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Originally Posted by morgan76
Looks good
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08-22-2020 06:52 AM
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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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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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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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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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Originally Posted by rlrhett
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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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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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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.
Transcriber wanted
Today, 04:35 PM in Improvisation