The Barry Harris Approach To Improvised Lines Harmony Pdf

  • The Barry Harris Approach to Improvised Lines & Harmony: An Introduction Written by Fiona Bicket. This 26 page tutorial introduces the reader to the practical and theoretical concepts taught by Dr. Barry Harris.
  • Issue 1.0 - The Barry Harris approach to Improvised Lines & Harmony: An Introduction B.H.: In the following example the A and C (from the C6 chord) are held and the G, E, and A move up one degree of the C diminished sixth scale, then back.
  • 50+ videos Play all Mix - The difference between Barry Harris borrowed notes approach and his locked Hand Approach YouTube Learn music theory in half an hour. Duration: 31:36.
  • Apr 14, 2014 Charlie Parker recorded a number of solos on the chord progression to ‘What Is This Thing Called Love’. On two of these performances, a 1952 studio version of ‘What Is This Thing’ with a big band and a live 1953 version of ‘Hot House’ (a Tadd Dameron tune which uses the same changes), Parker takes two different solos, but he can be heard working with some of the same material in both.

Hi Alan,. Just received a copy of your book. I have been fascinated by this method. He and Barry have been very successful with the diminished approach. Pianist Barry Harris’ method which outlines a more summarized, yet in-depth, approach to jazz harmony. Method adapted for guitar by Alan Kingstone. Thread: Kingstone/Harris Harmonic Method for Guitar I know there is a dedicated Barry Harris thread, but most of it is focussed on single line improvisation. Alan’s book doesn’t really seem focussed on that (although maybe .

The Barry Harris harmony approach is a way of thinking about jazz chords and melodies based on specific 8-note scales. Instead of using the usual 7-note scales, 8-note scales provide a way for you to discover new and exciting chord voicings.

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Just received a copy of your book.

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I have been fascinated by this method. You have laid it out so beautifully and I am going to work on it. I have had the opportunity to play with Barry a few times over the years.

He is truly a master and as you well know he was the first cat to teach jazz in a logical way.

The Barry Harris Approach To Improvised Lines Harmony Pdf

harriis He and Barry have been very successful with the diminished approach. Great work and may I bug you with a question or two along the way?

Thank you for this wlan. Studying the concepts put forth in this book will not mrthod you a set of hip sounding voicings. What you will find herein are the structural components, as mapped out and developed by jazz giant Barry Harris, that will guide and aid you on your own personal road to discovery. Imagine, a system for learning jazz harmony that actually embraces the concept of improvisation. As I see it, there are two paths for a chord player to go down.

As well, one realizes that the interesting spots in music, whether you are comping, harmonizing a melody or writing an arrangement, are the places in between the chord symbols.

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In fact, I prefer to think — movement-to-movement — as opposed to chord to chord. When was the last time you listened to the symphony, for instance, and said oh yeah, Am7b5 — D7. Suddenly the musical ceiling gets raised and points us back to the purpose behind this book. Having had the pleasure of seeing Alan grow musically over the past 20 years, I am delighted that his insightfulness and hard work have found their way into a form that others can benefit from.

I am confident that guitarists everywhere who are fortunate enough to pick up this book will thank him again, and again. He is a living and brilliant extension of Bud Powell.

The Barry Harris Harmonic Method for Guitar

Or is it the other way around? It encourages musicians to create original phrases based, in part, on the cross-fertilization of rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic models embodied in the rules Harris promulgates.

It is a very forr and organized hwrris of looking at chord movement applied to the areas of accompaniment, arranging and composition. An excellent orchestration tool. I am fifty years old and a pro pianist, and Barry talks about and demonstrates an approach that for me is already changing my playing.

Improvised

I watched all the dvds through several times which really helps to see his over-all approach before I began using the dvds with the workbook.

I am still on the first page of the workouts but I already have a very different perception and skill that is popping out. This is one of the best investments I have ever made!!!! Barry Harris is a great pianist and a great educator. Working with this less than two weeks, the exciting part has been watching how much is already creeping into my playing. I am climbing out of old perspectives and into new ones.

The Barry Harris Approach To Improvised Lines Harmony Pdf File

This video was the grail I had been looking for!!! I have been studying these methods for some time using the information from your articles and whatever else I could find on the web. These videos really fill in the gaps of my knowledge. Berliner, University of Chicago Press The Kimgstone Gibbs Quartet Feat.

The Barry Harris Harmonic Method for Guitar – Howard Rees’ Jazz Workshops

This site uses cookies. By continuing to browse the site, you are agreeing to kingsfone use of cookies. About Studying the concepts put forth in this book will not teach you a set of hip sounding voicings. Barry Harris The Guitar in Jazz.

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Chapter 2 Chapter 2 Movement 2. Chapter 3 Chapter 3 Borrowing 3.

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Charlie Parker recorded a number of solos on the chord progression to ‘What Is This Thing Called Love’. On two of these performances, a 1952 studio version of ‘What Is This Thing’ with a big band and a live 1953 version of ‘Hot House’ (a Tadd Dameron tune which uses the same changes), Parker takes two different solos, but he can be heard working with some of the same material in both. I would suggest that these two performances are different stages of a work that was constantly in progress, although not necessarily progressing in a linear way toward a single ideal of perfection. Billy Taylor’s various versions of his tune I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free, discussed in another post, are another example of this kind of process. (The tradition of revising one’s own solo is perhaps a modern extension of the older jazz tradition of revising a solo by another player which I explored in my post ‘Oh, Play That Thing!’. So far as I know, although Parker studied the solos of Lester Young, he never performed any of them.) The more I listen to these solos, the more I think Parker was on a journey of ceaseless exploration rather than a quest for some kind of musical mountaintop, and so the most interesting question is not ‘which solo was better?’, but ‘how did Parker’s musical journey evolve over the course of these two solos?’. When I compare the two versions I am fascinated by how Parker used a number of the same concepts and patterns in both of them, and yet never sounded repetitive. (This reminds me that while playing a Bird transcription accurately can sound good, it is not in his spirit of constant creativity.)

One of the licks that Parker uses in both these solos is what I call the ‘seven down to the third’ scale. This name comes from the scale approach that Barry Harris teaches to the minor ii-V progression. As shown below, the minor ii-V progression has the same ascending-fourth/descending fifth root motion as the major ii-V progressions discussed in the last post, but the ii chord is a minor 7 flat five (rather than simply a minor seventh) and the V chord, in simplest version of the progression, is a dominant seven flat nine chord (rather than simply a dominant). Barry’s approach to the minor ii-V, like many of his other teaching concepts, is based on the ‘seventh scale’ (a.k.a. the mixolydian scale). Rather than assigning two different scales to the two chords of the minor ii-V, as many improvisation methods do, Barry uses a ‘seven up and down’ pattern with a seventh scale starting a major third below the root of the ii chord (or a minor third above the root of the V chord).

This scale choice has multiple benefits: for one, it is a pitch collection which is consonant with the m7b5 chord but avoids accenting its root. Also, when the ‘seven down’ half of the scale is ended on the note a half step above the scale’s root, it outlines a fully diminished chord that functions as a rootless voicing of the V chord.

In my class we call this scale ‘E flat 7 up and down to the 3rd of C’. Building off of this admittedly lengthy name, I call the second half of this scale the ‘7 down to the 3rd’ scale. (In my class, we practice minor ii-V-i patterns in which this descending scale is preceded by patterns that use what we call the ‘locrian pentascale’, which can be thought of as the third to the seventh degrees of the seventh scale from a major third below the root, or scale steps seven through four of the major scale beginning a half step above the root. These patterns can be heard on the first phrase of each A section in this scale outline of ‘What Is This Thing Called Love’.

Parker uses the ‘seven down to the 3rd’ scale in both his ‘What Is This’ and ‘Hot House’ solos to outline the C7b9 chord in measure 10, but where the 1952 solo stretches the scale over the course of two measures, the 1953 solo flies through it at the end of a fast series of 16th notes. Where the ’52 solo is more shorter and more playable, the ’53 solo is more virtuosic. The later solo goes on longer, but is more frenetic, as though Parker feels that he’s running out of time. In the transcription below, I’ve placed Parker’s two solos in two adjacent staves to highlight the way he reuses no less than five melodic ideas (the one mentioned above and those mentioned below the transcription) and yet ends up with two completely different solos. (A side note: The more I look at Parker’s composed and improvised melodic lines from this contrapuntal view, the more I notice him consciously or subconsciously creating a countermelody to an earlier line on the same changes, either one of his own compositions or a popular song. Look, for instance, at how the later solo counters the melodic motion of the earlier one in mm. 3, 7-8 and 14-15.)

The Barry Harris Approach To Improvised Lines Harmony Pdf Online

In the ’53 solo, Parker begins the first A with the same four-note motive that he used in the last A in the earlier solo (m. 25), which gives the impression that he is picking up where he left in ’52, almost as though no time had elapsed. The second phrase of the ’53 solo (m.3) also uses a phrase from the ’52 solo, this time moving a lick originally used in the second A (at beat 4 of m. 11) into the first A section. Both solos use the same five-note motive on both the Ab7 and G7 chords at the end of the bridge, but enclose them in different phrases and place them at different points in the bar. Measure 26 is the only time both solos use the same lick at the same time, a quote from the Bizet opera ‘Carmen’.

I first heard of Barry Harris from Yusef Lateef, whose improvisation class I took at Hampshire College in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. On the first day of class, Yusef identified himself as one of Barry’s students by saying something like: ‘I’m just going to show you what Barry Harris showed me’. Since then, I’ve sought out Barry’s playing and teaching more and more over the years and found him a perennial source of musical wisdom.

As with the work of other bop masters, I’ve found that I can return to Barry’s recordings over and over and learn something new each time. I spent a while in the early 2000s transcribing the great tunes and arrangements from Barry’s album Luminescence, andover the last five years or so I have been I checking out At the Jazz Workshop. Released a year after Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue brought the extended, floating harmonies pioneered by Ahmad Jamal and Bill Evans to a mass audience, At The Jazz Workshop pays no heed to the modal style but rather reflects Harris’ devotion to the more frequently modulating, obstacle-course harmonies of the bebop period. The album demonstrates how Harris was continuing to successfully evolve the melodic language of bebop, and the bebop concept of group interaction, at a time when many players had started to explore other sources of melodic invention and other concepts of ensemble playing. It is also a great example of how mid-20th century jazz repertoire created variety through a combination of popular tunes from the first half of the century (Don’t Blame Me, Is You Is Or Is You Ain’t My Baby), bop standards (Moose The Mooche, Woody N’You), and the blues (Barry’s original Morning Coffee).

At the Jazz Workshop is not built on arrangements as detailed as those of the Ahmad Jamal trio of the same era, nor does it go in the direction of the greater freedom for rhythm section players pioneered in the John Coltrane and Bill Evans group of that era; it is built instead on the model of the Bud Powell trios. In this format, the focus is on piano improvisation, with bass solos and trading between piano and drums used regularly to vary the return to the head statement. This format requires a rhythm section which, like any great pair of comedians or policemen, can keep a relentless pace without rushing and can respond immediately to sudden developments. Sam Jones and Louis Hayes, already veterans by the time of this album, achieve the same kind of tenacious unity as Tommy Potter and Roy Haynes, or Curly Russell and Max Roach, the two rhythm sections on The Amazing Bud Powell Volume One.

At TheJazz Workshop contains great examples of a number of important improvisational concepts, among them Barry’s approach to the minor ii-V progression. Barry can be heard using the ‘seven down to the third’ scale in a couple of places on At The Jazz Workshop. In the last A section on the third chorus of his Woody N’You solo, he navigates all three of the minor ii-V progressions with this scale. As the whole chorus is a great model of left hand-right hand conversation on a tune with an active harmonic rhythm, I have included my transcription of the whole chorus here.

In his solo on take 2 of ‘Is You Is Or Is You Ain’t My Baby’ from At The Jazz Workshop, Harris repeatedly uses a phrase ending in the ‘seven down to the third of’ scale to navigate the recurring Gm7b5-C7b9 change. Like Parker in the two solos above, Harris makes this motive sound different each time he recycles it by giving it a different rhythmic placement each time. Here is the phrase as it would apply to a two bar minor ii-V. (Harris uses this lick by double timing it, i.e., playing it in 16th notes over a single bar near the end of the phrase that starts at 1:20 on the recording.)

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I encourage readers to leave a comment of any kind, but I particularly encourage comments mentioning (and perhaps including a link to) a favorite improvised solo on a tune involving minor ii-V or ii-V-i progressions, or examples of a lick being creatively re-used by a improviser, either within one solo or across multiple solos.