NEA Jazz Master, pianist Dr. Barry Harris is unquestionably the highest authority on bebop today.  Dubbed by Downbeat Magazine as the “Keeper of the Bebop flame”,  Dr. Harris is both one of the best performers and the most knowledgeable teachers of the music. 

 

Born in Detroit in 1929, Barry Harris arrived just in time to experience bebop from the source—saxophonist Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker. “I sat in with Bird at least three or four times,” Dr. Harris remembers. “The chills engulfed you. It spoils you. When you do something like that, you end up looking for the same thing to happen with somebody else”. He later performed with a virtual Bird on “April in Paris” and “Laura” in the Clint Eastwood film, “Bird.” Growing up in Detroit and receiving classical training, he joined the ranks of the pianists of the so-called Detroit school of jazz piano, a style that combined the dexterity and harmonic sophistication of bebop with understated elegance and bell tone touch—Hank Jones, Tommy Flanagan, Hugh Lawson, and Sir Roland Hanna.  Young Barry Harris worked around the different clubs at the Motor City playing with his friends and contemporaries like Thad Jones, Donald Byrd, Frank Foster, Yusef Lateef, Sonny Red, Kenny Burrell, Paul Chambers, Elvin Jones, and also with the visiting musicians like  Lester Young, Flip Phillips,  Nancy Wilson, and Miles Davis.