Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby

Barry’s assignment: get the Cootie Williams band record that has ‘Round Midnight, Cherry Red Blues and Is You Is on it. While Cleanhead Vinson sings Is You Is, the pianist underneath is double-timing and running minor arpeggios, and that pianist is Bud Powell. Listen somewhere dark or quiet, he said, and listen to the piano.

The last train to Monk: an interview18:3619:14Barry Harris on WKCR-FM ¶115

He told the story again in The Pace Report interview: you had to go and listen to different players, Terry Pollard and then Cootie Williams, and on those Cootie Williams cuts you hear things you never heard from a piano player before. Cootie, he guessed, must have told the young man to do anything he wanted.

The last train to Monk: an interview18:3619:14

In a 2006 interview with All About Jazz he relived the first time he heard it: out of the background came a pianist playing minor lines, and he had to know who it was. That, he said, is how hearing players gets you going. He thought Cootie Williams must have been a generous leader to let Bud solo right through some of his records.

Andrew Velez, Barry Harris: A Thousand Percent Music Man ¶9Andrew Velez, Barry Harris: A Thousand Percent Music Man ¶10

He used the record to place Bud beside Bird. Bud was with Cootie Williams while Bird was with Jay McShann, each heading his own way towards the same summit; Barry did not think either had influenced the other much, and thought they met and clashed.

Barry Harris on WKCR-FM ¶116

Tom Cleary, who teaches Barry’s approach, hears it in Barry’s own 1960 recording at the Jazz Workshop. On take 2 Barry keeps using a phrase that ends in the ‘seven down to the third’ line over the recurring G minor 7♭5 to C7♭9, placing it differently each time and once double-timing it.

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Cleary’s name for that line comes from Barry’s way with the minor ii-V: instead of a scale for each chord, run one dominant scale that starts a major third below the root of the ii chord, so over G minor 7♭5 to C7 you play E♭7 up and down to the third of C.

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