Jimmy Slyde

Barry calls Jimmy Slyde one of the greatest people he knows in the world, and in the oral history one of the greatest tap dancers in the world, adding that Slyde had died a couple of years earlier.

Interview: Bird, Hawkins, Monk and New York34:40Barry Harris, Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program ¶355

On NPR in 1988, Barry says the Jazz Cultural Theater’s tap dancing never really got off the ground; Slyde came in and danced there, Tina Pratt taught there and Lon Chaney danced there often. He cannot see why jazz was cut off from dancing, and puts dancers on his big concerts to show that people dance to jazz.

Interview: Bird, Hawkins, Monk and New York34:0734:4035:12

In the Almeria talk Barry holds Slyde up against tap dancers who just get loud for applause without knowing the songs: Slyde knew every song Barry might play and tapped to the music, as the best tap dancers do.

Believe: a talk to musicians14:5715:31

Recalling famous guests at his big concerts, Berry Gordy and Clint Eastwood, Barry says that Eastwood, the guest he has just been describing, saw Slyde dance at one of them, never having seen him before.

Barry Harris, Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program ¶355

Introducing a song written for a tin can, Barry explains that it belongs to a play he was writing about a sock found in the street. He had planned for Barbra Streisand to be the sock and for Slyde to be the can and sing its song.

Artists House Master Class Barry Harris - Performance25:5226:2528:39

In a 1998 interview with Constance Valis Hill, known here only through a Portuguese podcast’s reading in translation, Barry says Slyde was about a year older and grew up on the same music. Both were beboppers, so Barry could start playing and Slyde would start dancing; Slyde understood syncopation.

Interview: tap dance and bebop31:36

In the same interview Barry says his own place, the Jazz Cultural Theater, always had tap dancers, naming Slyde first, and that he knew no other place like it.

Interview: tap dance and bebop31:01

Asked about a remark of Honi Coles’s (garbled in the translation), Barry agrees, saying that playing with Slyde is like playing with a bass player, and that at the piano he thinks of himself as Slyde. Elsewhere he says he plays as if his fingers were a tap dancer’s feet.

Interview: tap dance and bebop38:1838:5439:31Brian Jude de Lima, Reanimating Dissonance: Cultivating the Antecedents of Barry Harris’ Concept of Movement as a Multidimensional Pedagogical Tool for Ontario Post-Secondary Jazz Curricula ¶817Brian Jude de Lima, Reanimating Dissonance: Cultivating the Antecedents of Barry Harris’ Concept of Movement as a Multidimensional Pedagogical Tool for Ontario Post-Secondary Jazz Curricula ¶818