He recorded more than two dozen albums, including a string of celebrated releases in the 1960s for the Prestige and Riverside labels. He received multiple honorary doctorates, and was often referred to by friends and students as doctor.
Harris was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 1989. We believe in Cole Hawkins, Harris told his students later in life, name-checking bebops founding fathers. He remained an evangelist for what he considered the apex of American music making. Many of the hometown musicians he grew up around vibraphonist Milt Jackson guitarist Kenny Burrell the Jones brothers (drummer Elvin, pianist Hank and trumpeter Thad) saxophonist Yusef Lateef pianist Tommy Flanagan would soon become leading figures, and their contributions would help define the hard-bop sound: a sizzling, blues-drenched style that boiled down some of bebops scattered intensity.īut Harris never eschewed bebops high temperatures, clattering rhythms and dashing melodies. He came up in the late 1940s and ∥0s in Detroit, where a thriving scene fostered some of the greatest improvisers in jazz. Writing in 1986, New York Times critic Robert Palmer described Harris as a one-man jazz academy. He was known for his acerbic tongue and his demanding nature, evidence of his passion for teaching.
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Yet throughout his career he remained an independent educator: He never joined the faculty of a major institution, instead choosing to embed himself within New Yorks music community, reaching students of all ages.įor almost half a century, Harris led a weekly series of low-cost classes in the city, while also playing at prominent clubs around town and jetting off to perform and teach overseas. Starting in his teens and continuing beyond his 90th year, Harris performed, taught and toured with unflagging devotion, evangelizing for bebops stature as a form of high American modernism and helping to lay the foundation for the widespread academic study of jazz. His death, in a hospital, was caused by complications of the coronavirus, which exacerbated a number of underlying health problems, said Howard Rees, his longtime business partner and collaborator. Barry Harris, a pianist and educator who was the resident scholar of the bebop movement and ultimately, one of its last original ambassadors died Wednesday in North Bergen, New Jersey.
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