Barry Harris, a pianist and educator who was the longstanding scholar of the bebop movement — and eventually one of its last original ambassadors — died Wednesday in North Bergen, NJ. He was 91.
His death, in a hospital, was caused by complications from the coronavirus, which exacerbated a number of underlying health conditions, said Howard Rees, his longtime business partner and collaborator.
[Those We’ve Lost: Read about other people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic here.]
From his teens until after his 90th birthday, Mr. Harris taught, taught and toured with unwavering dedication, evangelizing bebop’s status as a form of high American modernism and helping to lay the groundwork for the widespread academic study of jazz. Yet throughout his career he remained an independent educator: never joining the faculty of a major institution, choosing to embed himself in the New York music community, reaching out to students of all ages.
For nearly half a century, Mr. Harris ran a weekly series of cheap classes in the city, while also playing at the city’s leading clubs and traveling abroad to perform and teach. He was known for his sharp tongue and his demanding nature, a testament to his passion for teaching.
Writing in 1986, DailyExpertNews critic Robert Palmer described Mr. Harris as a “one-man jazz academy.”
It emerged in the late 1940s and 1950s in Detroit, where a thriving scene harbored some of jazz’s greatest improvisers. Many of the musicians from his hometown where he grew up – the vibraphonist Milt Jackson; the guitarist Kenny Burrell; the Jones brothers (drummer Elvin, pianist Hank and trumpeter Thad); the saxophonist Yusef Lateef; the pianist Tommy Flanagan – would soon become leading figures, and their contributions would help define the hard bop sound: a blistering, blues-infused style that captured some of bebop’s diffused intensity.
But mr. Harris never shied away from the high temperatures, clattering rhythms and boisterous melodies of bebop. He remained an evangelist for what he considered to be the pinnacle of American music making.
“We believe in Bird, Diz, Bud. We believe in Art Tatum. We believe in Cole Hawkins,” said Mr. Harris later to his students, as he traced the founders of bebop. “These are the people we believe in. Nothing has influenced us.”
Mr. Harris was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 1989. He received several honorary degrees and was often referred to as ‘doctor’ by friends and students.
He recorded more than two dozen albums, including a string of celebrated releases in the 1960s for the Prestige and Riverside labels. On all those LPs, he played either in small ensembles or alone on the piano, demonstrating his sly, roving harmonic feel and unshakable sense of bebop rhythm.
A stroke in 1993 somewhat limited his mobility on the keyboard, but it didn’t slow him down much. As he grew older he developed a stooped posture, but as he sat at the piano, bending lovingly over the keys with a look of enamored study, his hunch became impossible to notice.
He is survived by a daughter, Carol Geyer.
Barry Doyle Harris was born on December 15, 1929 in Detroit, the fourth of five children born to Melvin and Bessie Harris. His mother was the pianist at their Baptist church and when he was 4 she started teaching him to play.
As an adolescent, he threw himself at the elbow of some of the more experienced pianists in town. Almost immediately after learning the basics of bebop, he became something of a junior scholar of the movement, building a pedagogy around the music that Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell and their comrades had only spent a few years together in Harlem. had invented earlier.
He began giving informal lessons at his mother’s house, and musicians with considerably more experience often sought out his informal symposiums, hoping to seep in what he called his “rules”: exercises and frameworks that could help them work out the complex. tackle – but often unwritten – structures of bebop.
“Trane followed all my rules,” he told The Daily News of New York in 2012, referring to John Coltrane. “I’ve made rules for cats to exercise.”
His process as an instructor was as improvisational as his performances. “To see him in action is to witness the oral tradition at its deepest,” critic Mark Stryker wrote of Mr. Harris in his book “Jazz From Detroit.”
Asked to be both a bandleader and a side musician in the 1950’s, Mr. Harris supported some of the leading musicians of the era when they performed in Detroit, including Miles Davis. He sometimes sat with Parker, the leading man of bebop, when he was in town.
Harris toured in 1956 with trailblazing drummer Max Roach and made frequent trips to New York to record with the likes of Thad Jones, saxophonist Hank Mobley and trumpeter Art Farmer. But he had raised a family in Detroit and was happily ensconced as one of the mainstays of the scene.
In 1960, at age 30, he was finally persuaded by saxophonist Cannonball Adderley to join the tide of Detroit musicians who had moved to New York. He continued to live in the metropolitan area for the rest of his life, teaching and performing almost non-stop, appearing on albums such as the 1964 hit “The Sidewinder” by trumpeter Lee Morgan.
Not long after his arrival, he befriended Pannonica de Koenigswarter, the heiress and advocate of musicians known as the Jazz Baroness, and she invited him to take up residence in her sprawling Weehawken, NJ home, overlooking Manhattan and it is teeming with dozens of cats. . (Mrs. de Koenigswarter arranged for Mr. Harris to remain in the house after her death; he continued to live there for the rest of his life.)
In 1972, Thelonious Monk moved in, and he remained there until his death 10 years later. So Mr. Harris went on to elbow a fellow master, exchanging information and soaking up his language even more. The Monk Songbook remained a pillar of Mr Harris’ repertoire throughout his life; perhaps thanks in part to the time he spent with Monk, his playing became both more lyrical and tighter in rhythm as he got older.
From 1974, Mr. Harris weekly intensive workshops in New York, open to adult students of all ages for a relatively low fee. Students could buy an evening ticket or pay for a whole year. He never stopped teaching classes, continued until the pandemic ended business in March 2020, then taught them via Zoom this year.
In 1982, Mr. Harris opened the Jazz Cultural Theater, a multi-purpose space in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, where he taught classes seven days a week and performed in the evenings. At some of those performances, he played a choir made up of neighborhood kids.
Mrs. de Koenigswarter helped fund the establishment, but Mr. Harris refused to sell liquor, preferring a community orientation that would allow children to be there all the time. As a result, he was not making a steady profit.
The theater closed after five years as rents went up, but Mr. Harris simply moved his operation elsewhere and continued to teach: in public schools, community centers and abroad.
He never really stopped performing either, performing regularly at New York venues into the 90s, including a more or less annual run at the Village Vanguard.
His last performance was in November, in a concert with winners of the Jazz Masters prize. He did not play the piano, but sang a rendition of his own ballad, “The Bird of Red and Gold”, a tale of inspiration and triumph he first recorded, in a rare vocal performance, in 1979.
In time, Mr. Harris’s students spread around the world and committed themselves to continuing his work. With his blessing, a former student established a venue in Spain, the Jazz Cultural Theater of Bilbao.
Interviewed by The Times shortly before the pandemic, Mr Harris had lost none of his passion for teaching. Reflecting on the experience of improving a student’s hearing, he said, “It’s the most beautiful thing you want to hear in your life.”