he counts. Across the two and a half octaves most horns have, the possible orderings of notes grow fast: multiply 1 x 2 x 3 x 4 x 5 x 6 and you already have 720. He compares it to a penny doubled every day for thirty days, which ends up worth more than a million dollars. Music is math, and math has no end.

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Some students act as if Chopin and the other masters played everything there is. Barry disagrees: nobody has, not even Charlie Parker. He recalls that when Coleman Hawkins played All the Things You Are, Bird came down a little in his estimation, because he saw that no one plays it all. Since music, like math, has no end, the best piece has not yet been written. He still calls Bird, Bud and Dizzy great, but insists there is a whole lot left for you to play.

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The masters who came before did not tell us everything, Barry says; they couldn’t, because there is too much to tell, and some things you have to find out for yourself. There is a lot in this music that hasn’t been played yet, like scientists who reached the moon and now want Mars and then other planets. What you need is to learn certain things and then get into them and solve the mysteries yourself.

Student performances and coaching26:09Barry Harris Spanish TV22:29Believe: a talk to musicians29:29

Barry recalled that as a teenager he loved jazz so much that, while others were out playing baseball and football, he ran home to sit at the piano.

Interview on Italian television10:45

We learn to improvise the way we learn to speak: crawling, saying mama and daddy, learning words, going to school. We all graduate with the same words, yet each of us uses them differently, shaped by family and surroundings. Music is the same. Learn as much as you can and everyone will go their own way, so don’t worry that study will make everyone sound alike.

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The great players had instantly recognisable sounds: Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, Lester Young, Lockjaw Davis, Yusef Lateef, Bird, Sonny Stitt. Barry finds that many players today sound alike, so half the time you can’t tell who is playing. He blames electronics, which make sounds indistinguishable, and horn players who use a straight tone.

Interview: Bird, Hawkins, Monk and New York11:14Artists House Master Class Barry Harris - Student Interviews After Concert11:4812:22

If you play a horn, practise your vibrato. Barry links vibrato to soul and believes it is what made each of the masters distinct: your vibrato is what separates you from the next player. Pianists need a sound of their own too. Barry says he doesn’t want to sound like everybody else, and recalls the sound a great pianist he listened to drew from the piano (the name is unclear in the captions).

Interview: Bird, Hawkins, Monk and New York11:50Artists House Master Class Barry Harris - Student Interviews After Concert12:2212:56

In class Barry urged a student not to hold back out of fear. You have to take risks when you play. Don’t play the intro and then let everything drop; start doing it and don’t be scared.

Class of 19 October 2010: through the changes3:103:484:25

A former student, speaking at Barry’s funeral, recalled that alongside hard work and practice he taught the importance of silence. You don’t always have to fill the spaces with notes; a pause or a space can be your greatest asset, whether you are playing or singing.

Barry Harris Funeral1:07:39

For Barry the secret of the music is feeling. He describes going to hear Charlie Parker with strings and feeling a chill that started in his feet and went through his whole body, the most beautiful feeling he could imagine. The whole idea of playing is to make somebody else feel that. His aim was to make listeners feel the way Bird or Chopin made people feel.

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Barry liked to say that the dumbest person in a classroom is the teacher, because he has been in the class the longest. A teacher has to learn from his students. He taught, he said, so that someday someone might show him the right thing; then he would stop teaching and graduate from the class himself. Half joking, he added that a teacher should be good enough that by the end he tells himself he will never teach again.

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Barry makes a point of being able to do what he teaches: he can sing ideas and licks to students, have them play them, then go to the piano and play them himself, and he stresses he is not a piano teacher who can’t play. He had classical teachers who taught well but whom he never heard play; still, he considers it very important to play in front of students. They have to see it done and then feel it: hearing him play alone at the piano, without bass or drums, shows them how it is supposed to feel.

Accepting the Bruce Lundvall Visionary Award2:55Interview: Detroit, Bud Powell and the shuffle12:2913:06

Barry described his job as working out how to make each student play. He keeps showing things, potentially a million of them, until one day the student realises they can play and starts making up phrases of their own that have nothing to do with him. That, he says, is how the music goes on.

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At the end of one workshop Barry told the students they had to believe in him, or in somebody: he had shown them what a diminished scale really is and things they had never learned before. Believing, he added, is not about taking his word for it but about recognising that what he shows is right. He told the guitarists he expected them to become the best.

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At Barry’s funeral a pianist colleague summed him up. As a player, Barry built his improvisations as an unhurried, flowing story, never showing off for its own sake, with a deep grip on the beat. As a teacher, his way of setting out the bebop language went to the heart of what makes a melody melodic, joining lines and chords into one whole: melodies live inside chords and chords live inside melodies. To the end he stayed curious, often calling this colleague with a musical puzzle to work out, each at his own piano.

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Barry called building a young audience his main concern. The average youngster knows nothing about jazz, doesn’t care to, and is prejudiced against it without ever having heard it; jazz musicians aren’t even heard enough to be disliked. He joked that things are bad when your audience is as grey-haired as you are, so creating young listeners is the main task for jazz musicians.

Barry Harris- Jazz Master, Educator, Saint0:295:53Passing It On3:02

Barry noted that his concerts, for example in Detroit, drew old folks, people he went to school with, and that this white-haired audience keeps shrinking as they die. Jazz gets little exposure; most people now say they don’t like it, and some have never even heard it played.

Believe: a talk to musicians0:37NBC News profile at the Jazz Cultural Theatre2:21

Because young people will not hear jazz anywhere else, Barry said each jazz musician has to create an audience and turn young people on. That means playing where they are, even in a noisy club, rather than refusing. Most of the world is the lion’s den, so you go in: invited onto a big TV show or a rock-and-roll event, he would go and show them that rock is not the only music.

Interview: Bird, Hawkins, Monk and New York14:0515:1215:46

Barry argued that jazz should simply be recognised as the national music, the country’s cultural contribution to the world, without any drawn-out process. He found it strange that he had to go to Japan to discover he was a star, while young Americans know nothing about the music, and he wished jazz musicians could be heard on the soundtracks of big films.

Interview: Bird, Hawkins, Monk and New York16:2020:4331:2338:00

Barry said he was presenting songs this way to show that Americans can write beautiful music. He pointed to standards like April in Paris and Autumn in New York as beautiful music written by us and for us, and regretted the nonsense that goes on today.

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Barry said he spent his life believing in jazz and travelling to make sure people knew it, partly because the US was starting to neglect it. One of his classes in Rome had students from 22 nations, and he drew similar turnouts in Verona, Madrid and elsewhere. He wished he could get that at home, since Americans should be the hippest people about this music.

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Asked why he came to New York after so many years in Detroit, Barry said you simply have to come to New York. Though he noted its problems, such as the homeless at the Port Authority, he hoped it could regain its status as the finishing school of the world. New York should set the trends rather than leave that to Hollywood or other cities; the young should set an example of how to act, and the old should show how to grow old gracefully instead of hiding their age in a society geared to youth.

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