Dear musician,
This is a step-by-step guide to the musical language of Barry D. Harris and his forefathers. It explores the basic grammar that allowed American giants of true Jazz to create sublime music. There are dialects, idiosyncrasies and boundless interpretations in their repertoire — yet common influences and harmonic patterns can be identified. As with other art forms, remaining true to a tradition, and constraints, will allow you to channel personal forms of magic.
Barry Harris (1929-2021): a genius pianist, a humble guru, and a shaman. He taught students to look at the piano in a radical way. Bits and pieces of his teachings are scattered around the internet, yet it is difficult to sort the authentic from the inauthentic and the clear from the confusing. There are music educators online who have added the Barry Harris method to their content, building on other musical systems. This creates unnecessary complexities and misinterpretations. The Barry Harris method holds a deep coherence that is best appreciated on its own. This doesn’t mean it is all encompassing, it just means that it provides the most elegant and beautiful harmonic logic.
This guide provides the foundations which will allow you to evolve as a Barry Harris disciple. No music background needed. In fact, not knowing comes with a huge advantage: you won’t need to unlearn anything.
Consulting LLMs on the Barry Harris method won’t do, as they were fed vast amounts of misleading information. Knowing and appreciating the harmonic beauty of this tradition is beyond an LLM’s intelligence. Real Jazz is among the most profound of human expressions. A human intelligence, a human emotion, a human frontier. An AI will never improvise like Duke Ellington, Coleman Hawkins, Hank Jones or Bud Powell.
In the 1990s, Leonard Nimoy (better known as Spock) paid a psychiatrist in Los Angeles the full hourly rate for Yiddish lessons — because no other teacher was around. This is the situation with the language discussed in this book. There are very few wizards in the world who can teach it properly. I was fortunate to find one of these wizards, and have become like a Carlos Castaneda learning from a Don Juan. I started listening, writing, practicing, refining, and the result is presented to you.
Barry Harris once said: “The golden age has passed. It is time for a renaissance.” For him, the golden age was the synthesis of African rhythm, classical music, and African American music of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. The renaissance can be a further development or that era, or perhaps a blend with additional cultures — as long as harmony is preserved.
This digital book will be updated regularly, as part of my eternal musical journey. Stay tuned.
Love,
Yair Goren