Ethan Iverson hat auch noch einen Nachruf auf Barry Harris geschrieben – alles dreht sich um dessen Faszination für den „dimished chord“. Ein paar Auszüge:
While jazz is black music, the huge military-industrial complex of jazz education has predominantly been a white man’s affair, and the music has certainly suffered from this imbalance. The classical music of Africa offers the most advanced rhythm in human history, and the African perspective is just as important to jazz as any kind of European harmonic theory. It is much harder to explain rhythm in a textbook than harmony. One must have a professional demonstrate the oral tradition in person.
A famous institution at the dawn of jazz education was North Texas State, started by Leon Breeden. Breeden never played a gig as a serious practitioner, and his perspective was almost wholly European in outlook. The sound of that era of North Texas State was of a high school marching band playing Duke Ellington except straighter, faster and louder. (Sadly, this amped-up marching band sound was very influential, and can be heard all over once-famous records from the 1970s and ‘80s, not to mention the 2014 movie Whiplash.)
Fortunately, a few consecrated masters did their own kind of local work, such as Marcus Belgrave in Detroit, Mich., and Jackie McLean in Hartford, Conn. In New York City, Barry Harris taught his idiosyncratic theories to small groups of interested amateurs and professionals at various community centers from 1974 up until last month on Zoom. Anyone could show up on a Monday night and hear the griot talk about the diminished chord for up to three hours at a stretch. At first, all you needed was a five-dollar bill. In the ’80s, the cost went up to 10 bucks, and more recently it had finally hit $15.
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On the YouTube channel BarryHarrisVideos, there exist hours and hours of Harris talking to students at Royal Conservatory in The Hague between 1989 and ’98, offering astounding revelations about swing, bebop, and the blues. These profound insights are not available anywhere else. It’s as if the very soul of harmony relents and gives up a few of her secrets.
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During the Swing Era, it became commonplace to sneak in diminished chords while harmonizing scalar melodies, usually in between sixth chords, almost an alternation of binary ones and zeros. (To pick one familiar example, Duke Ellington’s theme song, “Take the A Train,” written by Billy Strayhorn, offers this kind of harmonic thinking.)
All modern jazz comes out of the Big Band era. The prophet of bebop, Charlie Parker, was the ultimate big band soloist. Soon the small group piano players of the ’40s and ’50s played a constant stream of diminished chords borrowed from the sax sections: little nips and tucks in the texture of the harmony. These nips and tucks are soulful, sweet, and simply help make the music swing, the same way a jazz drummer’s left hand coughs and rattles on the snare drum while keeping time.
Something changed in 1959, when Miles Davis, Bill Evans, John Coltrane, and the rest of that legendary ensemble released Kind of Blue. The first track, “So What,” has nothing to do with any diminished chords. This was modal music based on scales, without any nips or tucks. If Haydn’s son had played a tense modal chord, Papa could stay in bed, for few chords in that style are moving anywhere in particular.
Game over. In jazz, almost everyone adopted modal thinking, not just for obviously modal themes like “So What” but for everything else besides. Almost overnight, the sixth chord became passé, for modal thinking allowed more dissonant sounds from higher degrees of the relevant scales. That old diminished chord, so useful when navigating a terrain of sixth chords, was likewise gently put out to pasture.
Jazz was dying as a popular art form, but new forms of black music also appreciated the way modal thinking brought out the groove. James Brown would exhort his saxophonists to “play some Trane!” and they would respond with modal explorations over his band’s one-chord vamps. On the other side of the tracks, rock guitarists rarely played diminished chords unless a metalhead was going for a “quasi-Bach” cadenza. The quick-moving harmony of the big band era was gone, and apparently gone for good.
As for Harris, newer fashions passed him by. He could play funky music, do a little bit of modal jazz, but mostly he just kept on doubling down on the past. He quit a gig with rising star Cannonball Adderley; he shrugged off his contribution to Lee Morgan’s hit “The Sidewinder.” By the time he was teaching, he told his students that Miles Davis went commercial as early as 1957—most teachers give Miles at least another decade—and insisted that John Coltrane was no Charlie Parker.
Still, his profound stubbornness paid incredible dividends. Harris steadily grew as an artist while digging further into his treasure box of unfashionable secrets. In his fifth decade, Harris hit his stride as a player, recording masterpiece after masterpiece on small labels like Xanadu and Muse. If I had to pick just one, the nominee would be Live in Tokyo 1976 with Sam Jones and Leroy Williams.
Es lohnt, den ganzen Text zu lesen:
https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/barry-harris-obit/
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"Don't play what the public want. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you doin' -- even if it take them fifteen, twenty years." (Thelonious Monk) | Meine Sendungen auf Radio StoneFM: gypsy goes jazz, #154: Irene Schweizer (1941-2024) – 13.08., 22:00 | Slow Drive to South Africa, #8: tba | No Problem Saloon, #30: tba