The point I was trying to make in the book review is: many jazz guitaristspianists simply comp by shape without exploring the full harmonic potential of tunes and progressions.A simple demonstration on the first 8 bars of the jazz standard Out of Nowhere.I am using some ideas directly (or indirectly related to Barry Harris harmony.).
Barry Harris Harmonic Method For Guitar Lesson Full Harmonic PotentialRead about this topic and try it See what you can come up with for your comping. He draws from his experience both as a professional jazz guitarist and professional jazz teacher to help thousands of people from all around the world learn the craft of jazz guitar. Join 20,000 guitarists and get the latest jazz guitar tutorials delivered to your inbox. Barry Harris Harmonic Method For Guitar Lesson How To Win FriendsReading suggestions The Yellow House Never Split the Difference Shoe Dog Elon Musk Hidden Figures Grit The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fck On Fire The Hard Thing About Hard Things The Emperor of All Maladies A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius Yes Please Team of Rivals Devil in the Grove Fear Rise of ISIS The World Is Flat 3.0 The Unwinding Principles Steve Jobs Angelas Ashes The Glass Castle The Gifts of Imperfection Bad Feminist John Adams How To Win Friends and Influence People Loading Quick navigation Home Books Audiobooks Documents, active. 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 ( Dont Blame Me, Is You Is Or Is You Aint My Baby ), bop standards ( Moose The Mooche, Woody NYou ), and the blues (Barrys original Morning Coffee ). 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 Taylors 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 ones 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 Parkers 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.). 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-fourthdescending 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). Barrys approach to the minor ii-V, like many of his other teaching concepts, is based on the seventh scale (a.k.a. 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). 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. 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 hes running out of time. In the transcription below, Ive placed Parkers 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 Parkers 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. 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. 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. On the first day of class, Yusef identified himself as one of Barrys students by saying something like: Im just going to show you what Barry Harris showed me. Since then, Ive sought out Barrys playing and teaching more and more over the years and found him a perennial source of musical wisdom. I spent a while in the early 2000s transcribing the great tunes and arrangements from Barrys album Luminescence, and over 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.
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