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The sessions are in someways better than the irl workshops, because you can hear what he’s saying a lot better, and you don’t have a bunch of horn players getting it slightly wrong.
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08-15-2020 10:10 AM
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Could any of you kind souls check I've got this right?
C up and down
Bb7 up and down
C up and down
Eb7 up and down
Ab up and down
D7 up and down
G7 up and down
1235 on each chord of the turnaround
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Lady Bird?
Originally Posted by morgan76
Looks good
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My problem with all this Harris thing is.. OK We've got the scales, but now? We have yet to make music with them. Scales are not lines.
I think Peter Farrell video material should be better explained but you feel music from minute 1. I have put a lot of effort with the scale outlines and my achievement has been to sound so scalar and previsible. Harris speaks so badly about other educators but He is not far from Berklee education prespective: play this scales and may be you obtain music from them. May be I'm wrong but is what I feel. Jazz has been a chord tone thing until Coltrane and Miles. Benson is the last of the chord tone-passing tone strategy.
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Thanks! Oops yeah, Lady Bird
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Barry Harris does not say “play scales and that’s all there is to it.” There are pages of things in Barry’s book to practice just within the dominant scale: triads, arpeggios, “important arpeggios”, the previous with half-step approach, the half-step rules, etc. Originally Posted by sjl
I’ve only practiced this all in a haphazard fashion, but once my ears gets familiar with the sounds, and I start correlating those sounds to what I hear on bebop recordings, it starts to come out in my playing a bit.
I imagine that this would all be a lot more useful if you could sit in on his in-person lessons on a regular basis and have to suffer through the humiliation of his somewhat Socratic approach. I sat in on a couple of covid-era Zoom sessions and appreciated the benefit to be had from hearing him sing a line at tempo, perhaps over a ii-V movement, based on one important arpeggio followed by a descending line with half-step rules applied, and having to basically play it by ear.
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You need to spend some time with BH material. Chris (thing I learned from Barry Harris) is a good place to start. Originally Posted by sjl
His teaching isn’t built around the student specifically; it’s more like when he was growing up. You take what you can from it, which is more and more as you get familiar with it. He learned by watching piano players in clubs, listening to records and puzzling out what was going on, grabbing hold of any information he could get.
I had similar misgivings starting out, but really it is very different from the Berklee thing. That’s a theory of harmony; Barry actually details a whole bunch of strategies to go from scales to lines.
i can’t sum it up here. You have to immerse yourself. It takes a while to get up to speed.
But; I came to it by studying bebop solos and then I could see the value of it. Parker plays a lot of scalic stuff as well as chord tones. I started understanding Barry’s perspective when I saw there was a lot of stuff in that music that wasn’t simply chord tones and passing tones...
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Thanks mates. I 'll give it another chance, sure is my fault.
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As Christian said, this is a great place to start. He shows you how to turn those scales into lines:
Things I've Learned From Barry Harris
- YouTube
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Don't overlook the "5, 4, 3, and 2 " scale degree embellishment phrases. They demonstrate the two general types of melodic embellishments. Once you have those for the key of the song, and also for the chord of the moment, then it's time to extrapolate and discover the 8, 7, b6 and 6 scale degree embellishment phrases. And then figure out the ascending forms of all of those scale degree embellishment phrases.
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Also, the way BH teaches shapes in diminished scale, whole tone scale, and the scale specific chromatic scale tweaks for melodic improv is useful.
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I find scales sound quite good when played down from the 7th (especially with a grace note to that first note). I am not a fan of going up from the root. Then reverse 7 and 6; then reverse 2 and 1
Last edited by rintincop; 09-01-2020 at 01:36 PM.
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Is Barry's official 4 phrase in minor?
4 2 4 -3
or
4 1 2 -3
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4 1 2 -3 in the DVD booklet... Originally Posted by rintincop
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The “4” phrase is
4-down to 2- up step wise b3 to M3
4-2-b3-3
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I quite like 4-#1-2-b3
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I hate to rehash an old BH question, but I need the BH brain trust to help me understand the still confusing dichotomy of BH harmony and melody.
I understand that BH's maj6dim scale is for HARMONIZING. For single note melody, BH believes in a scale first approach. So if your trusty Real Book says D-7 G7/Cmaj7 you practice getting the soloing into your ears by playing a G Dom scale up/down and a C maj scale up/down. Or for E-7b5 A7/D-7 you would practice a C Dom to the third of A and a D min scale with a b6 and 6 (right?).
But if you are comping, you are supposed to look at that D-7 G7/Cmaj7 as just movement to a C6. The most obvious is to play the F6->Do->C6. Or maybe F6->F#o->C6.
So, what if you are doing a little of both? Or if you are being comped by a BH person who is playing these "movements" rather than the 251's. What scales do I practice? Do I stick to the Real Book and think of the comping as just an embellishment or is it a reharmonization of the Real Book requiring different scales? What does BH teach about this?
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There is some overlap actually, BH also uses single-note scales derived from the 6/dim stuff to play lines. (This is covered in the Roni Ben Hur book and also in some of the ‘Things I Learned’ YouTube episodes).
For myself I just think of them mainly as 2 separate approaches. When I’m messing about with solo guitar stuff I find myself using the 6/dim sometimes to create chordal passages, but when playing passages involving lines I will be thinking more of the ‘improv’ single-line stuff. I don’t have much difficulty in switching from one to the other. I think it is because I am thinking in terms of the chords and lines that I have already learned to generate from the 2 systems, rather than painstakingly thinking about the systems themselves, if you see what I mean. You have to get to that stage somehow.
Of course sometimes I will stop at a particular point and do some analysis, if I think there is something that could be improved. Mainly this will be where I am trying to get some better chordal stuff happening. But that is not ‘playing’. Eventually the new stuff I figured out in the ‘analysis’ will creep into my playing. But it takes a while.
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Actually I raised a similar thought once on the forum, I wondered somewhat facetiously would a BH-style pianist have to simultaneously think left-hand: harmonic system, right-hand: improv system, if they were playing a solo while comping chords in the left hand?
In fact if you listen to bebop pianists like BH, when they are playing flowing bebop lines in the RH, they are usually only playing quite minimal LH chords, often just root and third, root and seventh, or root and sixth.
At slower tempos such such as a ballad, then you hear a lot more rich harmonic movement in the chords they use. But then they usually aren’t playing such complex lines in the RH.
There are some interesting solo piano tracks by Bud Powell where you can really hear this dichotomy. Here’s an example where he plays quite full chords and passing chords during the head, but once he starts his solo the chords are reduced to very simple voicings, often just 2 notes:
Last edited by grahambop; 10-07-2020 at 10:55 AM.
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Bud very often played just 1, 7 and 3 behind his solos. This is what I hear most in his trio playing.
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Saw this on FB - you can watch this one-hour film on Barry Harris, free for the rest of October:
Spirit of Bebop Film – Barry Harris
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Dr. Harris teaches that comping does not "suggest" to soloists and vise versa. Comping is to outline the progression and keep the rhythm. Originally Posted by rlrhett
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Thank you, David. That is the most direct answer I’ve had. Interestingly, Bob Conti also holds that as long as soloing and comping follow the form of the song they can exist completely independently. He’s said in his videos and once on the phone with me, “I don’t even know what that guy is playing. It doesn’t matter!” Originally Posted by WILSON 1
I think of Conti and Harris as pretty close to polar opposites, but it is instructive when these philosophies converge.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro
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Interesting film, heartening to see so many young kids enthusiastic about being in Barry’s choir. Originally Posted by grahambop
There was a brief glimpse of Jimmy Heath on soprano sax in the big concert at the end.
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You know one result of the pandemic is realising that everyone sounds just as good tracking their parts separately as they do playing in the same room, regardless of what style of jazz it is. Originally Posted by rlrhett
It’s not what I expected.
It’s more fun in the same room.
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Pianist Issac Raz has a bunch of Barry Harris method YouTube videos. He has attended Barrys classes a long time and is still attending the Zoom classes. He started his Barry videos about a year ago (his older videos are not on Barrys teachings) but hes got quite a few and is always adding others.
He has a few where he looks a ideas Barry covered in one specific class that I really find helpful. His YouTube page is here:
Isaac Raz - YouTube
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What would a scale outline on something like Desafinado look like, with the b5 on the G7 etc.?
I try to think in scale outlines as much as possible, and I understand running scale into scale on something like a minor II V I, but I haven't grasped how to think about different altered dominants with it.
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I bet it is the G7b5 diminished scale. Take the 4 notes of the G7b5, G B Db F plus the four notes of F#dim, A C Eb F#
G A B C Db Eb F F# G. Up (one measure) would be G A B C Db Eb F. Up and down (two measures) would be G A B C Db Eb F Eb Db C B A G. Play as eight notes and you have the chord tones on the beat, which is what all Barry’s outlines have.
I haven’t heard him in workshops or any videos, and I’ve only taken about 15 or so of his online workshops, talk about this scale for improvising, but he does talk about this scale a good amount in chord playing. That is what leads me to believe this is what he might say. But don’t hold me to this
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Tritone’s minor?
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G a b c# d e f
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Like many people probably, when I started working on the half step rules I had to map out the different possibilities to get a better sense of the sequences. The first chart here shows the standard rules for dominant descending scales over an 8 note sequence, starting on each note in turn. So it's like a bar of eighth notes with downbeats highlighted in green. Final column is downbeat of next bar with landing note always a chord tone. One small point to note is that the rule for starting on the 7th is usually said to be as 1 or 3 half steps, but in fact over just 8 notes you can't get to the third half step (7,#7,1) unless you extend down the octave into the next bar, so it's really just 1 or 2 half steps.
So then the pattern nerd in me started looking at the sequences for a shortcut way to remember them and I came up with the following.
If the 1 (Root) is on a downbeat you MUST follow it by the #7 half step.
If the 3rd and/or 2nd is on a downbeat you CAN (optional) follow either/both by the half step below.
The resulting sequences are mapped in the second chart.
For me, the advantage of these rules is that they are dynamic, i.e you can implement them or not purely based on a particular note you arrive at in a line, rather than being determined by where the line started several notes earlier. You don't have to remember whether the starting note is odd or even, and there are no extra rules for starting on upbeats, incorporating triplets etc. In fact you can do whatever you want earlier in the line, even including rests. They seem to me to be based more intuitively on feeling the downbeats, rather than some abstract counting process. Also, the decision notes (R,2,3) are all next to each other, so visually it's quite easy to see when you're approaching that critical area.
They also generate not only all the original sequences, but a few more possibilities that the original rules do not - specifically the half step below a 3rd without a corresponding half step below the 2nd, which seem perfectly acceptable variations. The only blip is a couple of runs from the root and 2nd that end on the second (shown in red) rather than a chord tone, but I figure I can live with that - it's not an exact science.
I haven't looked at the major half step rules yet.
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If the 1 (Root) is on a downbeat you MUST follow it by the #7 half step.
If the 3rd and/or 2nd is on a downbeat you CAN (optional) follow either/both by the half step below...
... the decision notes (R,2,3) are all next to each other, so visually it's quite easy to see
Nice! Thank you for pointing this out.
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Also, if you choose the b2 option after the 2 on a downbeat, that will ALWAYS be followed by the 1,#7, 7 sequence. i.e there will then always be those 5 semitones in a row. Originally Posted by Michael Neverisky
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Thank you! I greatly appreciate your sharing your efforts on BH's 1/2 step rules as I've been spending considerable time exploring them lately.
I wonder though if this phrase is quite accurate as stated? "...If the 3rd and/or 2nd is on a downbeat you CAN (optional) follow either/both by the half step below".
Maybe I'm not interpreting it quite right but it seems that if the 3rd is a downbeat and you choose to insert a half-step between the 3rd and the 2nd on your way down, then aren't you also required (i.e., not optional) to insert another half step between the 2nd and root (i.e., because you've now placed the 2nd on a downbeat... and if you just decide to go directly to the root without that non-optional additional half-step, then the root will be on an upbeat)?
Given that the whole goal is to get those dominant scale guide tones (R,3,5,b7) onto the downbeats. might this approach work:
Add an odd number of half-steps once a guide tone falls on a downbeat. Otherwise, add an even number of half-steps (i.e., to get/keep those guide tones back onto those downbeats). Note: zero is an even number.
Is there something amiss with this simplified statement?
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I think the main goal is to get the landing note on a chord tone, not necesarily on the intervening beats. In fact if you look at the original rules, the root does appear on an upbeat after a downbeat 2nd in a few places. There are also 3rds and 5ths that fall on upbeats in some sequences, so it's not always required. I think the rules could be whatever helps to streamline your thinking process, until you get to the stage where you can do it without thinking!. Originally Posted by OneWatt
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Optional because it depends on where you're going. Consulting the first chart, annotated with Originally Posted by OneWatt
red, you can proceed through the upbeat 1 to a downbeat 7.
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Many thanks for your prompt replies... I need to cogitate further on the algebra ;-)
Meanwhile, it seems that (having spent a good bit of time playing through the "rules") my ears and fingers are now at a point where they collaborate to put an appropriate # of half-steps in the most musical places. Since that was the original goal, so it's all good.
On a separate but related BH topic, I am loving those chromatic scale half step rules, going up and down. They get me out of an improvisational bind time and again.
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I looked at how you can get chord tones on every beat and this is what I came up with. It's perfectly possible but I can only assume that Barry didn't go with this because he didn't find empirically that players did this. (NB The term 'half step' is not always taken literally - in the case of 4 the half step is an upper neighbour tone - could be other things too.) Originally Posted by OneWatt
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Explained simply:
If starting on the beat on the odd numbers 3, 5, 7, or 9 for example , then none need be added.
If starting on the beat on the even numbers 2, 4, 6, 8 ,or 10 for example, then add another note as soon as possible.
It's very simple, two cases, like a binary balancing. It evens out any odd seven note scale.
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If you start on the 9th or 10th and use the rules as written , it will flip. the dom7 chord tones will end up on the upbeats
| D C B Bb A G F E | D C
| E D C Bb A G F E | D C
Correct me if I’m wrong but I don’t think Barry is thinking about compound intervals for these rules. I’ve actually never heard him talk about compound intervals in the improv class other than to say he doesn’t think of them.
When practicing these things through multiple octaves when you go through the root the whole thing resets.
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BTW, here’s a good summary of the rules on guitar (sorry any Barry students who get triggered by the term ‘bebop scales’ lol.)
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Not quite sure I follow... inasmuch as the 9th is the 2nd, isn't 9 an even number? Originally Posted by rintincop
... and the 10th is a 3rd, hence odd?
;-)
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No, not so in the linear architecture of the major scale. Test it and you will see. Originally Posted by OneWatt
As C said
"When practicing these things through multiple octaves when you go through the root the whole thing resets."
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So here's something which I haven't really got my head around. According to generally accepted wisdom, and explicitly in the Roni Ben Hur book "The reasoning behind the rules is to have you play a phrase that will end with a strong note (a chord tone) on the downbeat." Originally Posted by bleakanddivine
But, if we consider that more often than not a G7 phrase is going to resolve to a C chord (CM7 as tonic, or possibly C7 in a cycle) or an Am if being used over a Bm7b5 E7, or move to an F7 in a descending pattern like Dm G7 Cm F7. When we look at the landing notes on the first downbeat of the next bar that the rules give us, we find that not many are actually chord tones.
From this chart we can see that when moving to a C chord, only 6/13 of the possible landing notes are chord tones (in black) - less than half. Going to Am or F7, only 3/13 are chord tones - less than a quarter. So over a I Dm G7 I CM7 / I following the rules only gives you a chord tone on the first beat of CM7 in less than half the possible scenarios. In other words you'd be just as likely to land on a chord tone by playing sequences of notes without the rules.
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Learning to connect chords is a separate thing Originally Posted by bleakanddivine
So here's something which I haven't really got my head around. According to generally accepted wisdom, and explicitly in the Roni Ben Hur book "The reasoning behind the rules is to have you play a phrase that will end with a strong note (a chord tone) on the downbeat."
But, if we consider that more often than not a G7 phrase is going to resolve to a C chord (CM7 as tonic, or possibly C7 in a cycle) or an Am if being used over a Bm7b5 E7, or move to an F7 in a descending pattern like Dm G7 Cm F7. When we look at the landing notes on the first downbeat of the next bar that the rules give us, we find that not many are actually chord tones.
From this chart we can see that when moving to a C chord, only 6/13 of the possible landing notes are chord tones (in black) - less than half. Going to Am or F7, only 3/13 are chord tones - less than a quarter. So over a I Dm G7 I CM7 / I following the rules only gives you a chord tone on the first beat of CM7 in less than half the possible scenarios. In other words you'd be just as likely to land on a chord tone by playing sequences of notes without the rules.
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I’ve wondered about this as well. I’ve been using Barry’s half-step rules over ii-Vs or just iis or just Vs while playing standards at really slow tempos (yes, yes, I’m doing Howard Roberts’s Superchops again) and frequently when it’s time to cross the bar to the I chord I will have to make some real-time decisions about how to resolve. Depending on which beat and which interval you start the descending scale from, you may have to break out of the “rule” by playing an enclosure or using some other device to resolve on a chord tone of the I. Originally Posted by christianm77
What does Barry say?
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Start by using the diminished chord related to the dominant chords for example Bo7 on G7. It’s straightforward as if you are using the added note rules you’ll come out onto a diminished chord tone on the beat (and if you are headed to 1 just raise it by a half step.) Originally Posted by wzpgsr
Connect to a target chord tone. Don’t overdo it. just one is fine. Let the dominant be the most important thing, but you could try one of the 5 4 3 2 phases to polish it off. (Or you could use those phrases without the diminished.))
That will get you startedz
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This would be a diminished built from the dominant and another dominant a half-step above, is that right? So if my I chord is A, the V is E7, and the diminished is built from E7 and F7? Originally Posted by christianm77
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Bingo Originally Posted by wzpgsr
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Aren't you just saying that the target note (downbeat of second bar) is going to be a note of the diminished chord - #1(if you do the suggested raise from 1), 3 ,5 or 7, (G>Ab,B,D,F) but those are still not chord tones of the target chord for the second bar.?? Originally Posted by christianm77
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