Barry Harris method: an introduction

Summary

The presenter offers a practical introduction to pianist and educator Barry Harris’s approach to jazz, based on attending his workshops. The method focuses particularly on bebop, especially the music of Charlie Parker and Bud Powell. It may be less relevant to players primarily interested in modal improvisation. In the presenter’s view, its central strength is helping musicians turn scales and harmonic ideas into convincing jazz language.

Barry Harris and his teaching

Harris was a major jazz pianist who performed with many leading musicians. The presenter emphasizes that his long career as a teacher was equally significant. Harris’s workshops typically had three parts:

• Harmony: Chords, voicings, and movement between chords.
• Improvisation: Single-note bebop lines.
• Singing: Learning a standard in a suitable key and singing its melody and words. The presenter considers this an important, sometimes overlooked, part of the method.

Harris treated harmony and single-note improvisation as distinct subjects, rather than treating improvisation mainly as a matter of navigating chord changes.

Harmony: chord movement and the six-diminished approach

Harris often focused on movement through chords, rather than viewing harmony as a succession of static chord shapes. One well-known part of his approach uses an eight-note scale formed by alternating notes from a sixth chord and a diminished chord.

The presenter recommends starting with the two most important versions:

• Major sixth–diminished
• Minor sixth–diminished

For example, the major-sixth version can be built by placing diminished-chord notes between the notes of a major-sixth chord. This produces a balanced, eight-note scale and can also be used to create moving chord voicings, including block-chord textures. Players can practice in several voices and experiment with borrowing notes between the major-sixth and diminished groups.

The presenter notes that this sound and the related voicings predate Harris; his contribution was to systematize and teach the scale and the ways it can be used.

Improvisation: building bebop lines

In Harris’s improvisation classes, students often learned lines by listening to the teacher, repeating them, and playing them at tempo. The presenter describes this as demanding but valuable for developing the ear and technique. The live examples also showed how Harris could create lines spontaneously and explain how they were built—something that can be harder to capture in written theory alone.

The approach includes several practical ideas:

• Reduce chord progressions to a manageable framework. For instance, a section of rhythm changes can be simplified into a sequence such as “I–V” and “I–IV–I–V.”
• Practice scales through the changes. Play them in different positions, ascending to the seventh and, when useful, descending again. This helps put chord tones on strong beats and makes the progression easier to hear and outline.
• Give dominant harmony special attention. Harris’s approach often treats many progressions through dominant-scale activity, while using only a few notes from tonic major or minor chords.
• Develop a vocabulary from dominant chords. Practice scales, thirds, triads, seventh-chord arpeggios, and lower-neighbor notes, including adding neighbor tones beneath chords.
• Use added-note and bebop scales. A scale can be expanded with one or several extra notes, including chromatic notes, to create more possibilities for lines.
• Work on small line-building devices. The presenter mentions pivots and “five-four-three-two” endings as useful elements to combine into improvised phrases.
• Explore dominant substitutions. A dominant chord can be approached through its tritone substitute and other related dominant chords. For example, around C7, the presenter discusses E♭7 and G♭7 as additional possibilities for moving to F major.
• Extend the approach to minor harmony. After working with dominant material, apply similar ideas to minor sounds, including melodic minor, harmonic minor, and minor sixth–diminished. Major harmony can also be incorporated.

The presenter finds the focus on dominant-scale activity especially useful, while stressing that the method’s possibilities expand as these elements are combined.

Suggested learning resources

The presenter recommends the following resources as reliable ways to study the method:

• The Howard Rees DVD set, which features Harris teaching. The presenter considers it a particularly useful, organized resource and says the first set alone can provide substantial material to study.
• Alan Kingston’s book on the Barry Harris method for guitar, recommended for chordal and movement concepts.
• Ronnie Ben-Hur’s Talk Jazz, in its standard or guitar version, recommended for single-note material.
• The YouTube channel Things I Learned from Barry Harris, by Chris Parks. The presenter describes it as comprehensive and also notes Parks’s teaching through Open Studio.
• Labyrinth of Limitations, by Thomas Eakle (name as heard in the subtitles), recommended for deeper exploration of harmony.
• Isaac Raz’s channel.
• Jazz Skills, by Sha Verma.

The presenter says these are recommendations, not an exhaustive list, and singles them out because of the creators’ direct experience with Harris’s teaching.

Speakers and sources featured

• Presenter/narrator: The host of Jazz Guitar Scrapbook, speaking from personal experience at Barry Harris workshops.
• Barry Harris: Heard in a workshop-style teaching excerpt; his method and teaching are the subject of the video.
• Musicians discussed as influences or examples: Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, Sonny Stitt, Coleman Hawkins, Dexter Gordon, Wes Montgomery, Warne Marsh, Lee Konitz, Elvin Jones, and the Count Basie Orchestra. The presenter also mentions early students Paul Chambers, Tommy Flanagan, and James Jamerson.
• Recommended study sources: Howard Rees’s DVD set; Alan Kingston; Ronnie Ben-Hur; Chris Parks / Things I Learned from Barry Harris; Thomas Eakle / Labyrinth of Limitations; Isaac Raz; and Sha Verma / Jazz Skills.