Barry Harris: 15/12/29 – 08/12/21

Often considered the last remaining keeper of the bebop flame, Barry Harris’s long career has finally ended thanks to Covid, although he had been seriously ill a couple of years earlier, and also in the early 1990s. One of the famous Detroit community of second-generation bebop players, he was born and brought up there and, despite his early associations with many more famous names, he remained active in his hometown until after he turned 30.

He learned piano from age 4 thanks to his mother, who played regularly in church and soon encouraged Barry to do likewise. From high-school days, he was associating with other promising youngsters such as Elvin Jones, often jamming in each others’ homes. Harris became known as a knowledgeable theoretician, saying for instance in the book Before Motown: A History of Jazz in Detroit 1920-1960 by Lars Bjorn and Jim Gallert (U. of Michigan Press), “Paul [Chambers] learned to play at my house; he was probably one of my main students”. Joe Henderson and Charles McPherson were among his later acolytes.

Because of the lively club scene in Detroit, people like Charlie Parker, Sonny Stitt and Miles Davis loved to spend time there, and Barry had a chance to sit in with them. But, apart from a brief 1956 foray with Max Roach’s quintet, Harris remained active in Detroit until working equally briefly in 1960 with Cannonball Adderley (he’s on the quintet’s first ‘Work Song’) when he moved to New York. Here he was recording under his own name for Riverside and as a sideman for Dexter Gordon, Hank Mobley, former Detroit resident Yusef Lateef and Lee Morgan (famously on The Sidewinder). After accompanying Coleman Hawkins’s twilight years (1965-69), Harris became close to one of his great influences Thelonious Monk and, for instance, acted as rehearsal pianist for Monk’s 1974 Carnegie Hall concert. Subsequently, he lived alongside Monk at the apartment of the Baroness (Nica de Koenigswarter) and remained there after her death in 1988.

After the informal instruction he gave in his early period, Harris went on to earn a formidable reputation as an educator, giving seminars and weekly workshops emphasising the virtues of Monk, Tadd Dameron, Parker and perhaps especially Bud Powell. He regularly travelled to Japan, Europe and the UK, for instance at PizzaExpress, appearing with local rhythm-sections and challenging audiences and students alike. As early as 1955, journalist Barry Ulanov caught him live in Detroit, stating “It’s been a long time since I heard a modern pianist with such old-fashioned elegance of style and new-fashioned length of line”. The logic of his solos and their theoretical underpinning remained with him and with his followers, including many of NYC’s current crop of pianists.