Know the song; learn many songs; find your key

A singer who studied with Barry recalled at his funeral that he drilled singers on the original melody and lyrics, making them sing them over and over. His reason: only once you know the melody by heart can you begin to do something with it, improvise on it and make it your own.

Barry Harris Funeral1:06:561:07:39The Great Pianist Barry Harris’ Funeral At Abyssinian Baptist Church In Harlem53:40

In class, singers should sing the scale exercises along with the horns as soon as they have the pitch, and speak up too. If you want to scat, Barry says, you have to know the changes: he would not let a singer scat on a song until she could recite every chord and every note in it.

Practising the blues with the horns, part 10:379:5017:12

Horn players should know the words as well. Barry began insisting that horn players learn the lyrics, especially for ballads, after hearing a very good musician play a song: he felt that if the player had known the words, he would not have played a certain part the way he did.

Interview: Bud Powell and teaching singers18:5419:26

Barry made his singers learn a lot of songs of his own choosing, and right after the class learned a song, everybody had to stand up and sing it. (Asked on a radio show how he picks songs, he said he sometimes just opens a songbook with his eyes closed and takes whatever comes up.)

Interview: Bud Powell and teaching singers17:0817:40Piano Jazz with Marian McPartland31:48

Find your key and write it down. Barry would take a song through about five or six keys and have each singer pick one. He insisted they write their keys down and learn to transpose, so they could carry their own lead sheets and know what key they had sung something in; he was not going to keep finding keys for them. One result, he noted, was that he ended up playing tunes in keys other than the original, since singers tend to pick sharp keys.

Interview: Bud Powell and teaching singers17:4018:18Piano Jazz with Marian McPartland44:32Feeling the ‘and’34:46

Barry described how his classes were arranged: first the piano players, then the singers, with the class pianists accompanying the singers, then the horn players. He said two or three pianists who could not accompany anyone six months to a year earlier could now do it, and that it let him sit back and listen to the singers instead of comping for them himself.

Piano Jazz with Marian McPartland16:2517:03Interview: Bud Powell and teaching singers18:18

To learn songs properly, get the real published sheet music (the kind that even shows the movie the song came from) and get as close as you can to the right version, since a lot of sheet music is full of mistakes. Barry used to go to the library and search the card files to find songs. Fake books, he says, are called fake for a reason: people turn to a tune’s page and think they can play it, but it’s phony; you have to find the real thing.

Believe: a talk to musicians43:5444:3045:04

Barry says young pianists lack the automatic movements older players knew. For example, at the end of the second eight bars of a tune you play the IV minor and go back to I before going into the bridge. They also play odd introductions that don’t sound like real intros. These small things are learned as you go along.

Interview: Detroit, Bud Powell and the shuffle15:2015:53

Barry is angered when players simply get louder until the audience claps, and when crowds cheer whoever gets loud and looks good. He compares this to tap dancers: the best ones, such as Jimmy Slyde, knew the songs and tapped to the music, while many of today’s dancers don’t know songs; they keep tapping, then do something sudden and the crowd goes wild. The lesson: know the songs and know about movement, rather than relying on volume.

Jazz schools and the basics2:46Believe: a talk to musicians14:2214:5715:31

Barry believes in real classical music as well as real jazz. In the great pieces you can hum the melodies all day long (he mentions the Revolutionary Etude), whereas much of what is played today, in his opinion, could never have been heard in anybody’s head, because you cannot even hear it. Music should make sense melodically.

Believe: a talk to musicians9:089:49

Jazz is big, Barry says, but it is simple, and people have moved away from its simplicity into complication. He sees the same thing in painting, recalling an artist who rolled on a canvas and sold the results for millions.

Interview on Italian television11:20