Barry HarrisThe method

Chris Parks · Stage 14: Practising

Small things: the first bar of Body and Soul

Episode 95 · 9:11 · On YouTube · In the lesson player

Chris takes one bar, the opening E flat minor to B flat 7 (or D diminished) of Body and Soul, and finds many ways to decorate the melody with a diminished run: thirds, repeated notes, chromatics in between, half steps below. His point, from years in Barry’s classes, is that the ‘bigger stuff’ never comes: it is these small things, built up one on another.

Step by step

  1. 1:05Take the first bar of Body and Soul: two beats of E flat minor, two beats of B flat 7 (or D diminished)
  2. 1:41Hear the B flat 7 as a diminished and run the diminished into the melody
  3. 2:17Vary it: run up to the melody note instead of down, play the diminished in thirds, or play each note twice
  4. 3:20Put chromatic notes between the notes of the diminished, then try it backwards
  5. 4:33Add a half step below each note of the diminished, then play it in thirds with a half step below each third
  6. 5:52Chris’s realisation: in Barry’s classes the ‘bigger stuff’ was these small things, built up one on another
  7. 8:38Stop any Barry recording after four or six bars and list everything in it you could practise

Barry’s own words on this

14.3 Learn from the masters by ear; study the small things13.3 Standards worked in class6.6 Chromatic pickups and the well-placed half step

In the course

Half step belowCome up a diminished from the thirdSoloing with the diminishedSmall things

Transcript

  1. 0:00hello and welcome to episode 95 of things i’ve learned from bear harris and today i thought we would discuss uh small things looking at small things but before we get started uh i just wanted to thank adam and all the people over at open studio uh they asked me to come do a workshop there and i really had a blast it was really nice and there were a lot of really great students there and if you want to check out their youtube page open studio it’s really
  2. 0:33wonderful nice resource for uh learn learning jazz and other music too they have a lot of uh different exercises and different things to look at in terms of packages to sign up for and things like that but it was really wonderful experience and uh adam was really a pleasure to work with and he’s one of the teachers over there and he took the class which shows how interested he is as a teacher at still trying to learn which is fantastic i love seeing that so anyway
  3. 1:05uh go check out open studio but for today’s lesson uh i want to look at something small or small things i thought we would take the first two chords of body and soul which would be um e flat minor going to b flat seven or some people play um d diminished so if we just if let’s say we were playing the beginning of the melody the very beginning of the melody now
  4. 1:41there’s a lot of ways that we can tackle that so what i was focusing on is this once we got to the b flood seven how i was looking at this note as instead of b flat seven which you can look at it as but the fifth b flat seven i was looking at as one of the notes of the diminished so then we say [Music] this is a diminished just really pretty so let’s just try to put that in with the melody so we’ll say
  5. 2:17[Music] nice run [Music] it’s pretty let’s try um instead of just running the scale that maybe we’ll run up to it [Music] also pretty maybe we’ll do like a little pattern where we play
  6. 2:49thirds so we’ll say [Music] nice or maybe we can do [Music] maybe we’ll do each note twice [Music] also pretty [Music] uh let’s do oh i like these where you put the
  7. 3:20chromatics in between each note so here’s the diminished so maybe we’ll say we’ll put the chromatics in between [Music] i like that one and you can do backwards let’s see [Music] those are also beautiful so what i mean
  8. 3:58by small things is this is the first bar of body and soul just the first bar two beats of e flat minor two beats of d diminished or b flood seven whichever way you wanna look at it and look at all the different ways that we can approach even um playing the melody and adding little nice notes to it or even as soloing you can use all these things so if you think about it we could spend as uh musicians um a lot of time practicing
  9. 4:33and learning a lot of different things but sometimes it’s nice to take one little small thing and practice this little small thing try to come up with a million different things from it so let’s say how about if we do [Music] that’s a half step below each note of the diminished or the diminished scale that’s a nice one sorry uh how about if we do thirds we could play thirds on guitar
  10. 5:13those are pretty or maybe we’ll do a half step below each one of the thirds also pretty so how about if we do instead of [Music] um we’ll do we’ll do a flat fifth so we’ll say [Music] also really pretty so
  11. 5:52[Music] also beautiful so it’s these little small things and i think the um i’ve been talking to my students about this um the people that i’ve been having little get-togethers with and i think the thing that i was always mistaken about was i would come back from a class one of various classes where it would be let’s say the improv class where it’s about two and a half to three hours of a series of looking at
  12. 6:25like this chord going to this chord or the first four bars of the blues or the first two bars of a blues or even just things to play on b flat seven and i remember thinking like wow this is really great but when do we get to the bigger stuff like when do we really get to the bigger stuff and then after years and years of being in barry’s class we never seem to get to the bigger stuff and it occurred to me that that was my mistake for thinking that the bigger stuff was something else the bigger stuff or
  13. 6:58what i thought was the bigger stuff was all these little small things like thinking about a million different ways to play the very first part of body and soul and then you build upon that you just keep building keep building keep building so now your foundation is filled with these little small things and these little small things when added up create this much larger more grand um
  14. 7:32thing which is what i always thought like oh what’s this next thing but it’s not it’s these little small things that’s the whole point of studying with barry where you’re like wow i feel like maybe we’re getting bogged down in just one bar or two bars of something but that’s not getting bogged down that’s getting deeper into the music and it’s also why sometimes he studying with barry for a while it ruins you to listen to other music because if you listen that intently to things
  15. 8:04and you’re really aware of a certain change or in a tune and you hear maybe one of your favorite players and they kind of glance over a change or maybe they don’t they act as if it wasn’t important or something like that it’s a little disappointing you’re like oh maybe they haven’t checked that out i don’t know if that’s the case or maybe that’s not the way they think about soloing or developing as a musician but once you’re around barry that’s all he talks about these little small things and when you hear him play that’s what you discover you get all
  16. 8:38these you could listen to barry play and stop and at any point and then listen to four bars or listen to six bars and then stop it at six bars within that four or six bars you’re going to find a million things that you can practice and really develop and work on and that’s what i mean by small things so let’s let’s keep that in mind the small things are what’s important there are no big things it’s just the small things anyway until next time thanks